Windows Home Server: The Good News
There's a video on Channel 9 of Charlie Kindel talking about Windows Home Server. It answers a few questions:
Windows Home Server is based on a stripped down Windows Server OS.
That's good news, because it makes it more likely that the box will be capable of real server functions.
It's designed as a headless system, and unlike the original Windows Media Center, they're supporting letting you install it yourself - building your own machine.
There's still not information on exactly what it is and how it works, but it looks more promising now.
Being headless, it's not going to be a media center - there's no video in/out. It's up to hardware manufacturers to figure out how to configure it, so maybe there'll be a way of building a combo Media Center / Home Server.
Funny thing is they've showed the XBox 360 IPTV features at CES, and that's another set of features I'd want rolled into one box. As it stands it sounds like you'll need at least 4 devices to have a real "connected home":
- Windows Home Server
- Windows Media Center
- XBox 360
- Windows Vista PC
This convergence seems more like divergence.