Exceptional Innovation is set to ship its first 50 CableCard-ready LifeMedia Media Center PCs, but don't think you can get your hands on one. They're all spoken for. "I can't even get one for my own house," says EI chief Seale Moorer.

EI announced in May that it would develop its own PCs after previous partner HP pulled out of the Media Center business. HP's departure turned out to be a blessing for EI, which was unleashed to make Media Centers the way they should be made.

"It comes down to engineering," says Mike Seamons, vice president of marketing. "That's what's different. We put in the best components. LifeMedia is built for today and built for tomorrow. … I think LifeMedia is going to be pretty close to perfect."

The "built-for-tomorrow" part has to do with EI's patent-pending MediaPlate. The architecture allows integrators to swap out…

Alienware is coming out with some higher-end Media Center PCs to be sold only through specialty A/V channels. The company will demonstrate the products for the first time in September at its own booth (1098) and in Exceptional Innovation's "Lifeware Village."

We've been wondering for quite some time what Alienware would do in the Media Center department.

The notorious gaming PC developer was in and out of Media Center for a few years until it launched Hangar 18 last year. The product was the first one built on AMD's Live! Media Center platform, with 5.1 surround sound including amplification of 200 watts per channel. (For the history Alienware Media Centers, view the slide show.)

Wonder no more. The response to Alienware's Hangar 18 was "overwhelmingly positive," says Derek Kaminski, product manager for Alienware's Digital Home group.

He's not exaggerating.…

What do you do when you have your playlist already running on your iQ music management server from ReQuest? Do you really need to waste precious touchscreen real estate on a static image of an album?

At CEDIA, ReQuest will introduce new Web functionality for its iQ system, introduced with much fanfare at last year's expo. Users will be able to monitor stock quotes, the news, weather and other online services while the music plays. The touchscreen will continue to show audio functions, however, so users can scroll through sources, presets, and other settings, without missing a beat of the stock market's collapse.

ReQuest didn't come out and say any of this. The speculation simply comes from an image now plastered on its home page.

The MediaMax HD Entertainment Server from Axonix now can store and play back any kind of DVD -- standard, Blu-ray or HD DVD -- and distribute the content throughout the house.

Axonix says the product is the first media server to play both HD DVD and Blu-ray content with cover art-based navigation. "Other media servers including those based on variations of Linux and Media Center Edition OSs are either unable to play HD movies or they require you to manually browse a textual list of HD movie folders using an unintuitive PC-type interface," according to the company.

And the Media Max isn't just for movies. It stores and plays the full gamut of content, all instantly accessible from any room of the house: HD and SD DVD movies; CD, MP3 and WAV music; photos; and movies and music downloaded via the Axonix NetPlay service. Any media can be played simultaneously in any room.

The MediaMax HD system requires two pieces --…

Fuze Media is a startup that wanted to come up with the ultimate out-of-the-box multimedia experience, including whole-house audio and video, photo sharing, music and movie management, PVR capabilities, the works.

The result is the Fuze Media Server which starts with the FuzeBox media server hub and FuzeMini server clients. They look a lot like Media Center PCs.

Fuze insists that they aren't. Specifically, Fuze says it is "not a control or MCE system."

Yet the main Fuze server, the FuzeBox, is OEMed by Velocity Micro, has the same CableCard capabilities, same form factor, and same Viiv logo as one of Velocity's Media Center PCs.

The Fuze jargon is also Media Center-like:

FUZE delivers a complete system that stores, manages, organizes, and distributes all of your digital media -- to any part of the home. Live TV, recorded TV, movies, videos, music, digital photos, and more are all…

Inteset, LLC is now offering an optional Blu-ray HD-DVD combo drive in its Maximus and Denzel media server systems. The Media Centers can play back both Blu-ray and HD-DVD discs in full 1080p resolution from a single drive.

“It’s been a long time coming,” says David Hirsh, Inteset’s Director of Business Development. “Users now have no limitations for movie playback. DVDs, Blu-ray, HD-DVD, it doesn’t matter. Our media servers handle all of these formats."

Blu-ray and HD-DVD playback is facilitated through CyberLink’s PowerDVD Ultra software. All high definition 7.1 surround sound formats are supported without the need of a separate receiver or pre-processor, including Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD, and DTS audio.