Following yesterday’s launch of Media Center 2005 it has been posted on the MSDN Subscriber Downloads site in English, French, Dutch, German, Italian, Simplified Chinese, Japanese and Korean. This download is available to all current MSDN Universal, Enterprise, Professional, Operating Systems, MSDN Academic Alliance and MSDN for Microsoft Certified Partner subscribers. Although this download is present in MSDN Academic Alliance this subscription level only includes product keys for Windows XP Professional. Upgrades for existing Media Center users depends very much on the manufacturer of your Media Center PC, you should contact them directly regarding upgrades rather than Microsoft. HP is already taking orders for their existing machines at http://h30237.www3.hp.com/mce2005upgrade/ for a small amount ($9.95). Some OEM’s may need to include new versions of DVD decoders which would bump up the cost.
If you are interested in developing for Media Center the 2005 SDK has already been posted at
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=33839D15-FD6E-46BE-A3B3-EEB7A62D1B20&displaylang=en
The MCE section of my site is currently in a bit of disarray, I’m currently working on organising my current pages a bit better and getting an ‘Introduction to Media Center 2005’ page up. The versions page has already been updated for MCE2005 and contains a few navigation links which do not exist yet, so apologies if you are ever forwarded to ZoneEdit on your travels. I’m also working to get v1.02 of my reset tool up for Media Center 2005, though the version which is currently up should work properly with it.