Several years ago, I wrote an article for MSDN on programming against the DVR-MS file format. I'm very pleased with how well the article was received, and to this day I get a lot of people writing to me about the article. Unfortunately, recently the article was removed from MSDN. Rather than spending...

Several months ago I updated my "Time Travel with Windows Media Center" article to be based on Windows Vista rather than on Windows XP. It's now online! If you're interested in writing background add-ins for Media Center, check it out at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb643809.aspx . Thanks...

I've been using WebGuide with Media Center since the initial version, and Doug Berrett has always done a terrific job with it. But with the newest version, WebGuide 4, he's completely outdone himself. It's brilliant. Works great with Vista, has a terrific interface, and it supports on-the-fly transcoding...

Back in early 2005, I wrote an article for MSDN on implementing add-ins for Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 . As part of that article, I implemented an add-in that made it easy to jump around in a recorded TV show, video, or music file using the remote control, simply by entering a time code using...

I'm enamored with the movie capabilities of my Canon Digital Elph. While I love taking pictures, sometimes I don't just want stills from an event, but would prefer to capture the whole thing in the form of a movie. As a result, I take short movies with it all the time. Recently, I wanted to extract...

Ian was nice enough to have me on the show this week. Check it out: http://mediacenter.thepodcastnetwork.com/2006/03/09/the-media-center-show-48-stephen-toub-msdn/ 00:50 Coming up this week 01:30 Email - No Apple DVR 02:36 Email - XBOX 360 04:04 Email - PSP Media Server 05:08 Email - Vista Media Center...

Today, the Media Center team released Update Rollup 2 for Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 (you may have heard of the update referred to previously as "Emerald"). Update Rollup 2 includes a plethora of modifications to improve the stability, reliability, and functionality of Windows XP Media Center...

Update Rollup 2 for Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 was released today! Get it while it's hot. In addition, for all you developers out there, a new SDK was released and can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=1D836C29-ABD5-4FDD-90C5-5C5ABAE97DB4&displaylang...

Charlie Owen from the Media Center team is raffling off a bunch of prizes (Visual Studio 2005, Windows XP, Office 2003) in exchange for donations to American Red Cross Hurricane Relief: http://blog.retrosight.com/PermaLink,guid,615c3873-ec2c-4869-9d8a-c4bec36042ba.aspx . I have a shrinkwrapped copy...

Update (10/14/2005): MediaState.dll in the new SDK released today is signed. You can download it at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=1D836C29-ABD5-4FDD-90C5-5C5ABAE97DB4&displaylang=en . The Media State Aggregation Service (MSAS) in Windows XP Media Center 2005 provides...

I finished the code for this project months and months ago, and I had every intention of writing a full MSDN article describing the ins and outs of what I’d accomplished, but time seems to have gotten away from me. Rather than let the code languish any longer, I’ve decided to simply write up a (relatively...

I was asked earlier this week if I knew of any tools that would let one easily edit the metadata associated with a DVR-MS file. Specifically, the person wanted to edit the title and description of a recorded show. There may very well be such a tool out there, but I'd never seen one, so I threw one together...

One of the features I've wanted for a while now in Media Center is the ability to easily jump around within media. I have a bunch of family home videos on my machine, and it can be frustrating to navigate to particular moments that I want to show to family and friends. To compensate for this, I wrote...

I've received some very nice feedback on my DVR-MS article ... I'm glad people are finding it so informative! I did want to call out one thing about the sample code. Buried in the middle of the article (when discussing WmvConverter) is a sentence: "This code will allow you to convert non-DRM'd, NTSC...

My latest article for MSDN Online is now available at Fun with DVR-MS ! A bit on the long side, but in it I delve into working with DirectShow and DVR-MS files (the recorded television files generated by Windows Media Center) from managed code, and I demonstrate how to do things like work with DirectShow...

I wrote a short article for MSDN which demonstrates how easy it is to write fun Audio DSP plug-ins for Windows Media Player. Karaoke, Windows Media Player Style Have fun.

As I mentioned in my last post , I recently wrote an article for MSDN detailing an approach for synchronizing calendars in Outlook with custom event data sources. I also mentioned that I included a few demo (but usable) CalendarProvider implementations for synchronizing with data sources like event logs...