Alex Harries's diary

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Ok, so the Media Center (a bit like Sky+, but it does DVDs and videos, downloads movies off the internet, records Sky - or freeview, or cable, plays and organises music, burns recorded TV to DVD, and a fair bit more, too) is up and running. I can log into it from anywhere in the world and run Azureus (err, to download non-copyrighted stuff, obviously), and it's got just over 1.25 Terabytes (1,250-ish Gigabytes) of recorded TV, videos and music on it.

But one thing I - or anyone else - couldn't do was schedule TV recordings and watch recorded TV over the interweb.

Until now.

I'm trying out WebGuide4, a program which adds a website to your Media Center to let you view the TV listings on your Media Center, schedule recordings (or change them), cancel recordings, etc etc yada yada yada.

Basically, it's like the Sky+ Remote Record service with knobs on (and, in my case, a bit of a knob operating it...).

Another really handy feature is that you can set up users with different privileges; I've set up an account for me that can add and delete recordings and administer the Media Center remotely, and another one for everybody else in the house that can only add and cancel recordings to prevent any, err, "accidents".

You can also watch live TV streamed over the web to your PC, wherever you are (as long as you have a fairly fast broadband connection). 

Two other very good features are the remote control function - which lets you control your media center over t'interweb (I guess in case your remote dies, or you just want to annoy your housemates?) and the option to watch your videos over the internet. They're both features which are only available in the full version of the program though, so I can't comment on how well they work just yet.

True, it takes someone a bit geeky to set it up, but once it's running it looks like it's going to be a helluva cool toy.

The program is free to use for up to 30 days, and costs $18 to buy a license for. I think I'm going to buy it - and that's really, *really* rare for me, but I'm so impressed with it it's only fair to support the programmer(s) who are working so hard on this excellent toy.

There aren't really any downsides at all to this program - the set-up process was a breeze (it even tried to configure my BT Home Hub's firewall for me - after politely asking for my permission - but thanks to the Home Hub's in-built "I don't want to play nicely with anything" system, it didn't work, but that's probably not the fault of the WebGuide program).

All in all, it's a very well-designed program. It installed very easily, and kept me informed about what it was doing - and why - all the way through. Setting it up as a subdirectory on my home webserver was as simple as a few clicks of the mouse, so I didn't have to remember any complicated web addresses, and it hasn't slowed my system to a crawl or crashed (yet - touch wood).

It's also an ASP.NET website application, so even more credit should go to the creators who have obviously achieved a hell of a lot with this program. The fact that they've beaten Microsoft - who have invested millions if not billions of dollars into Windows Vista Media Center - shows they've probably missed a trick on this one. Hopefully, in a couple of years' time we'll see it as a fully ...