Windows 7 and Media Centre

So I’ve always been a fan of Media Centre and although I’ve never really used it to its full potential (never had Live TV through it) I have used it sporadically on both my old Vista machine and via my 360 acting as an extender. What's stopped me from really moving to it full time, from a media playback perspective, was it’s lack of support of other 3rd party codecs (DivX, XVid etc).

However, whilst playing with Windows 7 over the last few days, I noticed something that didn’t really hit me until now.

Windows 7 out of the box now seems to support DivX and XVid formats (amongst others). All content I have on my WHS was fully playable in Windows 7 without installing ANY codecs. These formats are now able to also be able to played back in Media Centre (as opposed to Media Player).

Tonight, I’ve finally got a little time to connect my 360 to Windows 7 as a Media Extender and amazingly, all codecs can now also be played back via the Extender. I don’t believe this was ever possible prior to connecting to a Win 7 Media Centre and in addition the UI of the extender now reflects the Windows 7 UI (so I suspect the recent NXE update to the 360 also enabled it to also receive updates to the Media Centre Extender client).

All good news and another step towards me having a fully integrated Media solution at home. All I need now is for the next version of Windows Home Server (which will be based on the Windows Server 2008 R2/Windows 7 architecture) to also include Media Centre so I don’t need to keep two machines on constantly to serve media.