 If
you are a frequent the::unwired reader, you know that I have a real passion for
using my Slingbox
and WebGuide on my
Windows Mobile smartphones since both really spices up my Windows Phones. Since
I travel a lot, I'm either missing my favorite TV shows due to other
appointments or I'm unable to watch them on hotel TVs because the channel isn't
available there. For live TV I'm using my Slingboxes but to schedule a
Media Center
recording, either from PCs/Notebooks or from Windows Phones, I'm still using
WebGuide 4 which is one reason why I haven't upgraded my Microsoft Media Center
to the TV Feature Pack or Windows 7 yet because in this case WebGuide would
break.
Since Doug Berrett, the developer of WebGuide, has joined Microsoft's Media
Center team earlier, there wasn't an update or upgrade released anymore but in a
recent interview with NEDMUG.com, Doug unveiled that a kind of WebGuide
functionality might hit
Microsoft's Live Mesh
service, most potentially as a
Silverlight
application which again makes me hoping that
Silverlight Mobile for Windows Mobile might hit Windows Phones better sooner
than later:
Pete Stagman had the chance to speak to Doug Berrett confirmed again that
WebGuide will not work on Windows 7 because "the guide data is stored in a
different data type and the new WTV format is not supported by WebGuide".
Doug followed up by explaining that he gave a demo of what he's working on at
PDC, which was an application called "WebGuide Mesh".
Doug explained that WebGuide Mesh is "a working name. I had to come up with
something for CEDIA and that was just something they would understand there. The
name may change". However, the short demo he gave, which included some guide
stuff coming from fake data, clearly showed that the interface looked like the
old WebGuide menus and Doug confirmed that WebGuide Mesh could have all the the
functionality of the original WebGuide stand-alone application.
However, he made clear that "this is very early in the process and it may
all change. We'll have to wait and see what the final version looks like. Right
now I can open up mesh while on the road and change a cached schedule to record
a program, then when you connect to the net, Mesh will upload the changes and
then you will get a confirmation that the program was scheduled. That's all the
software does at this point in time".
Definitely an interesting approach to use Live Mesh to connect to a home Windows
Media Center. So far, Live Mesh was only used to synchronized user generated
documents. And since Live Mesh is also available for Windows Mobile, there might
be a good chance that a kind of WebGuide functionality might come back to
Windows Phones again, but this time not from an independent third party
developer but from Microsoft itself.
UPDATE: Just found the Channel 10 video above which was recorded during the PDC back in November last year. There, Mark Pendergrast, Brendan Grant and Doug
Berrett talked about their PDC sessions and how Live Mesh is being integrated
with Windows Home Server as well as the above mentioned prototype of WebGuide is
demoed.
Cheers ~ Arne
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