MCE 2005 and Flash, Things done my way

I’m really enjoying my Windows Media Center, allthough I still have to do a good case mod ’cause right now I just a have a big ugly atx-tower and a 19″ crt in my livingroom. The only thing is, being an Interaction and Interface Designer I like having things behave the way I want them to. Since rewriting MCE isn’t an option, I decided to see what I could do with extending MCE through the ‘programs’ section.

Reading through the SDK I found that it was real easy to extend MCE with HTML-pages (it embeds IE). Well hey, if it does HTML, it does flash! And because I have all my media and data on a LinuxServer it was easy to create a backend that can read my musicfolders (my biggest complaint about the way music is handled on mce) but also my contactdatabase, my musiclyrics and tabs.

[ Screenshot ]

Now the tricky part was designing the interface and application-structure in flash, and getting the remote to work.
But now I’ve got everything sorted. And I’m enjoying my MCE the way I want to.

b.t.w. It should’n be too hard to replace the backend with a c# or asp.net solution, so you could even run it when you don’t have server.

Demo of K8055 Interface for Flash

I’ve completed a demo for the K8055 Interface to Flash.
I’m using this demo for a minor in Interactive Installations I’m teaching at
Communication and MultiMedia Design in Breda (the Netherlands).

You can download the demo from the download page.
You’ll need to have the .Net2 framework installed as the wrapper executable has been written in c#.
And ofcourse you’ll need a Velleman K8055 Experiment board.
Be sure to run the exe, not just the swf!

If you like it, you’ll be able to buy the sourcecode for a small amount, once I’ve set up my PayPal account.