With the new Harmony Media Center Extension you can now control your home through Microsoft Media Center.
At the click of a button you can control lighting, heating, blinds, and even see who’s at your door whilst you watch TV or your favourite DVD.

Harmony Media Center is a further expansion of the leading Harmony Home Automation Server software and allows you to integrate your home control system with Windows XP Media Center. This means that your home control system is now accessible from the same place as your music collection, TV, DVDs, CCTV system and photos.

Features and Benefits

Full integration with Windows Media Center - placing your home control system in the same place as your music collection, TV, DVDs, CCTV system and photos

Choice of skins – so you can choose your preferred look

Ability to run scenes and macros – to enable you to get the environment exactly how you like it at the press of a button

Resolution independent – so you can use it with your hi-definition television

Support for Media Center extenders (such as Xbox 360) – to provide remote control of your Home Automation System from any TV in the house

Fully supported by all leading European equipment manufacturers - such as Rako, Opus, Somfy, Silent Gliss, Domia Pro, Zwave, Zigbee, EIB, Konnex, Domia X10 and Modbus.

XHub Media Center is one of the most popular alternatives to Apple's Front Row software. Developed exclusively for Mac OS X Tiger and later, XHub Media Center is fast, feature-rich and highly customizable, yet amazingly easy to use. Just connect your Mac to your living room TV and enjoy all of your digital media on the big screen from the comfort of your sofa. In addition to the essential music, movies, and photos modules, XHub Media Center offers internet radio, web browsing, and EyeTV integration.
XHub Media Center has an appealing interface and is fully themeable, with a wide range of skins and sound sets to choose from. You can even design your own theme for a truly personalized media center experience!
With built-in support for Salling Clicker, an award-winning software that allows you to use a Bluetooth/WiFi-enabled cell phone or PDA as a high-end remote control, XHub Media Center has the most sophisticated control options available on any system.
XHub also supports remotes from Apple, ATI, Keyspan and many other manufacturers.

• MUSIC
With XHub Media Center, it's easy to access your entire iTunes music library. You can play individual songs, entire albums or playlists, use Cover Flow, play songs by genre or composer, and watch captivating visualizations that change with the rhythm of your music.
With XHub, fetching missing album artwork from the Internet is easy as pie. Just press the button. You can easily set the rating of a song, toggle a playlist's shuffle and repeat mode, skip to an upcoming song or even wipe it from the playlist.
XHub reads data from your music library much faster than other media center applications. It will gather up all of your artists, albums, songs, genres or composers in just a blink.

• DVD
Enjoy watching your favorite DVDs with XHub Media Center. XHub will automatically keep track of where you last left off.

• PHOTOS
With XHub Media Center, you can display slide shows of your digital pictures anytime, while listening to your favorite tune. Choose from a wide range of photo effects and slideshow transition styles.

• VIDEOS
Enjoy digital videos with XHub Media Center. You can easily find and watch home movies, theatrical trailers, video podcasts and locally stored DVDs, as well as music videos and TV shows downloaded from the iTunes music store.

• NEWS
With XHub Media Center, you can browse and read internet news feeds and surf the web from your living room couch.

• RADIO
Enjoy listening to internet radio with XHub Media Center. You can download and play podcasts and tune in to thousands of free online radio stations from DJs and broadcasters around the world.

• TV
Enjoy digital TV broadcasts and recordings with XHub Media Center and EyeTV by Elgato Systems. XHub is the only Mac media center with integrated EyeTV.

• VIRTUAL KEYBOARD
With XHub, browsing menus is quick and easy. Simply type a few letters on the virtual (or physical) keyboard to jump right to the menu item of your choice. No need to scroll through thousands of artists to find that ZZ Top evergreen!
You can also scroll through menus quickly with the left/right button on your remote, skipping ten items per click.

• THEMEABLE
XHub has more than twenty subtly animated interfaces - varying from the slick and elegant to the curious and colorful - that you can change to as often as you like, with ease. You can even design your own skins! Pick your favorite color, font and background image, movie, slideshow or even Quartz composition.
You can also choose from a variety of sound effects.

• SPECIAL ACTIONS
By giving the Menu button on your remote a long press, you can trigger different actions depending on what you are currently doing. Set the rating of a song, fetch missing album artwork from the Internet, open the Go To Time menu or start a TV recording. Best of all - YOU decide what action to trigger.

• SPEECH ASSISTANCE
XHub has optional speech assistance. When enabled, browse menu items are read out loud, by Victoria, Fred, Junior or whatever voice you prefer. You can turn on speech assistance, leave the living room and change music playlist while making a sandwich in the kitchen.

• CELL PHONE REMOTE CONTROL
XHub can be controlled with your Bluetooth-equipped cell phone or PDA. If you use the plug-in remote for Salling Clicker, you don't even need to stay in sight of your TV to control XHub - the browse menus appear right on your phone's display! The numerical keypad even serves as a multi-tap input device, for quick searching.
XHub ships with plug-ins for Salling Clicker and Romeo, and pre-configured HID files for more than 20 cell phones from Sony Ericsson.

• MOVIE POSTERS
Drop your movie posters in the designated folder and XHub will display them when browsing movies. You can also add folder posters to be displayed for all the files in a folder, for example the episodes of a TV series.

• FULLY CUSTOMIZABLE
Don't have EyeTV? Don't care for album artwork? Want to prevent system sleep or not? Prefer green to blue? It's up to you. XHub is fully customizable.

November 3, 2005 — PC News Weekly, in its October 31st issue reviewed 4 top Media Center PCs; Dell, HP, Cannon PC and Gateway.

Cannon PC was awarded PC News Weekly’s coveted Best Product Award for its LX Series Media Center PC.“What’s inside this media center PC is equally as impressive and we give Cannon PC LX Series computer our Best Product Award with a true competitive system that can stand up against the major players,” said PC News Weekly. “Cannon PC LX Series gives the big boys a run for their money.” “We are very excited and honored to be chosen PC News Weekly’s Best Product Award.

In the highly competitive computer market it can be difficult to compete with major companies. Cannon PC has demonstrated that it can compete and win against the best of them,” says Gregg Cannon, President of Cannon PC. Cannon goes on to state that, “Our goal is to be the leader for Media Center computers, accessories and technology.

A key component to Cannon PC leading this market is designing high end, feature rich, Media Centers.

Our competing LX is one such mid-level system. I am curious how our high-end EX system would have been perceived in the challenge?”“We plan to expand our offerings in the next few weeks to include an Executive Series Media Center designed for the Executive office or home office. These systems will be ideal for the executive that needs a powerful PC to analyze data or present presentation, while also keeping up to date on the latest news from CNN or FOX,” Cannon says.Cannon PC is a Houston based company that specializes in Media Center PCs and technology.

They offer three lines of Media Center PC that are fully customizable, ranging in price from $1,995 to $3,495. All Cannon PC units are perfect for advanced home automation, high end home theater systems, and professional business presentation rooms.

Standard features on all their systems include Pentium 4 processors, high speed SATA drives, built in wireless features, gigabit Ethernet, multi-media card reader, 3 fire wire and 6 USB ports all housed in stylish living room style cases.

Cannon PC offers high end units that are rack mountable; ideal for state of the art media rooms or A/V closets. These units can be configured with more than 1 terabyte of internal storage for those users with massive video, CD and photo collections.

Windows XP Media Center 2004 is a superset of Windows XP Professional; it contains additional capabilities for Home Entertainment which is not present or not easily possible to achieve (to same level of results) out of the box on other editions of Windows.

These features enable the ability to view digital media on your machine (all pictures, video's and music) via a graphically driven DirectX based user interface. The special part is you are able to do this using a remote control device on your monitor or TV.

Windows Media Center features the ability to record and pause live TV on demand, and allows you to automatically record an entire series of a program with 2 button presses. The recorded TV shows are recorded in a format called dvr-ms (digital video recording MicroSoft) which is fairly similar to the asf file format. The recorded shows are made up of MPEG2 streams and Meta information to store details about the program. Using the correct software such as Sonic's MyDVD product it is possible to record these shows into DVD's which can be used in most set-top DVD players.

Windows Media Center is an OEM product which means it can only be acquired with a new Media Center PC or for development use as part of an MSDN subscription. At this point you cannot legally obtain the Media Center software to build your own Media Center system for home entertainment purposes. This was a conscious decision taken by Microsoft to ensure that users have the best possible experience (so a system will have adequate hardware and support).

Media Center 2004 is available without a Media Center PC from MSDN as part of their operating systems subscription and higher (from $699 US Dollars). This is designed for developers interested in building for Media Center and is actually a violation of the license agreement to use for home use.

NVIDIA-based Media Center Edition desktop and notebook PCs deliver a complete digital entertainment solution. Imagine all of your digital media—TV, pictures, home movies, music—in one place, and accessible with a single remote control. With the combined power of the Microsoft® Windows® XP Media Center Edition operating system and NVIDIA technology, your computer has the power to take you directly into the digital media future.

At WinHEC 2005, NVIDIA presented second generation living room PC reference design which will enable system builders and OEMs to build more powerful living room PCs at compelling price points. The suggested designs have a richer feature set, consume less heat and power, and are a physically smaller and quieter addition to a consumer's living room.