Those who follow the blog know that some of us are trying to get some more info out of Microsoft regarding codecs and extender support.  Just today, Charlie Owen posted a link to an article detailing what we can expect and two of the things in my previous post will be answered in Windows 7!

First of all, it looks as though we will be provided with H.264 support both in Media Center and on extenders!  I can only hope this is a pre-cursor to us getting a DirecTV solutions  As well, you’ll be able to resume video files…this as I said earlier, is a huge factor in WAF and I am soooo happy about this!

For television viewing, everyone is going to get the TV Pack functionality.  This tells me that I should probably just uninstall it for now and wait.  We’ll see though.  I know this will make a lot of people happy as well.  It also appears as though you’re going to be able to share your Recorded TV across your network without going through a series of painful and complicated registry hacks.  This again is going to be extremely useful to myself as I have a Media Center machine running in my sons’ play room and this will allow me to do all of the recording in one location.

From the blog post:

I’ve elected to not take any screenshots for this section — not much has changed visually for this feature, so I’ll just enumerate what’s new from a functionality perspective.

• The Video Library, like Pictures, Music and Recorded TV gets the Shared Library feature so you can enjoy content from other computers on your network.
• H.264 playback is now supported out of the box with Windows 7 — including on Media Center Extenders – both standalone hardware implementations AND on the XBox 360 when in Extender mode. I know a few people on http://www.thegreenbutton.com who will rejoice.
• Video Play All allows you to play all of the videos in a specific gallery in a continuous play list – you can now easily excite the neighbors with your vacation and home videos one after the other!
• Videos now have parity with Recorded TV in the area of bookmarks – you can now resume previously played videos where you left off.

TV

For starters, you get all of the enhancements made available with the TV Pack (including those for United States customers). For more information on the TV Pack check out this post at The Green Button: http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/thread/282555.aspx. If you recall, the TV Pack was designed to enable TV standards in Asia and Europe. There are some nice additions in this area for Windows 7…

There are a myriad of other enhancements dealing with sorting, visuals and finding your content.  I’ll allow the screenshots to speak for themselves and of course, you can head to the post written by Charlie and read it for yourself.  I have to say I’m still a bit disappointed we’re not getting more codec support on the Xbox 360 extender but they’ve added enough to keep me happy for now…and I’m not sure if that’s good or bad. 

Again though, this is an Alpha build so who knows, maybe we can get them to throw more in before Windows 7 hits the market.  I won’t lie though, with this being given to attendees at the conference, more than likely it will be available online before the end of the week and I may try and give it a go.  If I do, I’ll try and post and let everyone know what I think.

***I apologize if you’re reading this late but just before publishing, we lost internet…first winter storm of the season.  Hopefully someone got the news to you!***