Great TV Tuner card for MCE. Hybrid cards are pretty common, but this one is unique in having a hardware MPEG-2 encoder for its NTSC tuner (in addition to its ATSC tuner for OTA HD).

That means you get two tuners which operate at the same time for the cost of one PCI slot. Cheaper than the hybrid ATI 650 with no hardware encoder for its analog NTSC tuner (and you can only use one tuner at a time).

This looks pretty cool.

Quoted: Big Screen Blog: Fox Sports MCPL(+Web) Addin for Vista Media Center.

Quoted: Documentation, tools, and sample code for developing Windows Media Center applications and services.

I think this actually makes a lot of sense -- a kiosk only goes so far. MCE, Zune, and recent smart phone / PDA type devices are considerably more interesting than a "solution center featuring platform and development tools" (ewwwwww).

Quoted: And what about Media Center? How often has it been demonstrated in a store's home theater setting, much less connected to an Xbox 360 in another mocked-up room?

3rd party drivers to enable the analog tuner on ATI (h)DTV Wonder card / Vista.

Quoted: Installation procedure for Vista, Kram Drivers and HDTV Wonder

Need to look at this vs. online storage. It can hold 200 DVDs or CDs. One extremely cool feature is you can load it with your CD collection and batch rip! It will also play DVDs via MCE's interface. Need to figure out how flexible it is ... SDK, alternate OS compatibility, etc. Tempting to wait for a BD version, but $399.99 after rebate isn't THAT ridiculous.

I could recover some of the cost by offering "CD ripping services" for people with big collections :)

Quoted: Amazon.com: Sony VGP-XL1B2 Media Changer (also: VGP-XL1B): Computers & PC Hardware

These are some sweet HTPC boxes ... the I/O panel on the back is really nicely done. Strange that the small one has HDMI out but not the larger one ... you can get the same horsepower for way, way, way less money, but if money's no object this is a nice way to go :)

Nice UI on this MP3 player, looks just like the Vista MCE channel display.

Laundry notification on your TV. We're a lazy, lazy society. And yet, this is awesome :P