Checking Out Windows Media Center in Windows 7

"If you are attending the 2008 Professional Developers Conference you received a pre-beta Windows 7 build today (6801) which contains many features the Windows Media Center team has been developing over the past year. It's my pleasure to take a few minutes to outline some of these new features for you. If you install this build do keep in mind it's considered an ‘Alpha' experience meaning some features may not be polished or work quite as well as they will in the final product AND things may change (mostly for the better we hope) between now and beta and RTM. So let's jump right in..."

Microsoft employee Charlie Owen has published a bunch of screen shots from the Windows Media Center interface inside Windows 7. Lots of improvements are shown, but the one that really caught my attention was native h.264 support, including Media Center Extenders. Finally, using h.264 inside a Microsoft ecosystem won't be quite so frustrating. There's some good stuff here!