Talking
about DVDs; if you have a couple of (legally) ripped DVDs on your Windows Media
Center Edition you can now access these DVDs wireless as well - straight from
your Windows Mobile Pocket PC or Smartphone! During the past weeks, I played
with a couple of Beta builds of Doug Berrett' WebGuide 4.1 (please
see the::unwired's review of WebGuide4 Mobile here) and all I can say is, that it is a fantastic addition fort every Windows (Vista or XP) Media Center Edition. Not only it lets you place-shift your live TV, this DVD streaming is the killer (as long as your DSL upload is broad enought and you have at least a UMTS connection for your Windows Mobile device).




To see the whole list of new features -
head over to
the::placeshift but here are the major features for the mobile version:
- Added streaming DVD functionality for non-encrypted DVD's stored in
folders.
- store all of the video_ts files in a folder with a "folder.jpg" to
use as cover art
- recognized as full DVD offering titles/chapters/menus
- note that direct-show doesn't show the menu highlights when
streaming, so you can also use the title/chapter list.
- Added DVD ISO mounting via Daemon Tools
- Added "dvdid.xml" support for cover art and DVD info
- Modified DVD stream to pick AC3 stream with more than 2 channels (was
selecting a silent channel sometimes)
- Added "Now Playing" page to Mobile section to allow for transport
controls and chapter list while streaming
- Added 4x3, 16x9 and audio-only streaming profiles
- Added streaming audio to mobile (to handle high-bitrate of MP3->WMA
conversion)
- Added videos/DVD streaming to mobile
- Automatically goes to "now playing" screen before launching mobile
stream
- Fixed mobile permission issue where user wasn't allowed to login with
restricted permissions
- Fixed mobile auto-login.
- Cleaned up font sizes in mobile pages
- Improved streaming of Divx/Xvid files
- Added mobile setting to change the ASX stream extension (normally WVX,
but can be changed to ASX for other apps that don't recognize WVX (for
instance Kinoma on
Palm)
As I said, I was playing and testing v4.1 a lot during the last weeks and
it's definitely a major improvement, especially the DVD streaming functionality
which gives your place-shift access to your DVD collection from wherever your
are.
The price of the full version of WebGuide4 stays unchanged - US$ 18 only!
WebGuide 4.1 is available (and requires) for Windows Vista Media Center and
Windows XP Media Center Edition. It's not running stand-alone.
Cheers ~ Arne