My HTPC is in a closet. I can't see it from where I sit and watch TV and listen to music. The idea is to have it on a screen that you can see from 10 feet away. I could get one of the new net notebooks and run a wireless remote desktop connection, but that's a $400 to $500 solution. I appreciate the interest in helping so please keep the suggestions coming!
On the HTPC in a closet thing. When you do that, you don't have to be overly concerned with noise. I have a quite HTPC, but I had to nothing special to make it that way. I had my processor fan go bad on me, it made a huge racket until I got around to replacing it. But, I heard nothing in the room the HTPC serves.
I really like the monkey. We have an exercise bike in another room and we listen to playlists and watch visualizations while we work out. When I want to do maintenance on my audio library or add music to one of our portable players, I use the regular monitor interface.
Today's thinking is to create a new page for the MCE, lets say. MMaudio. MMaudio starts the Monkey and when monkey starts up it runs a script that pulls data to create a Music explorer tree on an MCE page. The MCE page picks this up and displays it. From MCE you select something to play and that in turn runs another script that tells the monkey to play it. If you integrate monkey toys into this all of a sudden you have stop start skip etc all built in.
From what I have read so far, the show a list and display it (scrolling lists) is pretty slow with the MCE interface. See posts in
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/window ... fault.mspx.
Another option would be having a script generate just select parts of the Music Tree and display them in a much larger font. Make the Tree more page oriented. First page show you highest branch of the tree. When you select say either playlists or albums, it opens up a new page to display things.
Anything that lets me select and play music while sitting 10 to 12 feet away works for me. In my case, I can set a browser or the Monkey to be visible from that distance. Its just a strain to see it. Those of us with less than perfect vision, its not workable.
That are lots of ways to do this kind of thing. When you think about it, the work that was done to display things on small portable devices is applicable to this problem. its a problem of sizing things to the screen so that its visible under the operating conditions .
My HTPC is in a closet. I can't see it from where I sit and watch TV and listen to music. The idea is to have it on a screen that you can see from 10 feet away. I could get one of the new net notebooks and run a wireless remote desktop connection, but that's a $400 to $500 solution. I appreciate the interest in helping so please keep the suggestions coming!
On the HTPC in a closet thing. When you do that, you don't have to be overly concerned with noise. I have a quite HTPC, but I had to nothing special to make it that way. I had my processor fan go bad on me, it made a huge racket until I got around to replacing it. But, I heard nothing in the room the HTPC serves.
I really like the monkey. We have an exercise bike in another room and we listen to playlists and watch visualizations while we work out. When I want to do maintenance on my audio library or add music to one of our portable players, I use the regular monitor interface.
Today's thinking is to create a new page for the MCE, lets say. MMaudio. MMaudio starts the Monkey and when monkey starts up it runs a script that pulls data to create a Music explorer tree on an MCE page. The MCE page picks this up and displays it. From MCE you select something to play and that in turn runs another script that tells the monkey to play it. If you integrate monkey toys into this all of a sudden you have stop start skip etc all built in.
From what I have read so far, the show a list and display it (scrolling lists) is pretty slow with the MCE interface. See posts in http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/community/newsgroups/WindowsMedia/default.mspx.
Another option would be having a script generate just select parts of the Music Tree and display them in a much larger font. Make the Tree more page oriented. First page show you highest branch of the tree. When you select say either playlists or albums, it opens up a new page to display things.
Anything that lets me select and play music while sitting 10 to 12 feet away works for me. In my case, I can set a browser or the Monkey to be visible from that distance. Its just a strain to see it. Those of us with less than perfect vision, its not workable.
That are lots of ways to do this kind of thing. When you think about it, the work that was done to display things on small portable devices is applicable to this problem. its a problem of sizing things to the screen so that its visible under the operating conditions .