Floppyhead - Digital Media and Home Theater Computers

The Open Media Library plugin for Vista Media Center, which will manage your movies stored on your computer, has been released as a beta. Previously, if you wanted to check out the plugin, you had to compile it yourself, something most people are not going to do. The executable file is currently available for download at the new Open Media Library website. (Note: A great way to track progress in development is from the wiki page on their Google code page.)

From their announcement:

It is a great pleasure for me to present you all with the very first early beta of Open Media Library - OML. OML is the first open source movie library to be released to the public and man are we proud. Months of hard work have been put in to please all requesters and early alpha testers and to give you all the very best movie library out there. This is the first release, so there are bugs, there are errors and your feature request may not be included yet. So please go download OML, use it, abuse it and report back to us about what works, what needs to be altered and how we can make the product even better. We love feedback, but please primarily use OML’s own forum at forums.openmedialibrary.org.

The main strength of Vista’s Media Center is its plugin architecture. Any decent programmer can develop add-ins for Media Center that can improve its overall functionality. The developers of Open Media Library have taken that creative process one step further by making their plugin an open source community project.

So what does Open Media Library add to Media Center? Basically it lets you stream movies to extenders and watch Blu-ray movies in Media Center, all through a very slick interface. It is similar to the popular My Movies plugin, which is getting long in the tooth.

Last week I read an article at Washingtonpost.com about Snagfilms, a relatively new website dedicated to full-length documentaries. From the site:

At SnagFilms.com, you can watch full-length documentary films for free, but we also make it easy for you to take our films with you and put them anywhere on the web. When you embed a widget on your web site, you open a virtual movie theater and become a “Filmanthropist.” Donate your pixels and support independent film!

I love it when companies or websites promote free digital media. The internet is a powerful tool to reach a lot of people with relatively low overhead. Movie studios are so paranoid about digital distribution that they lock their content as tight as possible with digital rights management. Having a site offer unique content for free is always a breathe of fresh air.

My first thought when I heard about this site was that it needs a Vista Media Center Plugin. Maybe someone with a little more programming skill than me could gin one up.

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