Windows Tools, Help & Guides

A computer user since 1976, Deck enjoys testing new software and reconfiguring his equipment to squeeze the most out of it. "Computing has come a long way since those early days" Deck recalls "I get a real kick out of watching the industry grow - getting paid to write about it is just icing on the cake!"

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This is the second part of our series on the Windows Media Center. Did you miss the first part?

In this section we’ll take a look at the ways Windows Media Center can organise and present your movie collection.

Media Browser:

The “bare-bones” WMC movie component is pretty good, but a bit stark.  Fortunately the clever developers out in the world have come up with software packages to add functionality, flexibility, and better looks.

There are several to choose from but my choice for an enhancement to the WMC movie component  is “Media Browser“.  It sits as a separate icon in your WMC start page and handles your music collection as well, but we’ll focus on the movie parts for now. The front page is below. It’s fairly straightforward, adds a lot of functionality, it looks good – and it’s free.

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This is the first in a series of articles taking a detailed look at Windows Media Center (WMC) as offered in Windows 7. We’ll look at the main features as well as some of the minor goodies — we’ll point out a few short-comings and explain how some of these short-comings are overcome with some great 3rd party programs.

Our conclusion is that WMC provides an easy and attractive console for many of your digital entertainment sources – movies, TV, radio, music, photos – and more.  One remote control  drives the  system, it looks great, there are a host of plug-ins and add-ons to fill a few functionality gaps , and it’s free with the Windows 7 operating system.

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