AndyC:
James: Ah, the legendary SoftSled, where art thou? There was compelling evidence that it already existed back in 2005, and nothing I've seen since then has lead me to believe that's not still the case. Unfortunately, I don't think it fits the 'Vision'. Microsoft's apparent goal is to get extender functionality into TVs/DVRs/STBs/etc, and they seem terrified that SoftSled will erode their ability to do so.
The original extenders for MCE2005 were codenamed "Bobsled" - I think that all SoftSled was, was an in-software version of the extender for testing the Media Center code, rather than a product-in-planning, as the hardware wasn't available to test with.
Cheers,
Andrew
At that point in time, quite possibly - although a software extender has been hinted at many times since the original conception of Media Center and/or Extenders. As late as last year, during WinHEC, Bill Gates said "We'll enable PCs themselves to be Pika display terminals" - that, IMNSHO, says it all and the reason they haven't got there already can only be speculated upon - but with the complete shambles of the Fiji betaprogram (at least the one I was enrolled in - and I'm not even talking about it being OEM or the fact h264 was removed, I'm talking about general build and developers information) I know who I would point my fingers at.
Ok, so perhaps I'm not even after a "full" Pika client - being able to have one PC, stored in your rack, in your loft, under the stairs, whereever with a tuner "farm" would do for me (and I would assume most people) as long as the tuners were available from all the clients and the recording schedule of the "server" could be controlled remotely.
Anyway, we're getting seriously off topic now :)