This feature is outstanding - thanks for adding it. I actually create slideshows in an external program and save them as playlist files (.m3u) which I then import into Media Center. This works pretty well - the only problem is that they initially just show up as Playlists in the Music library until I select them to bring up the playback menu and then they show up as available Slideshows in the Picture library. Is there any way these could be recognized as slideshows when they are imported? Also, it would be great to be able to easily do a normal or random slideshow. That is, add an additional "Play Random Slideshow" button so you can do either easily. I know you can bring up the options menu and toggle "random" but this is only available after you already started the slideshow. Thanks.

I think this might be a bug and have nothing to do with the .m3u playlists.  If I create a slideshow in Media Center it shows up in the list of slideshows and not in the music playlists.  If I then create a playlist in WMP that is just photos when I go into Media Center it now lists both the new slideshow and the original one I created in Media Center in the music playlists.  I then have to select them both to get them to show up in the slideshows list.  Is there somewhere I can report this or has this already been addressed?

 I can only assume from the silence that this problem didn't make the "cut" to be fixed for release and I will have to wait for some unknown (long) period of time for it to be addressed?

You have 2 separate issues here: one is that you want to import slideshows that are in m3u format into Media Center and have them show up right away in Slideshows in the Picture library, and the other is a feature request to play a random slideshow.

For the import issue, I think you may be running into an issue with how we tell if a playlist is "music only", "picture only", or mixed. Since WMP has no concept of a concurrent playlist with music and pictures, the playlist itself doesn't contain metadata to tell us if that's the case. So, we have to crack open the playlist and examine items within it to tell. Since that can be an expensive test, especially over network connections, we have a compromising optimization to improve gallery load time. Instead of opening every item in the playlist, we only open the first and last items. If the first and last items are both music, we assume it's a music-only playlist. If the first and last items are both pictures, we assume it's a picture-only playlist. If they are both, it's mixed.

The reason we do this is because we don't really support importing playlists from other formats directly--we only support it via WMP. When Media Center saves a mixed playlist, it saves all of the pictures in a block, followed by all the music in a block. This is because pictures are cheaper to identify in the playlist than music is, so scanning forward to find the first music item is faster than if we had to scan to find the first picture (IIRC).

The reason you saw the behavior you saw is because once we actually open a playlist for playback, we read the whole thing instead of the higher-performing method for media-type detection. If the playlist turns out to be mixed, we overwrite the original playlist with the ordering I described above, which causes future visits to the galleries to show the correct info.

So, to get the behavior you want, save your playlist in the same ordering scheme that Media Center uses. Group all of your pictures together at the front of the playlist, and all of the music at the end. The pictures will play in the order presented, as will the music, in parallel with each other.

 Thanks for the reply but all these playlists are pictures only, no music in any of them.  And as I mentioned in the second post, even if I create a picture-only playlist directly in WMP I get the same behavior (it shows up only in the music playlists until I "open" it).

Can you post repro steps, including specific actions you take in the UI of applications, and the order you took them?

 Ok, here is where I look like a liar but I swear it was consistenly not working before.  I had to go in before and open each picture playlist in the music area individually before it would show up in the "slide shows" list.  Now all my imported picture playlists are showing up properly in the "slide shows" area.  Maybe it just needed some time to "bake" - I don't know?  I will see if that behavior returns.  Sorry and thanks for your replies.

 ^_^ no worries. If you have trouble, next time lead off with as specific steps as you can get--I believe you were seeing something strange, but before I can really be that helpful I have to be able to do it myself so I can debug. Glad it's working for you now!

There is still something wrong here as it is now back to showing all my slideshows in the music playlists area again.  Nothing happened other than me not running Win7 Media Center for several days.  I tried this again from "scratch" on a new PC and get the same results.  Is there some way to force Media Center to read and "classify" these playlists as you described?  It seems that importing these playlists for the first time should do this and if so, there is a bug in the playlists reading/classification.

 Steps to reproduce:

1) Create .m3u playlists containing only images and put them in a folder.

2) In Media Center, add that folder to the "Pictures" library.

3) Go to the playlists list in the Music area and note that all the imported (picture-only) playlists are listed there.

4) Go to the slideshows list in the Pictures area and note that none of the imported playlists are listed there.

5) Go back to the music playlists area and select one of the slideshows.  You see the "play slideshow" dialog and when you close that dialog that playlist is missing from the list as it has moved properly to the slideshows list.  Note that only that one playlist has moved and you have to open each individually to get them to move.

 This is still not working.  I have tried it on several different PCs with the same results.  But I can see by nobody from Microsoft replying to any messages in this board that you truly don't care now that Windows 7 has been released.  I guess you have moved on to bigger and better things and have left your users to fend for themselves.  Sad...