Last year I bought a XBOX 360. Until now I've been using it mainly to play games, and watch the occasional movie on DVD. Besides that I have a pile of mp3 files on an external HD which I have connected to the XBOX.

What I never really really explored was the Media Center functionality of the XBOX. Until last week. I started my XBOX, pressed the Media Center on my (xbox) remote, and when through a few simple steps to connect the XBOX to my Vista laptop.

Simple enough, all my media files which are located on my laptop are now available for browsing in a pretty nice interface on my XBOX. Cool. But what about those DIVX files I would like to watch? Well, for that I found Transcode 360. It's a free tool that resides in your system tray which will transcode your DIVX files on the fly to a format that the XBOX supports. Works just brilliant! And free too :-)

For my podcasts video podcasts I went a step further. I downloaded the Windows Media Center Software Development Kit 5.0 , opened the 'Q' sample project in Visual Studio, went through a few steps, and now I can watch my video podcasts right on my XBOX. The 'Q' application is a podcasting client included as an example in the SDK. It uses the Windows RSS Framework to download your podcasts. Works, and it has quite an interesting graphical interface (I have to get used to it a bit). If you want a more 'standard' (less animated but probably more functional) interface, you could check out TVTonic. It gives you a nice and easy to understand interface including the option to subscribe to podcasts on the XBOX itself (the 'Q' application lacks that).

Okay, I can hear you thinking... will there be a Doppler for Windows Media Center? No, not in the near future. Time... so much to watch... so little time...

On a side track: I'm readying a new release of Doppler 3.0. This time with Polish, Slovak, French, Swedish, Dutch and of course English language support! I run it on Vista, as you might have guessed, so that works too.