Tech @ FuryTech

For those of you have a large amount of local content, you’ve no doubt quickly realized that Windows MCE’s default handling of media leaves much to be desired.

Here enters MediaBrowser. Mediabrowser is a free program that handles organizing your video files complete with online metadata. It is incredibly simple to setup, quite stable, and practically essential for anyone interested in having the ultimate home theatre experience on their computer.

The amount of data that it can display for your collection is astounding. It can handle trailers for movies, episode plot details, and it even lets you search for actors in your collection.

For those of you who want to take the time to generate the metadata locally, there is a great program called MetaBrowser that can handle that for you. While it’s not free, it is definitely worth the $20 to help keep your collection permanently organized.

I highly recommend MediaBrowser to anyone who uses Media Center as a front-end for their home theatre systems.

I’ve been working a lot as of late putting together a Windows-based DVR. One of the nice features of some DVR boxes is that you can update their recording schedule online, so if you’re out of the house and realize you forgot to set something to tape, you can just log onto the website, and add it to your recording list.

Windows MCE 7 doesn’t support that out of the box, however, that’s where Remote Potato comes in. It installs a small webserver onto your MCE system so that you can add and remove recordings. It also supports streaming your media anywhere where you have access to a browser. It is password protected, so you don’t have to worry about someone logging on and deleting all your recordings, which is good. If you have a large number of channels, you can select which channels you want to show to the guide, so you only have to scroll through the channels that you actually use.

All in all, it’s a great free program that is highly recommended if you want to be able to add recordings from anywhere.