Smart Home Blog

If you prefer proprietary Windows MCE instead of open source XBMC for your media center then following two program should be interesting for you. Media Center Studio allows to to change Windows MCE background image, menu strip, and fonts for the main interface, while Media Center Themer provides you a way to customize the font style and color throughout Windows MCE, including third-party add-ins. Both program are fully compatible with Win7.

[via eHomeUpgrade]

Evoluce announced its new Kinect-based gesture interface for Win7 “Win & I” which brings PC remote control to the new level. Sure it needs to be polish and user should be prepared for it but even now it looks very impressive (see the video below). The “Win & I” home edition is tagged at €20 only (without Kinect, of course). So, you may try it to control your media center and enjoy new feeling.

Also there is an another similar software called Air Presenter. It’s developed by So Touch. According to its video presentation the Air Presenter offers more native gesturing and hand-waving then “Win & I”. Its gestures look a bit similar to work with touchscrteen.

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Reycom announced its two new Win7 media centers – REC 100 and REC 1000. Basically they’re the same except hard drive capacity – REC 100 has 320GB and REC 1000 – 500GB. Also REC 1000 sports Blu-ray drive except DVD one. Both models are based on Intel processors and nVidia graphics and have dual ATSC tuners and RF remote control.

Except compact size and nice design the REC 100 and REC 1000 are energy-efficient and not expensive. They’ll be available this quarter at $499.00 (REC 100 I guess).

[via The Digital Media Zone]

An open source project called Simonsays offers a voice control for Win7 MCE via microphone to capture voice commands. Those commands are processed by Windows 7 Voice Recognition SDK. Currently hole project is a Python script hosted at Google Code. It has a limited dictionary of commands. But it should be enough to control playback or volume. You can install and configure Simonsays using that instruction.

[via ehomeUgrade]