I think I just heard Bill Gates at WinHEC 2007 say that Pika is going to work on PCs to be used as a screen terminal aka SoftSled. Jessica, can you say anything more to this or was I day dreaming?

Don't we all wish.    Anyone else at WinHEC confirm?

I'm going to defer to my friends on the Extender team for this one. I've sent the thread to them.

Chris,
He didn't go into any details, but he definately said (I'm paraphrasing)...

Pika is in Xbox 360, we are going to make it super easy for it to be available in HD tvs and other CE devices. We are also going to make it available in computers to act as screen terminals.

Hopefully this is why Extenders V2 aren't available yet! I can dream can't I?

Thanks Jessica, I love you and your teams commitment to this community.

Considering that pretty much everything mentioned at WinHec was about current year releases I would suspect this too will be delivered by years end.  Bill Gates comment about a "Terminal Screen" makes me wonder in what form this is going to be delivered.  Is he talking about software add-on to Vista or is he talking about some new hardware/firmware built-into Laptops and Monitors.  A hardware solution doesn't seem neccessary with all the power of a PC/laptop so I'm hoping its going to be software/windows based.  More than anything though, I hope they support running Media Extender in a window or full screen modes.

I found an article by Paul Thurott confirming this information.  I know that this isn't a whole lot more information than was originally posted but Paul is generally a reliable source of information.

He also said, cryptically, that Microsoft will be bringing the Xbox 360's remote media experiences, codenamed Pica, to various consumer electronics devices, like TVs, as well as PCs. This means, essentially, that the Vista-compatible Media Center Extender technology in the Xbox 360 will soon be available to a much wider range of users.

My bet is that the feature will be included in the next Media Center refresh.  Let's just keep our fingers crossed.

John

Yeah, looks like Paul did a much better job of paraphrasing what Bill said. Good, I wasn't dreaming!

Of course Paul said it was coming three years ago too. 

But really it sounds like this is true.  Now we just have to wait and see what the extent of it is and how it will be packaged.

Chris - Moderator:

Of course Paul said it was coming three years ago too. 

But really it sounds like this is true.  Now we just have to wait and see what the extent of it is and how it will be packaged.

And when it will ship, and what it will cost us...  I'm all ears!

Hopefully those who get to beta test the next release will get an early answer. I doubt we will hear anything semi-official from the extender team though, but I'd sure like for them to prove me wrong.

One of the Extender PMs just posted this on his blog:

What BillG said at WinHEC about Pika

So it has been theorized that BillG announced a "SoftSled" at WinHEC. That is not the case. What he said was that the functionality to remote Media Center onto an Xbox 360 will be available in other CE devices like TVs. This is the Pika project that allows CE partners (e.g. people who make hardware) to add MCX to their deviecs (there is an MCX session later this week on how to do this). There are no plans to make a software-based MCX.

http://blogs.msdn.com/denmor/archive/2007/05/15/what-billg-said-at-winhec-about-pika.aspx

Weak
http://msmvps.com/blogs/chrisl/archive/2007/05/15/906258.aspx

Indeed. Very weak....none of thenm can say why or explain why it's not worthy of inclusion..I swear to god we shouldjust figure out how to do it on our own and opensource that biznatch.

While we're at it maybe by then we'll figure out how to make the triple-damn "WatchedFolders" for Recorded TV actually REFRESH like the DVD Library does...dang..do these people really use these products?!

Yup, we do use the products. And you're also right in that we can't say anything about the alleged Softsled.