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.