I’m going to join Simon May in putting out a call to arms.  Were I a programmer, this is probably something I would have tried already.  I’m not, so all I can do is ask the community.

Simon posted to his blog today asking the community to take up the cause of developing a flash transcoder for Media Center extenders.  In doing so, Simon linked back to a blog written by the developer of TunerFree MCE. 

From the post:

So, since the future of online video for the moment lies with flash, and Microsoft aren’t interested in providing better support for that in media center and extenders, the only real way of getting great support for online video in media center is for someone to write a transcoder for converting the flash stream to WMV or MPEG-1/2. Since the flash streams typically contain H.264 video for high def, simply unpacking it from the rtmp stream isn’t enough for it to play on extenders or pre-windows 7 media centers, since they don’t support that video format. That conversion is not a trivial thing to do on the fly (as opposed to downloading the whole thing first then converting it).

I am hoping that this mini-essay on the topic is going to prompt someone out there to start an open source project to convert flash streams to a media center compatible format. There are lots of add-ins that would benefit from it, like my TunerFreeMCE code, Yougle and I’d imagine SecondRun.tv when it gets release, so go on someone, make a name for yourself by taking up this challenge.

Head over to read the whole post.  There’s a lot of good info there.

Again, I’m not a programmer, so I have to rely on others.  I hope the community can come together and build an app that’s easy to use and gets us using online content throughout our homes.  This is something I’d even be willing to pay for if it meant that things like Secondrun.tv worked not only on the MCE machine but on extenders as well.