It’s been a few weeks now since we announced the Meteor application and we’ve been feverishly procrastinating as hard as we possibly can to make sure that we lose any momentum that we gained when we first revealed what we were doing. So on the back of that wave of “Real Life” and “Actual Job” nonsense that we’ve had to put up with, it’s time to finally see Meteor in motion.
The Meteor Hub
This first video shows off the Meteor Hub. In this panorama, the user is presented with a few different sections:
Now Playing
The Now Playing section is the go-to section of the Hub. Here the user will be able to easily manipulate the currently playing media item; be it a song, an album, a podcast, a TV show or a movie. The user is able to easily change track and scrub to a specific position in the media item.
Recent
The Recent section is where the history of what the user has played on their media center is displayed. It currently shows the last 7 media “filters” that have played. Filters is a concept we’ll get into a little bit later, but is core to the way that Meteor works and how smart it can be with your media.
Library
The final section here is the user’s media library. Here the user can easily jump to different areas of their media and browse to them in an integrated and intuitive way.
We really wanted to get away from your phone being a straight up “remote control”. Something that you point at your box and press updownleftright or key in numbers. We want this to be totally integrated into your media library and the first step is treating it like one would treat a personal music device like an iPod or a Zune. One of the pillars of our design is to make people believe that playing media from your media center is almost exactly the same as on your personal media device; why separate the experiences so much?
Meteor Library
There are a couple of cool things about this section that I wanted to briefly talk about:
User Experience
The first is the user experience. What we want to make sure is that it’s easy to get to the media that you want easily by separating it into logical sections (pivots) and then make it easy to drill down and refine your browsing.
For example, say you wanted to get to a particular song in a particular album, you could get there by clicking on the artist, then the album then the song, or you could go straight to the album and go from there, or if you just felt like listening to something in a specific genre, then you can find out all of the artists and albums in that. There are lots of ways to browse your own media and we want the user to discover them in an intuitive manner.
Data Virtualisation
The second really, really, really, really damn cool thing I wanted to touch on (hopefully Chris doesn’t think I’m overstating this) is that we’ve implemented a form of data virtualisation for large lists of data in Silverlight. We’re WPF developers by day, so we get all of those nice things in WPF, and indeed have spent quite a bit of time trying to optimise the way we retrieve data from a backend, so we were a bit perplexed when we found that this sort of thing wasn’t exactly… easily done… in Silverlight. So where the albums are shown there is what we call our VirtualisingWrapPanel, so all of the data is loaded as the user scrolls down. It’s seriously a cool thing and hopefully a blog post about this tech comes along soon, because it’s something that we think would be extremely useful for lots of developers.
Questions and Answers
There have been quite a few questions asked about Meteor and I’ll probably compile them and put them in a separate post but there were some things that we wanted to just mention in a FAQ style format:
Do you support extenders?
This is something that people ask all the time, and as far as we know at this point in time: yes, we will support extenders but of course Meteor must still be connected to the actual Media Center PC. This may change, so don’t take this as gospel just yet.
Can I connect to my Media Center over the internet?
Technically yes, but it’s not something we’re supporting at this point.
Do I have to install anything?
Basically, we’ll have an installer that installs a Media Center addin as well as a small WCF service that allows Meteor to talk to your Media Center. It’s lightweight and leverages all of the cool stuff that Microsoft provides developers.
That’s about it for this post, we’ll have more information soon but before I sign off, I’ll just mention that these videos are from an early version of Meteor and the UI/uX etc will change over time, so things that are here now may not actually be there for the final version or they’ll have changed some. Disclaimers abound!
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Great looking software, look forward to using this. One suggestion, will you consider some integration with Windows Home Server v2 for internet streaming? Should look great. Thanks.
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Love what you’ve done so far! One quick note. The 4-way arrow in the circle you can see on the first window is used in Zune for fitting a video to the screen. Using it here to bring up on screen controls would break the user expectation if the same is true of WP7 controls.
Thanks Curtis
Like we mentioned there are a few place holder controls at the moment – we’ll have a look at that one soon.
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Looks great, will this HUB also work on a Zune HD? If so, when and where can I get it?
Hi RiWe
At the moment we’re concentrating on Media Center. We’ve worked with the Zune software a bit but haven’t looked into the internals to see how similar to Media Center it is. If we can get it going, we will, but for now we’re investing our effort into getting one application to be as cool as possible. Hope that’s not too disappointing!
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Wow! This will be epic!!!! How do you get to the “Now Playing” section? The second vid shows a paused TV show, but I did not notice a “Now Playing” selection. To re-iterate on RiWe – please get this amazing APP on the ZuneHD marketplace TOO! (I know you guys can’t control that) But, I’d buy this app for every single Zune/ WP7 device in my family for sure!
…and not to be a kiss-a$$, but speaking of keeping the momentum for you guys – I’d love to design a logo for Meteor and/or The Land Dolphin if you’re interested (it’s free – cuz I love what ya’ll do.) Look me up. Here’s just a little bit of my work: http://99designs.com/users/328557
Not to get too far off topic, but it feels like an awesome day is almost upon us. Being a loyal Windows/Zune/Media Center/Xbox fan is about to pay off. I was starting to cave in and get an iPad, because I want some awesome Media Center integration, but this has brought a new life! Keep it up!
This looks beautiful! Seriously looking forward to it. If you guys decide to expand Meteor to remote access over the interwebs, how about a remote guide/record function?
By the way, this is an app I’d totally pay for.
Ragin’, just on the Now Playing section, we’ve made a few slight changes to the way that all of that stuff works to put it more in line with what the Music + Videos hub on the developer phones that have been released. We really want to make this an integrated and familiar experience, so we needed to make some changes, and yeah, we don’t really have any plans to get this on the ZuneHD marketplace yet (because we honestly have no idea about that platform, we can’t really them in Australia without importing).
If you’re keen to do up a logo for us, then go for it, I don’t see why not
RandomRage, we may have something in the pipeline that will make you happy. As far as I know (and I personally haven’t really looked into it but one of the other land dolphin guys has taken a peek), there’s an API to hook into the remote guide/record stuff, but it’s undocumented due to legal reasons, so we want to look into it, but we figure that will be a thing for a bit later.
@ ben:
Awesome, just give me an email address to send you some images to. I already have one concept.
Cool! You can contact us via contact@landdolphin.net or our twitter account http://twitter.com/thelanddolphin
Awesome. Look for an email from a gmail account from Ted
Any word yet, guys. Did you get my email?
One thing I just thought of reading the mention of the ipad above, will there be a PC version of this? This would be a nice way to control your media center using a Windows 7 tablet as well as the phone. Thanks.
This app is the only reason I am buying a wp7 phone. Im exaggerating hahah but I have my whole house set up with media center. This app would really add to the experience. I would love to have this app as the main hub for when I am on the road also. So that I am able to stream my tv shows, or music to my phone. Is this possible? Or maybe even sync tv/movies to the phone from media center?
This.. looks.. AMAZING!! I love it! I too kept feeling the Apple itch for the remote control of Media Center but this brings me back! Keep up the good works and continue releasing new videos to keep the hype up.
This is a great application that will definitely help Windows Media Center to become more accessible.
On another note – and I’m not trying to spoil the party – Have you given any thoughts to porting this application to the apple platform as well? Many of our customers uses iPhone and iPad while enjoying Media Center in their home.
I wish there was such an app for iPad for example so we could use it as a smart controller.
Looks fantastic! One comment: It looks like scrolling in the longer lists like Albums or Artists might be a little slow if one has lots of music or tv shows. Have you considered using an accelerated approach like in the WP7 People hub where the entries are grouped by the letters of the alphabet, and where pushing a letter shows a alphabet grid that allows one to quickly jump to entries starting with any letter of the alphabet?
@Bluemanta: No plans as yet to port this to the apple platforms. Not only do none of us know Obj-C, I think I’m the only one of us with an iPhone at the moment, and that probably won’t be for too long, hehe. Having said that, as far as I remember (don’t quote me on this; it’s been a while since I checked), the service itself is generic, so the client could be anything which opens the way for Meteor on Android and iPhone. As I say though, we don’t have any plans to port to either platforms.
@MikeT: That’s definitely a good idea but all of the data that we use is completely virtualised, meaning we only request data when it’s required, so to have a “jump list” type interface there, we’d have to either load all of the media data which means a ton of traffic or we’d have to implement some interface that just passes over relevant information. I guess there’s no reason why would couldn’t do something like that in the future, but probably not for the first release as it would require some refactoring.
Nice!!!!
I’m so looking forward to this App on my WP7..
heading down the track of WHS as well when version 2 comes out, so I hope you guys make a good app for that as well.. (seeing you’ve done such a great job at this one)
any plans to incorporate iis smooth streaming for silverlight into this to stream the live signal? http://www.iis.net/media/experiencesmoothstreaming1080p
if you could capture the outgoing stream i’d easily pay upwards of $100 per device i use. i have ceton’s tuner and i’d like to grab live tv (i know i could record it and play it back).
also, if there’s more than one extender running, how do you select the device?
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