MediaCenter, Xbox and my work

It's been a long time since my last post. It's just that I have become really really lazy.. Too lazy to even blog, chat with friends or do anything useful :P As usual, I'm just sitting on my couch and watching movie after movie, series after series, game after game......

One of my friends asked me to blog about my work. I thought I would start with that, without getting technical ;-) It's close to one year since I started work. The past year has been a lot of fun. Now, that we are 'almost' done with Windows 7, we can relax a bit before we start planning again. I spent most of my time working on the Windows Media Center - Extender streaming scenario. For people who are not familiar with that (most people outside U.S are not), go here. My idea of home entertainment has changed completely after I was introduced to Media Center and Xbox (I have been using my Xbox more as my home media hub than as a gaming console). This is the setup I have at home

These are some of the perks of working with this team, I get lot of cool stuff at home. I've never even imagined that I could enjoy HiDef TV wirelessly, streamed from my living room to my bedroom. It is fun even at work. I was working on a bug for close to one month. We were using a Seinfeld HD episode as our test stream. I ended up watching that episode a zillion times before I fixed the bug. I can tell you each and every dialog in the episode even when I'm sleeping ;) Now, they've given me a TV. I can watch TV 24x7 (or more precisely 8x5 a week!).

People in the U.S, please give the Media Center a try. You can use your xbox360 as a media center extender, stream live and recorded TV from your PC to the 360, pause, rewind or record live TV, stream videos from the internet and so on...... so, this is short summary of my work so far - fine tune the networking in the home media scenario. Hope you all enjoy Windows 7... I'm planning to write some more as we get closer to the release... Until then, enjoy the beta and RC versions ;)