I've had a dedicated PVR in my lounge for some time now hooked up to my 50" Pioneer Plasma and have been a great fan of GB-PVR which is a fantastic application written by a fellow Wellingtonian. I've just purchased some new hardware for my PVR (Asus M2A-HDMI motherboard running a X2 4800+ CPU) and thought I'd have a play with Vista Media Centre.
Is there anbody else out there making use of Vista's Media Centre and if so what plugins etc are you running on it? I only installed it yesterday so haven't actually looked around yet but did notice a few sites with plenty of XP MCE plugins - I'm guessing that these will work OK in Vista? For an EPG I'll be using XMLTVNZ + BladeRunner Pro which I still have to configure. I've already got XMLTVNZ running since I have also reinstalled GB-PVR on the PC.
Overall it's very snappy and seems to be a million miles ahead of XP MCE. GB-PVR also seems to run a lot smoother, video playback using VMR based applications seems to be far superior in Vista than XP and with the promised media centre upgrades coming in the SP1 upgrade as well the reality of running a PVR or PC in the loungeroom may finally become a reality for a lot more people.