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Webguide - My new Media Center plugin

Posted in Software, Media Center, gadgets, Vista, Internet, Windows, Microsoft on June 7, 2008 at 6:19 pm

Recently I started looking around for plugins for Media Center to see what its capabilities were. To be honest, I didn’t find much worth shouting about, until…

I found WebGuide 4. What a great FREE little program. It allows you to add ‘remote’ functionality to your media center through the web. It’s a small lightweight program that sits on your media center PC, it includes it’s own web server so you don’t even need to install IIS (less admin headaches!). Installing WebGuide gives you;

Access to all your media (Video, Recorded TV, Photos, Music) through a web browser.
Remote Scheduling for Live TV Recording.
Web ‘remote control’ for controlling your media center (TV) from the browser
Live TV Streaming

As you can see in the picture to the below, once logged in, you are shown your recently recorded and scheduled programs. You may also spot the remote on the right, this allows me to control my ‘TV’ that is connected to my XBOX 360. It basically has the same functionality as my Xbox remote (much to the annoyance of my girlfriend Joanne).

The picture above shows the TV guide allowing you to stream or record.

Installation is simple, there is alot of configurations, that among other things, allow you to create users and configure what you want each user to have access to. Once you have configured your the ports on your firewall and the ports in WebGuide, you’ll be able to access all of this from any Internet connection in the world! One small point on this;I wasn’t able to get the live TV streaming working until I installed the Cyberlink PowerDVD decoder, but to be fair this is the recommendation made by ASCII (the guy who make WebGuide).

Microsoft obviously approve of the software, as on the forum form WebGuide there is a post from the admin saying he struck a deal with MS to get WebGuide available for free and join the Media Center team!

I recommend this software to anyone with Media center (2005, Vista, Home Server), it’s a great little app that really adds something very new and cool to Media Center.