Media Center Programs

Sorry folks, no Hulu or Netflix in this top 5 list...yet. I know the Boxee folks have been hard at work, and great plugins are just going to make it easier for people to migrate over. Some great apps on this list, some more useful than others IMO, but all pretty high quality.

{joomsay link=http://mashable.com/2009/08/15/best-of-boxee/ [Mashable]}With the Pandora app for Boxee, you can log into your account and experience everything you love about streaming music from the shiny entertainment dashboard. The app is visually very impressive, feature-rich, and pretty easy to manipulate. You’ll find your saved stations on the right-hand side, which you can close and open, and a history of your streamed music is clearly highlighted across your screen. You can still create stations and bookmark songs or artists as usual.{/joomsay} 

Some FANTASTIC news for Boxee fans all around, as they have quickly closed a Series B round of funding. The funding is impressive in this climate, but no doubt the investors saw the immense growth that Boxee has accomplished with such a small budget. This should guarantee the continuation and improvement for quite some time--which hopefully will result in more content deals for you the viewer to enjoy.

{joomsay link=http://blog.boxee.tv/2009/08/12/boxee-gets-a-6m-catalyst/ [Boxee]}We are happy to announce that Boxee closed a $6M round of financing led by Boston-based General Catalyst with participation by prior investors Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures. Neil Sequeira from General Catalyst will join our board. We closed our Series A late last year, but given the momentum and opportunities we’ve seen over the past few months, we thought it made sense to bring in a new partner and additional funds.{/joomsay} 

We recently saw some newly released plugins for the Apple HTPC-application Plex, and today comes the announcement of a new version. Still not version 1.0, but a lot of fixes in this build from 0.8.1. to 0.8.2. Head on over to the Plex blog for the full list.

{joomsay link=http://elan.plexapp.com/2009/08/09/plex-082-silky-smooth/ [Plex Blog]}We’ve targeted two major causes of user interface delay (beach balling) in this release (starting streams and browsing through directories) and the results should make your experience much better than it used to be. As always, many thanks to the talented group of plug-in developers who keep expanding the content tree, as well as help us track down bugs!{/joomsay} 

Well, the wait is over at least for those of you with MSDN or Technet access. The rest of the world still has to wait until the end of October, but this is good news. I was finally able to activate my RTM build :-)

{joomsay link=http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windows7/archive/2009/08/06/windows-7-rtm-available-today-for-msdn-amp-technet-subscribers.aspx [Windows Team Blog]}And tomorrow, our Volume License (VL) customers with an existing Software Assurance (SA) license will be able to download Windows 7 RTM in English via the Volume License Service Center (VLSC). In a few weeks, the remaining languages will become available to them. If you are a VL customer without a SA license, you will be able to purchase Windows 7 through Volume Licensing on September 1st.{/joomsay}