Major Update to Windows 7 Media Center: Netflix, Internet TV, More

Lemme guess.. US only?

@albucian: One way to force the update (I think) is to go into Media Center and navigate to the "Movies" category. Look and see if Netflix is listed as one of the icons. If not, select "Movie Library" to bring up a list of your movies, and then go back to the Media Center main menu again, and under Movies, "Netflix" should show up as an option. When you select it, it will give you the option to install. That's what I had to do to see the Netflix option. Hope if works for you too.

Very cool! Media Center is the best DVR solution that there is - much better than TiVo or the sat or cable companies provide! --tayme

Tayme what and how are you recording? OTA content?

@rr0de - I dunno about Tayme but I record on a Hauppauge win-TV DVR 500. It's a dual-channel, Analog Cable tuner. Rogers up here shoots the analog signals from channels 2 through 99 and they have the major networks and most everything once would be interested in watching. I also have a Zune 120 that I can natively transfer the files to and watch at the gym while I work out. Watched Heroes today.

So, does this allow Xbox Live silver members get around the limitation of Netflix streaming only for gold members? If netflix is available via media center on the xbox... kinda negates the need to go gold.

@albucian: You can force the update by going to tasks -> settings -> general -> automatic download options, and click the "download now" button. You can see the status in your system tray (out on your desktop). It took about 3 minutes for me today when I did this. As soon as it said "downloads complete", both icons were available to me in the menu (to install). @mcwilliams132: not really, as far as I know. This only works on the media center itself, so unless you just want to use media center and watch it on your monitor or have your computer hooked right up to your TV (as media center is technically designed to be), you can't use this. Extenders can't use these features, and last I heard, xbox was included in that statement.

"Media Center is the best DVR solution that there is - much better than TiVo or the sat or cable companies provide!" I haven't seen any PC DVR solutions that can record from HDMI or directly from the digital data stream, so no, that isn't exactly correct. (I give you that the software is better though) My Bell TV HD PVR+ works fine, and OTA isn't in Canada (and is too sparse in the US to offer anything comparable to the channel lineup from digital cable/sat, from what I hear).

@tayme: The biggest issue is that legal digital downloads of TV shows has to break through national borders. There are US TV shows that I would like to download from some kind of digital service, and iTunes is one of the only services that has video downloads in Canada, but because of nationality issues, very few shows are from the US. There are Canadian TV shows that are very popular south of the border, that are exclusively on Canadian channels too, except where they are carried by US networks, such as Flashpoint, Little Mosque on the Prairie, etc. Some websites will rebroadcast them in their own country, but I can't, for instance, go to NBC.com and watch stuff on there. I have to go to CTV.ca and watch from there, and they don't have as good a quality as the originating network site. Likewise, there are UK shows that don't work on the BBC website unless you're in the UK (the BBC doesn't seem to offer much for online video in the first place). There are a lot of problems with getting service overseas too. Ask one of the resident Europeans about digital content availability from other nations. I think we need to address international digital content delivery before we look at DVR recording from a specific port. It first started with conflicting TV standards, and still lives on with disc-based region coding. Once the industry fears over international releases subside, we'll see more online media stores that carry content from all countries, everywhere. Only then will we see hardware restrictions reduced to try to keep up (and competitive with) digital distribution. I'll play the pessimist here and say that'll probably never happen though.