For the past few weeks, I’ve noticed a very discouraging trend among the majority of Vista Media Center plugin developers – they seem to be at a standstill.  There are a few that still have some life about them – the Video Library that Jack Luminous over at thegreenbutton is working on and myTV both seem to pluggin right along.  Brian Binnerup’s MyMovies is still also undergoing some massive development, but it just seems to never be towards the long overdue MCML interface.

The OML project was steamrolling ahead up until a few weeks ago, then it just seems to have hit a brick wall – in their forums too, which were usually flowing with new threads and posts.  They’ll quickly show up on the forum to tell you that development is not dead, but their SVN updates speak another story.  Video Browser‘s SVN has also been quiet now for about 3 weeks.  Nothing on the SVN side and the forum is pretty dead (although it wasn’t that active to begin with).  VMCNetflix seems to have halted at least a couple of months ago with no news anywhere regarding its status.  Finally, there’s MyMovies which is more than an enigma than a stalled plugin.  For nearly two years, perhaps the most popular Media Center plugin of all time, has been plagued by the outdated HTML-based interface within Vista’s Media Center.  The new MCML version has been promised for nearly a year now, but all I’ve seen are mediocre improvements and largely unnecessary additions to the data collection side of things.  The latest venture is the inclusion of a Windows Home Server edition due to popular demand.  Popular demand?  Hello?

There are some other new plugins that have hit the scene as of late, but I can’t call any of them as monumentous as the library-based plugins are.  They mostly fill a specific niche that I just can’t relate to.  So, what do you think is up with the latest “underdevelopment” of Media Center plugins?  Is it the return to school (as many of our developers are students doing this as a hobby)?  Maybe the introduction of the 2008 TV Pack has complicated some things?

In closing, I do want to say that I appreciate everything our plugin developers have done and this was not meant to be a slight against them.  I’m not a programmer so I am no one to criticize what they do for all Media Center lovers.  I do actively participate on most of the forums of the plugins I’ve listed so that I can help in my own way and will continue to do so as long as these plugins are being offered to us.