Mike did a great comparison of all of the different Netflix plug-ins for Media Center, and Alan seems to be doing good with his semi-recent CableCARD purchase. 

Ricavision looks like they are getting ready (again) to release their Sideshow remote.  While I love the concept, I can’t suggest anyone do business with Ricavision right now.  First it was delaying the remote well over a year, then raising their pre-sale prices, then running their beta program by asking for $350 retail price upfront (plus shipping) from testers, then posting them up on Amazon for pre-order (with free shipping) just days about the beta invites started!  Sorry Ricavision, I’m not biting.  I guess the one good thing is Amazon.com is actually selling them direct, so if something goes wrong at least you know Amazon can handle it correctly.  I look forward to a v2 model that doesn’t come at a crazy price tag and baggage that v1 clearly does.

Another day, another open source Media Center plug-in (loving being able to say that).  Today it is MCE Media Manager, which is an MCML plug-in for managing different types of media.  Currently, it is sort of a torrent plug-in, syncing with uTorrent to display the status of downloading torrents.  Besides that, the developer hopes to use the project as a learning experience for MCML.