It would be great if Microsoft would implement SmartSkip in MCE.  You can find more information about it here.  The Media Variations video was also pretty cool.

Alright, so I am getting ready to sit down and prepare for a InfoPath presentation that I am doing tomorrow evening and I can't even queue some songs up on the MCE.  You would think that when you are developing something like this, that you would allow users to queue songs up on the fly.  Especially when the API exposes the call.  Looks like an opportunity to do some MCE programming.

MediaCenter.AddSongToQueue

The AddSongToQueue method adds a specified song to the user's queue for audio playback.

Syntax

MediaCenter.AddSongToQueue(sUrl)

Parameters

sUrl

(Required) A String that specifies the location of the audio file to be added.

Remarks

Media Center enables you to dynamically create a queue of audio files for the user to play back in order. The queue starts with the currently playing song. If this method is invoked while no song is currently playing, then no queue exists, so Media Center will simply play the song indicated (that song then, in effect, becomes a "queue" of one song). If the method is invoked while a queue exists, Media Center will add the song to the end of the queue to play after any other songs in the queue finish playing.

If the user starts a queue in Windows Media Player, that queue will be maintained in Media Center as long as the playback is not stopped by the user or by an extensibility application.

Requirements

Windows XP Media Center Edition 2004.

So during my free time this holiday I built my own Media Center PC using an old Dell 8000 1.4 ghz, ATI All In Wonder 9000 Pro grahpics card and ordered a Phillips remote from new egg to drive it.  About 30 hours later and 4 installs of Windows XP with the MCE overlay I got it working.  For the most part anyway.  The remote works flawlessly, I can play Videos and Music from my media library.  The only thing left to get to work is the ATI card.  For right now, it is exactly what I want. I have Tivo, so I don't care about recording shows from the MCE at this point.

First, this is only possible if you have an MSDN subscription, and the ability to download Windows XP MCE.  Otherwise only OEMs have the ability to build the Media PCs.

Couple of headaches during the install:

The serial key identifies to the XP install that you are doing an XP MCE install, not just an XP Pro SP1 install.  This took me a couple of tries to actually figure out. 

Once I got it installed, I got the infamous Video Error.  I had to install the ATI DVD codec and WinDVD in order to get MCE to play DVDs. 

As I mentioned before, I have not tried to get the ATI card to play TV inside of MCE.  I have done some research on it and it looks like you can do it.  Dell is using the ATI card in there recently released Media PC, and I have seen some instructions on their forum on how to get it to work...

During the holiday I had some spare time... one of things that I worked on was putting together a library of graphics I could draw upon for presentations.  Most of the grahpics were “borrowed” from Patterns & Practices presentatations.