Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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© Copyright 2010, Omar Shahine
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I just installed my Media Center Rollup #2. What a silly name, but anyway. There is one feature in MCE Rollup that I have waited 3 years for (I think I was the first person to make this feature request of the team).
What is this feature? They call it Intelligent Zoom. If you have a Widescreen display, like my Plasma, and you watch a lot of TV that is not wide screen, you have a few choices:
A lot of TVs like my Plasma also have a mode that uses something called non-linear zoom (Panorama or TheaterMode). Basically it stretches the edges of the screen, and not the center so much, so that the 4:3 picture fills the screen to 16:9 but it looks a lot better than stretch. Since I drive my Plasma via DVI, the fancy Plasma non-linear stretch mode is not available. As such I've been watching 4:3 TV stretched and mostly gotten used to it, but anxiously awaited this feature.
For a good example of what this all looks like, I found a great CNet article on the topic (see Solution 3 for the non-linear zoom or stretch mode).