Short Bits: Vaio LT, Album Art, HD DVD, Plug-ins

In October, Sony will start selling their Vaio
LT HD PC/TV
.  It’s an all-in-one PC
22-inch LCD TV with a PC built-in.  There
will be a standard and an HD model that includes Blu-ray and CableCARD, I’m
assuming only a single tuner though. 
Cool idea, but I don’t see this pushing too many units.  Sony, like HP has a few innovative PC
concepts out there but I don’t think the general public is really ready for
something like this.

A week or so ago Jason Dunn wrote an article about Microsoft
not getting embedded album art
.   I
agree, I’ve been struggling with some album art recently and it’s ridiculous
that I have to spend time troubleshooting and thinking about something like
album art.  Not only that, the either
Windows Media Player team is behind the times. 
Microsoft is concentrating too much on thing like the Zune and online
services and not putting enough time into their flagship player.  Windows Media Player needs a lot of work, and
it seems very little gets done with every release.

There have been tons of HD DVD deals out in the past few
days.  First of all, if you pick up a Toshiba
HD-A2, HD-A20 or HD-XA2 at Amazon you also get
five free HD DVDs via snail mail and an addition three free as part on a
promotion
that ends on the September 23. 
Figuring $20 a disc, you are basically getting a HD DVD player for free
or really cheap.  There is also a deal
where you can get
the Xbox 360 HD DVD drive for $180 and get nine HD DVDs with that!

And lastly for a free plug-in notes, MCEBuddy is a DVRMSToolbox-like application
that could be considered to have a more understandable UI for beginners.  Looks pretty cool.  Converts files to other formats, remove
commercials, etc.

Ryan Hurst got around to updating one of the most popular
applications for Media Center, My Netflix is now
updated for a better Vista install
. 
Other changes include the images and bug fixes.

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