(April 2 - not April fools day anymore down here)

Big Screen Headlines v2 has now been officially launched on the bigscreenglobal.com website - and is available for 30 day trial and online purchase (and retails for just USD$24.95).

Headlines v2 (which for those new to this product - is a RSS + Rich Media viewer for Vista Media Center) - is pretty much a complete rewrite of v1 - and contains a truckload of new features and enhancements from the original release (many of which have been detailed on this blog in the past).

You can check out the full product details online (which includes detailed feature list and loads of screenshots) - with some pictures below to wet your appetite.

What's New :-

Apart from the core functionality provided by v1 (such as RSS Browsing and Content viewing, IE7 Subscriber Feed System support, Parsing of RSS HTML content to Media Center friendly text) - some of the major enhancements in v2 include :

- new main menu system - with direct access to all your content via the left/right sliding panels (which reveal several menu items when selected) - and direct viewing of 'latest' updated items and feeds without further menus. The main menu system is similar to that found on Big Screen Weather v2 - however has been enhanced to better support and accommodate mouse/touch control.

- loads of new presets with substantially updated video and audio section of new Web Media designed for Media Center (WMV Video etc).

- Enhanced Parsing of RSS based blogs / HTML Content (with Inline Image support - allowing you to view images contained with the content)

- Enhanced support for latest variants of RSS 2 Media (and other new formats such as OPML 2) with ability to drill down on multiple content attachments (where made available) - and comments feeds. When browsing items - additional content such as item and feed thumbnails are also displayed.

- Supports and recognizes and watch a whole range of new content types (where 3rd party codec support is available) - and even caters for the additional codecs on the new PIKA 2.0 Extenders (by allowing you to watch MPEG4, H264, DivX based content). For media center PC's - you can install additional Directshow compliant video filters and add support for numerous popular codecs (such as Apple Quicktime, Flash FLV Video, DivX/XVid, MPEG4 etc).

- Highly customizable viewing/browsing experience for RSS Feeds, presets and Articles with sorting, filtering, text size control and view styles. Your settings are also automatically saved (per user).

- Full Media Center Extender Support - with auto device detection/configuration for PIKA 2 (Linksys, DLink etc) extenders + XBox 360's - with customizable display/usage options (such as filtering out codecs etc). Display options can also be adjusted - such as disabling background animations for slower/lower powered machines) manually.

- Includes the Feed Synchronization Tool (which runs as a scheduled task) - which preprocesses and summarizes your Subscribed feeds (incorporating any recent updates made) - so they are ready for instant viewing when you load Headlines 2. The synchronized feeds (and any auto downloaded enclosures) are also then made available to extender users via the synchronization tool. The synchronization tool also creates 'best of' style feeds internally so you can quickly view lists of 'latest' items from the main menu - without substantial processing time (by media type or online/offline status).

- User Interface is available in 5 languages : English, German, French, Spanish and Italian.

Headlines v2 also features the new Activation/Trial/Unlock system found on the other v2 products (Weather v2 and Photos v2) - and allows you to upsize your existing trial to a full version if you decide to buy it.

Take it for a spin :-

If you want to try Big Screen Headlines v2 out for yourself - download a free 30 day trial version or purchase the full version - at these links below. Please note that you will need to sign up for a free account on bigscreenglobal.com if you don't already have one.

Trial + Download page : http://bigscreenglobal.com/bgproductdownload.aspx?PID=BSHV2
Product Purchase page :   http://bigscreenglobal.com/bgproductpurchase.aspx?PID=BSHV2

More screenshots :   http://bigscreenglobal.com/bgproductscreens.aspx?PID=BSHV2