Entries Tagged 'Windows Media Center Edition' ↓

Andy has a detailed description of the process he went through in selecting components for his new built-from-scratch MCE PC:

I evangelize MCE to pretty much anyone who will listen.  Once they’re sold on the concept most ask how much it costs, I tell them that the cost of an entry level system is pretty minimal $300-$500 but the sky is the limit depending on what you want to put in it.  Here’s my system and the reasoning behind it.  In most cases the link goes to the manufacture’s page, but in some cases (OEM or I couldn’t find it on their site) I link to where you can buy it.

I could quibble over a few bits (for example, I would recommend the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-500MCE, which is identical to the 150 but has two tuners on board, with a daughterboard that adds S-Video and component connections for the second tuner). Still, excellent advice. I’ll be building a new Media Center PC early next year and this will really help.

My ZDNet colleague George Ou asks an interesting question: Why does that new widescreen HDTV look so weird?

It’s a good summary of the issues that come up when you try to watch a standard 4:3 picture on a wide (16:9) display, or vice versa. And he has lots of good screen shots to illustrate the pros, cons, and tradeoffs of each option. Basically, with a standard picture on a full-screen display, you can choose between a distorted full image, an undistorted image that’s had the top and bottom cropped off, or a picture that uses only the center of the display and leaves bars (usually gray or balck) on either side.

If you use Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 with Update Rollup 2, there’s an additional “smart stretch” option, which stretches the edges of the current picture but leaves the center undistorted. I’ve found it to be an excellent compromise, if your hardware can handle it. I covered this topic last fall in a post that’s worth revisiting if this topic interests you.

Over at ZDNet, I’ve just published a detailed first look at Windows Vista’s new Media Center. You can read the article here or skip straight to the image gallery.

Overall, I’m pretty impressed with Vista’s Media Center. My main misgiving is the appearance of the dreaded “Restricted Content” error message, which occasionally plagues Media Center Edition 2005. A bug in Beta 2 means you’ll see the blue screen of DRM if you connect your Vista PC to a digital monitor with a DVI cable and then try to watch a copy-protected premium cable or satellite channel.

Supposedly, this bug will be fixed in RC1. But that’s small consolation to anyone trying to use Vista Media Center on a digital display today.

Go read the whole thing and let me know what you think.

While investigating the latest Media Center update rollup, I ran across a post at the new Green Button forums that explains how to check the version number of the Media Center components. That in turn led to this useful page on the intricacies of Media Center version numbers by Mark Salloway.

Using the remote control, press More Info, then choose Settings, General, About Media Center, Software Version.

For some strange reason, the version number I see here (which represents my Media Center installation before installing today’s update) isn’t listed on either table. Fortunately, today’s updates incremented the version number to 5.1.2715.2883, which appears to confirm I have the most recent version.

I’m so relieved.

Chris Lanier passes along the download link to a brand-new update package for Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005. The April 2006 Update Rollup flew in completely under my radar, I must admit. The KB article documenting the changes is here.

Before you can install this update, you have to install Update Rollup 2 for Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005. The April 2006 Update Rollup is cumulative and replaces three separate update packages released since Update Rollup 2.

I’ll look into it and report what I find out.

I’ve got some more thoughts on the insane naming convention for updates at ZDNet. Click here to read the whole thing.

Barb Bowman has step-by-step details on how she installed Windows Media Center Edition 2005 on a Mac.

She added an external USB tuner and a DVD decoder. It’ll be interesting to see how well this solution works over time. Sure seems like a great use for a dual-core Mac Mini, doesn’t it?

(thanks to Scott Kingery for the tip)

Update: Pictures of live TV running via MCE on a MacBook Pro Intel here.

PC World’s Harry McCracken has some questions about Apple’s new Boot Camp software, which lets Intel-based Macs run Windows XP. Like: “Does Boot Camp let you run Windows Media Center?”

Microsoft’s Sean Alexander has some answers:

MCE (and an unreleased player) are running like champs.  I’m hearing reports of Vista running as well.  Battery life still stinks compared to my sony but hey, this is a desktop replacement riight?

Windows Vista running on Apple hardware? The mind boggles:

Venkman: This city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.
Mayor: What do you mean, biblical?
Ray: What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor… real Wrath-of-God-type stuff. Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies.
Venkman: Rivers and seas boiling!
Egon: 40 years of darkness, earthquakes, volcanos.
Winston:The dead rising from the grave!
Venkman: Human sacrifice, dogs and cats, living together… mass hysteria!

PC World also has more details on the new $50 virtualization software from Parallels, which claims to allow Intel-based Macs to run Windows XP, several flavors of Linux, and even OS/2 Warp in a virtual machine without dual-booting.

Engadget’s Stephen Speicher has an excellent interview with Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore, who runs the eHome division that produces Media Center. I encourage you to read the whole thing. For those who are too busy, I’ve summarized some of the key bits about CableCARD and Media Center here.

CableCARD-ready Media Center PCs will be available after Windows Vista launches. How will the process work?

When you are shopping for a new PC after Vista launches, you’ll have the choice to buy one that is “Digital Cable Ready” and includes the right hardware for you to attach your coax cable from the wall right into your PC. Slap a cable card in and then get all of the great premium High-Definition content like HBO or Showtime or ESPN — all those things that cable makes available today, but requires a set-top box.

Only new PCs?

Yes, it will be only new PCs. .. [T]he cable industry wanted a way to know that any particular PC that was sold as “Digital Cable Ready” would absolutely be able to deliver on the wide range of things that you couldn’t predict with certainty would happen on a home-built PC. … [A]ny vendor that wants to build an OCUR [Open Cable Unidirectional Receiver] device has to take it through a certification process at CableLabs which is well-defined. They have a number of certification waves that happen at scheduled times every year. It’s a published test suite that it has to pass. So, that has to happen for the device that receives cable and translates cable conditional access from the CableCARD to Windows Media DRM. … [T]he entire system as shipped by the OEM has to be, for the purposes of this discussion, “certified.” The PC vendor has to notify CableLabs of the model of the PC that will be “Digital Cable Ready” and indicate that its entire system from the graphics card to the OCUR will support what is needed for things like the Emergency Broadcast System.

What does the certification process involve?

[T]he OCUR component must be certified, and it has to be built into a system that the OEM can essentially self-certify. By self-certification what that means is that it must meet a set of requirements that includes the way that things get displayed like Emergency Broadcast System and closed captioning, that the minimum content protection requirements are met, and that the system functions together as advertised as you would expect from a “Digital Cable Ready” device. The OEM then basically sends a letter to CableLabs indicating that a particular system is one that they have self-certified and can be shipped as a “Digital Cable Ready” PC.

What about system makers who don’t have the size or clout of a Dell or HP?

The smallest of OEMs that license Windows through the System Builder Kit (which you can essentially buy today as an enthusiast user) – those folks are not eligible to do self-certification with CableLabs. So the small PC vendors, as yet, can’t do this. We hope to get that process fixed in time, but as we’re at version one for the time-being it’ll be the OEMs which are a step up in size from that. That includes lots of small OEMs but generally not the mom and pop shops that do PC repair and occasionally build PCs.

Multiple tuners are supported, with multiple OCUR devices.

And what about DirecTV?

We haven’t announced the specific timeframe around when the DirecTV products will be available. … The basic idea is very similar [to the CableCARD/OCUR implementation], which is that you can get essentially a receiver device that is a DirecTV receiver and connect it through some digital connection to your PC. [Doing so] lets you get all the great value from the DirecTV service, including High-Definition. If you subscribe to NFL Sunday Ticket, you’ll be able to get that. All that good stuff.

My take? It’s progress, but it’s also a further fragmentation of the digital living room and a step backwards for users. I’ll have more to say later.

Here’s a quick follow-up to my Ouch! Bitten by DRM post from this morning.

I set up Media Center to record a movie on HBO Pacific at 9:30 MST. The movie in question? Wrongfully Accused, starring Leslie Neilsen, which sounds truly awful - the sacrifices I make in the name of science.

According to the Recorded TV list, Media Center recorded it just fine, but trying to play it back results in the dreaded “Restricted Content” error.

In fact, trying to watch any copy protected HBO content on this Media Center PC results in the same error after only a few seconds of viewing. I just tested using both tuners, and was unable to watch Miss Congeniality 2 on HBO Pacific or Jennifer Eight on HBO2. No great loss content-wise, but the bigger problem is making me very angry, to say the least.

For the most part, I use the DirecTiVo box in the living room to record HBO programming. It still works just fine. These days I mostly use the Media Center PC to record movies on unrestricted cable channels, including Comedy Central, American Movie Classics, and Turner Movie Classics. I assume this problem began occurring sometime on or before January 6, as that’s the first day when content I recorded from HBO turned out to be unwatchable. Last fall, I had no trouble watching HBO programming on this computer, so something has changed, and not for the better.

A post at Aaron Stebner’s blog, “Content protection errors in Update Rollup 2 for Media Center 2005″ offers a clue to the origin of the problem:

I have heard of several folks running into issues playing protected content (such as purchased songs/movies, or HBO television shows) after installing Update Rollup 2 for Media Center 2005. As I described here, Update Rollup 2 installs an updated Digital Rights Management (DRM) redistributable package. We are still investigating reports of content protection problems in order to identify root causes and provide fixes.

Aaron points to a Knowledge Base article, “The Windows Media Digital Rights Management system may not work if your computer hardware changes”, which identifies one possible cause of this problem:

The Microsoft Windows Media Digital Rights Management (DRM) system may not work if you make changes to your computer hardware. You may not be able to play protected content. Protected content includes content such as songs that you have bought and downloaded from an online store.

You may receive the following error messages:

• The license to play the packaged media is invalid.
• C00D277F - Secure storage protection error. Restore your licenses from a previous backup and try again.

This issue occurs because the Windows Media DRM system maintains information based on the hardware configuration of the computer. If certain components are changed, Windows Media DRM may not work because it may view the change as an unauthorized attempt to move protected content to another computer.

This issue may occur if you have made one or more of the following changes to your computer hardware:

• You recently changed hardware components, such as the CPU or the motherboard.
• You modified any one of your computer’s Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) settings that affect hardware components, such as disabling CPU hyper-threading.
• You moved the hard disk drive from one computer to another computer.

Well, that’s not the error I’m getting, but the underlying issue sounds familiar, especially given that I upgraded the hard drive on this machine last fall and used a disk imaging program to copy the contents of the old disk to the new one.

I’ll try resetting Windows Media DRM using the steps in the KB article. I’ll let you know how it works.

Update: Yep, that worked. But it required multiple steps that demanded more expertise than it is reasonable to expect any Windows user to go through. I didn’t bother backing up my licenses to see if my existing content would play back after the restoration. My guess is that it wouldn’t have worked.

DRM sucks.

Here’s a message you don’t want to see on your Media Center machine:

This occurs when you try to play back a copy-protected file - in this case, a movie recorded from HBO Signature - on a computer other than the one it was recorded on. Media Center Extenders include code that bypasses this restriction so that you can view recorded shows elsewhere on your network, as long as they’re playing back on the main Media Center box where they were originally recorded.

The trouble is, I got this message when I tried to play back a movie on the Media Center machine where it was originally recorded. And now I see that the same problem is affecting another movie recorded the same day, from the Starz channel. What went wrong? I’m not sure. Did I copy this particular movie file to a different partition?

I’ll do some more tests and see if I can figure out where the problem lies. Meanwhile, I won’t be watching Three Days of the Condor or Lenny anytime soon.

Update: See the follow-up here.