A peek at Media Center in Windows 7

I don’t know how else to say it:  Media Center in Windows 7 is awesome!  This post won’t go too much into why, but rather will show the initial setup experience, which is still pretty cool.

When the user first opens Windows Media Center, he is greeted with the following screen.  He may pan left and right to get an overview of the software’s features, as I will do through a series of screenshots.

After clicking “Continue” the user is greeted with the following:

The Learn More item apparently brings the user to a simple Media Center application with a few demo and tutorial videos.  Keeping in mind that this stuff is still in beta, it is a unfortunate that in the time between selecting “Learn More” and seeing a list of videos, there is no loading animation or status indicator of any kind.  Hopefully this will be fixed in the final release.

Back to setup.  Selecting “Express” does some things and then brings the user to the Media Center start menu (if that’s what it’s called.).  I was curious to select that, but I wanted to see what “Custom” had to offer.

Media Center did some processing for maybe a minute, which was curious.

Here is the obligatory “may we collect statistics?” choice.  This is one reason why I usually choose “Custom” for things like this, because I like to participate, but I don’t think the epxress option opts me in.

And of course a privacy statement…

w00t!

Now I have more options.  I don’t have a TV tuner any more, so the first option is not applicable to me, and the other two are not really that exciting or necessary for my system.  I was curious about the media libraries option, however, so I selected that.

Just as I thought, there is a “DVD movies” option now.  Move on that later…

I’m done, so I selected “I have finished”.

w00t!

And here’s the new start menu.

I’ve already played around with Media Center for a bit, and am really excited about a lot of the new features and improvements.  I’ll be writing most posts about them in the future.

Demos, Tutorials
Digital Lifestyle, Entertainment, Microsoft, Windows 7, Windows 7 Beta, Windows Media Center
13 January 2009 comment TrackBack-URI