TVSquad

One of the first things I noticed when I set up my home theater PC running Vista Media Center is that there are some pretty cool online features. You can watch a huge library of music video's MTV's Overdrive interface for MCE, or watch The Daily Show on Comedy Central's Motherload page.

There are also a ton of obvious online features missing. For example, no built in weather forecast application? What's up with that? Luckily there are plugins for pretty much anything you could ever need (including weather forecasts).

But what about podcasts and video blogs? Surely there must be an easy way to download and enjoy online media from Media Center's 10-foot interface. Well, there kind of is. You can subscribe to feeds and automatically download enclosures with Internet Explorer 7 or the podcatcher of your choice. Then you can tell Windows Media Center to monitor your download folder and your files will show up in your My Videos and My Music folders. This is hardly an elegant solution, so here's a few better options for you:TVTonic

TVTonic is a free program that integrates nicely with Windows XP Media Center Edition or Windows Vista Media Center. The application lets you subscribe and view video blogs that support RSS. You can set TVTonic to automatically download videos in the background, and you can configure how many episodes of each feed TVTonic will store by allocating the amount of disc space used.

TVTonic lets you browse a large list of some of the most popular video blogs with your remote control. If you like a feed, you can click to subscribe. Or you can enter feeds not listed manually.

RSS readers

While you may think of RSS readers as applications for viewing text-based news and blog feeds, it can be so much more than that. While TVTonic does a great job at downloading video files enclosed in RSS feeds, there are a number of other readers that can handle audio files, including MCE RSS Reader and Big Screen Headlines.

It took me a little while to figure this out. I'd been using the excellent NPR application for Windows Media Center to listen to some of my favorite public radio shows including Morning Edition and All Things Considered. But I also wanted to check out some non-NPR programs like This American Life.

First, I tried out the Radio Time application for Windows Media Center. Radio Time maintains a great list of radio stations that stream talk and music online and radio programs that archive their shows online.

If you visit their website, you can listen to many radio programs on demand. But through the Media Center interface you can only listen to live streaming radio. No help there (although if you don't have a radio tuner in your PC, this is a great application to have if you want to listen to local or international radio stations).

Now I'm using Big Screen Headlines, which includes an excellent podcast organizer. It will automatically recognize any RSS feeds you subscribe to using Internet Explorer 7. So I exported the OPML file with my RSS feeds from Juice and imported that file to IE7.

Big Screen Headlines shows up in Windows Media Center under the Program Library menu. When you open it, you can read your RSS feeds or listen to podcasts. So now I can finally listen to This American Life on demand.