by Scott Sanders
Beyond my day-to-day job contributing to the development of Windows Media Center, it’s big part of my life at home as well. Around the holidays Windows Media Center is often at the center of family activities, parties, and even simple winter nights cozied up with my family in blankets, the fireplace lit in the family room, and a great holiday movie playing. Below I’m going to share my favorite ways to use Windows Media Center around the holidays.
Finding Holiday Specials to Record
Right around the beginning of December, I use several features of Windows Media Center to start recording classic holiday shows. Category search lets me search for holiday specials. From the Start Menu TV strip, select Search | Categories and choose an appropriate category. In the United States, this is Special | Holiday (it may be different in your locale).
You can also use Title or Keyword search with obvious words like “Holiday,” “Christmas,” “Easter,” or whatever you like.
An automatic way to record lots of shows for the holidays would be to create a Wish List recording by selecting Add Recording | Wish List or Keyword | Program Title, and entering an appropriate keyword.
Tip! You should set a limit on the number of shows that will record to prevent your disk from filling up.
On Demand Entertainment
If you’d like to find a list of specials on right now, you can use the Guide categories filter to restrict the list of shows to just Specials.
As a user in the United States, I also use Netflix quite a bit to stream new and old holiday movies on demand. You can search by keyword or just browse categories like Children & Family to find some classics.
Getting in the Holiday Mood
When I’m throwing a holiday party, I always have Windows Media Center playing music and running a slideshow of the past year in the background. Selecting the Genre pivot on the Music Library is a great way to narrow into your Holiday music, select Play All, and then Shuffle.
You can easily start a slideshow of all of your pictures by selecting Play Pictures or, if you’re more ambitious, you can create a combined playlist of just the photos you want and your favorite holiday music ahead of time.
Another way to enjoy your music is with a custom, holiday visualization. You can find several great holiday visualizations that work with both Windows Media Center and Windows Media Player at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/player/visualizations.aspx.
Holiday Shopping Advice with Windows Media Center
Yes, that’s right. Windows Media Center even helps with my holiday shopping. Our Internet TV experience in the United States now includes Video Podcasts from Zune. Around this time of year, there are several that feature holiday gift guides, entertaining guides, and more.
Happy holidays!
About the Author
Scott Sanders is a Development Manager on the Windows Media Center team. Since joining Microsoft in 1999 he’s worked on several TV-related technologies including WebTV, UltimateTV, and most-recently Windows Media Center. He lives in Sammamish, WA with his wife and two (already tech-savvy) children.
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