Microsoft confirms it but do you think it´ll be in something new?

don't know as windows 7 has this too unless the beta of windows 8 shows us a differnet media centre but we have to wait

I expect Microsoft to release not just a WMC for Windows 8, but a TV-friendly Start Menu. Windows 8 will be for everything and that can't exclude HTPCs.

Yes and i hope in MKV support.

I feel that the Start Screen and all of its features IS Windows Media Center lol

Then you have no idea what Media Center is.

Sure, they share a look, but that's no surprise considering Metro was born on WP7 which borrowed heavily from Zune which borrowed heavily from Media Center.

Functionality-wise though, not one thing compares...

I think he was joking, man. As for a W8 Media Center, I'm glad they'll be including it again but I hope they come up with a better way to display library contents. My library in the Win7 version is a disorganized mess and half the albums have the wrong cover art or none at all, despite everything being perfect in WMP 12.

Personally, I don't use MC at all, so I don't care if they include it or not...

One would like to think he was joking, but with giantsteen, who knows.

I too am looking forward to a much-improved Media Center. Music is borderline as you describe, but tagging videos and such is just terrible. That said, The Zune software supports tagging with TV Shows and Movie metadata, hopefully this is something they'll make much easier in Win8, and I wouldn't be upset if they supported an existing, external format like xml files.

Hell, just integrate the MediaBrowser metadata system

I think the new MC will look a bit like the xBox360 menu
Hope they'll include MKV and (3D)BlueRay support

I wonder if they are going to be porting Media Center into a metro app. Some apps like paint, calculator, and the games would be fairly easy to port to metro I would assume, but Media Center is a pretty big program. I really, really hope that ALL the windows applications are at minimun available in Metro, if not exclusive to it. I think using desktop apps is going to be a pin so the faster everything switches to metro, the better. It's like a band-aid: rip it off fast.

In all honesty, I doubt it will be a "real" metro app, though I would expect it to be Metro-style. On one hand, being .NET, it'd be easier to port, but on the other, with it using it's own special mix of techs for the UI, there'd be less to gain. No doubt it'll be marketed as a Metro app, even if it really isn't - MS does it on WP7 where their own bundled apps are native using the Iris framework whereas everyone else makes do with Managed Silverlight/XNA.

To be honest, I could live with it if they slightly reworked the UI and simply used the Zune software instead of WMC. But that's just a personal preference.

The only problem with both WMP 12 and W7 Media Center was that they didn't allow you to have enough control.

Umm....what exactly were you wanting to do in WMP 12 that you couldn't do? I've never had a problem with "not enough control".

I could live with a reworked Zune replacing WMP, but WMC is much bigger and far more complex.

Oh, I know, but that's part of the problem for me. It's big, it's complex, and I really think it could be pared down. Look at XBMC (which I use regularly). It does everything Media Center does without using nearly as many resources.

XBMC doesn't quite do all that Media Center does, at least not out of the box, and it's that stuff that does add quite a bit of weight. I also think it's suffered a little from neglect through Vista and 7. Media Center would probably get a nice speed boost from dumping some of it's more surplus UI effects (Animated Background comes to mind) in search of a cleaner Metro interface as well.

I think a lot of it's apparent complexity is simply UI-wise though. For example, organising media is pretty poor in WMC compared to competitors. That's because it lacks any decent metadata support for videos beyond Microsoft formats. In fairness, metadata support in other formats is patchy, but XBMC and others get round it by using XML files with the media. WMC would seriously benefit from such an approach, and adopting the Zune organisational structure with it (Zune breaks down videos into Films, TV Series, TV Specials, etc - WMC does not).

Agreed. It seems to me that WMC (in addition to needing a redesign) focuses on being very BROAD in its categories (Movies, TV, Music), where it should be deep instead (Movies->(Organize by Genre, by Last Viewed, etc). I realize that means submenus or whatever, but I'd rather have that than have all my stuff thrown together with no way to sort however I want.

Mostly with editing the properties of music and movies. I know most of that can be done in Windows Explorer but still. And also with Album Art.

Umm.....all you have to do is right-click on the track or video you want to edit properties for and select "Edit" from the context menu. And you can replace album art by dragging a new picture onto the album. I do it all the time.

That's how you add album art (Other than it coming with Music). Thanks. Weird the way that they do things sometimes.

I expect to see a few metro elements in it as well, and maybe Microsoft can reduce the CPU and RAM usage of WMC as it hogs everything!