The kids are asleep. The popcorn's ready. Time to watch that favorite old movie on DVD. You pop open the case, but instead of “Dr. Zhivago,” you're staring at a copy of “Dr. Seuss.”

Another misplaced disc, another frustrating search through the entertainment center shelves – it’s one the more familiar and irritating drawbacks of owning large collections of entertainment content stored on DVDs and CDs. But with today’s launch of the Sony VAIO XL1 Digital Living System, a new digital content management product developed in close partnership with Microsoft, movie and music buffs can get back to enjoying their discs instead of playing hide-and-seek with them.

Consisting of a 200-disc media changer and recorder console that connects to a Sony VAIO PC running Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005, the Sony VAIO XL1 Digital Living System lets users control their media library in one location using the wireless keyboard and remote control. In addition to storing and indexing up to 200 CDs or DVDs at a time for playback on audio and video devices linked to their home entertainment center through the PC, VAIO XL1 system owners can use the Media Center Edition capabilities to manage content such as downloaded movies and music, digitally recorded TV shows, personal photos and high-definition camcorder video files.

The challenges involved in tightly integrating Sony’s disc changer, media recording and archiving capabilities, and other feature sets with Media Center Edition required deep – but not unprecedented – collaboration between the two companies. To learn more about this longtime partnership and the work involved in bringing VAIO XL1 to market, PressPass spoke with Mark Hanson, vice president of Sony VAIO of America, and Kevin Eagan, general manager of the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) Division at Microsoft.