Digital media from a Windows point of view

Engadget HD reports:

While the rest of us wait for the mythical DirecTV Windows Media Center tuner, some are apparently lucky enough to be a part of the beta program to test the HDPC-20.

About time. This was announced in January 2006, fer cryin’ out loud.

I gave up on DirecTV two months ago in favor of a dual-CableCARD system with Comcast, so I’m not likely to get an invite. Of course, the dish is still installed on my roof, and reconnecting it wouldn’t be too difficult…

I mean, it’s not like anyone would actually want to compare the cable and satellite alternatives side by side, would they?

Well, maybe. This announcement from Ceton Corp. does say "Coming Soon," and we all know long soon can be. Anyway, with a single card, they say, you can

watch and record Cable programming via the new multi-stream, bi-directional CableCARD, the M-Card. Pause, rewind, fast forward, and record live TV utilizing Media Center’s Digital Video Recorder. Transfer video to any TV throughout your house using an Xbox 360 or any Media Center Extender. Includes two High Definition ATSC QAM Digital Tuners to record two channels simultaneously while playing a third program from the PC’s hard disk.

Oh, the possibilities.

Via mymce.

Props to Ryan Smith at AnandTech for an excellent, thorough, detailed, and well-balanced review. A Second Shot: Windows Vista SP1 is worth reading (and re-reading).

The most interesting part to me was the detailed discussion on page 2 of the registry changes required to fix the performance problems you’ll observe if you try to perform file transfers over a network when a multimedia application is running.

I’ve been running Vista Media Center for several months with a pair of digital cable (CableCARD) tuners. Every so often, I encounter a recording that misbehaves in a strange but predictable way. The symptoms for me are as follows:

When I play back the recording, it appears to have been truncated. A half-hour show might appear as if it’s only 5 or 6 minutes long. In actuality, it’s the full recorded length, 30 minutes, which you can confirm by looking at the file size or the file properties.

The navigation buttons on the remote control work until you approach the "phantom" length marker. In the case of a 30-minute program that appears to be only 6 minutes long, the elapsed time counter stops at 5:35 or so. But the program itself keeps playing, and as long as you don’t touch the remote it will continue to play till the end. If you do touch the remote, you’ll find yourself whizzing through the program to the end and you’ll need to start over.

It doesn’t happen often, but it’s an annoying bug, to be sure. In a lengthy and informative thread at The Green Button former Media Center team member Jessica Zahn (now working on the Zune team) acknowledges that the bug has been reproduced. Unfortunately, there’s no fix scheduled for delivery anytime soon. According to Jessica, in a post from last October:

We found the bug. It’s been fixed for our next release, but in my opinion, it doesn’t reach the very high bar for an update outside of the regular product cycle.

Probably this is a fairly unpopular answer, so to offer a little more transparency into our process, I’ll share a little about the sustained engineering process for Media Center (and Windows). I used to be the SE program manager for the TV team before I switched to feature development work.

Basically, to get a fix made out-of-cycle, it needs to affect a large percentage of Windows users - not just Media Center users, because we can’t target Media Center users only given that we ship in every copy of Home Premium and Ultimate. Since our update would affect all of those systems out there, just that alone makes it very difficult to do MC updates. So typically we need some other sort of pressure - OEMs stating they will lose sales or incur support costs as a result of the bug, or political or legal issues, etc.

Another way, though, is to prove sheer numbers. At this point, despite a handful of people reporting the bug, I’m not sure we have a large enough number of people experiencing this bug to bring it above that bar.

I understand the logic of not wanting to push out an update to every person running Vista Home Premium or Ultimate, given that only a fraction of a tiny fraction are going to hit this bug. It would be nice if the solution could be made available as a hotfix via PSS, though, or if it could be bundled into the next Media Center rollup package. Meanwhile, you’ll find some suggested fixes in this other, related thread at TGB.

If my last radio interview didn’t scare you off, or if you missed it, here’s another chance to hear me jabber.

Ian Dixon is having me on as his guest on The Media Center Show this coming Friday, February 29, at noon PST (8pm GMT). We’ll be talking about Vista SP1, Media Center, and whatever else comes up. The show is live, so stop by Ian’s place and see if you can get your question answered in real time.

Ian’s an excellent interviewer and his show is a must-listen for anyone who’s even remotely (heh) interested in Media Center topics.

If you can’t make the broadcast, leave a question in the comments here or e-mail it to Ian.

Charlie Owen, Media Center Program Manager, is soliciting feedback on the Media Center Start menu. Go over to the forum thread at The Green Button and tell him what you like and don’t like.

I’m still mulling…

I’ve gotten some great comments to my first look at the Linksys DMA2100 Media Center Extender. One commenter asked whether menu options are the same when you use the Media Center interface on an extender compared with the full Media Center interface on the Vista Media Center PC to which it’s connected. The answer is no. Although virtually all the core functionality is the same, there are some differences.

Microsoft has an excellent FAQ on Troubleshooting problems with a Media Center Extender device that answers this exact question. Here’s a table listing the differences by UI area, as organized on the Media Center Start page:

Hope that’s useful information.

Note 1: GGMS-A content should play fully on any extender; the listing appears to be in error.

Note 2: I just downloaded an Amazon Unbox video (WMV format), and the Rewind/FF and Skip Forward/Back buttons work just fine when I watch it on the extender.

Note 3: Not sure what this is referring to, but the Skip functions work just fine when I watch recorded TV on an extender.

[cross-posted at Ed Bott's Windows Expertise]

My gadget-loving buddy Jake Ludington saw the MacWorld keynote today and called Steve Jobs’ announcements "lackluster."

And then Omar Shahine, whose gadget radar is as finely tuned as anyone (and who works for Microsoft, for cryin’ out loud), admits to "drooling" over the new Apple hardware and calls them "a nice set of announcements."

I was, frankly, underwhelmed. I wouldn’t trade my Tablet PC with its 200GB 7200RPM drive for a Macbook Air with an 80GB 4200RPM drive. And Apple TV looks like a local franchise for the Steve Jobs Video Store, where you can stuff dollar bills in it and they get pneumatically transferred straight to Cupertino. No thanks…

So what did you all think?

I’m a big fan of rating the tracks in your music collection. It doesn’t take much time, and the payoff is really wonderful when you hit the "5 star shuffle" list.

In Windows Media Player, it takes exactly one click in the Now Playing list or Library to add or update a star rating. In Windows Media Center, by contrast, here’s what you have to do when using a remote control:

1. On the Now Playing screen, choose View Queue and press OK on the remote.
2. On the Queue screen, press the right arrow to move the focus to the list of queued songs, and then use the up or down arrows to scroll through the list and select the track you want to rate.
3. Press the Info button on the remote.
4. Press OK to select the default Edit choice from the menu.
5. On the Edit Song screen, press the down arrow twice to move the focus to the minus and plus controls at the right of the current rating.
6. Press OK on the default minus control to lower a rating, or press right arrow to move the focus to the plus control and press OK to increase a rating.
7. Press the left arrow once or twice to move the focus to the Save option, and click OK to record your changes.

Isn’t that overly complicated? You should be able to get to the rating screen for any song with no more than one or two button presses.

This post by Media Center enthusiast Jerold Billings from the TGB @ CES blog is generating a lot of buzz for its hint that an update to Media Center might be coming later this year. It also includes confirmation that Microsoft is working on a feature to allow DVD streaming over extenders.

Before anyone gets too excited, scroll down to the comments, where the source of much of this information, Microsoft’s Jessica Zahn, tries to dial back some of the speculation:

Did you really write that? REALLY?
I might have further response to this post later; I think a couple of things were inadvertently misconstrued, but I need to make sure I say the right things.

I’ll see if I can track anyone down for more comments.

Update: Jessica did indeed add that "further response," which included this explanation of the DVD streaming confusion:

On DVD streaming: I think what I said here was that there is a compelling "soccer mom" scenario. As a mother, I know first-hand how many DVDs get scratched, lost, or damaged by my children. I’d love to throw all my DVDs into a changer and remote them to wherever in my house.

However, we haven’t announced this as a feature included in any future release. We play with all kinds of ideas - we’re software developers, after all, we have to prototype things! - but whether and how they make it into our products is another story.

There’s more, so go read her whole comment if this stuff interests you. Oh, and when I ran into Jessica at Ian Dixon’s Media Center meet-up at CES, I learned that she is moving off the Media Center team and as of tomorrow is going to be working on the Zune team. Best of luck, Jessica!