After hearing on the Engadget HD podcast recently that Remote Desktop in Windows 7 supports playing videos I decided to try play some files on our Media Center PC on another PC in our house. The Media Center PC is running Windows 7 Ultimate and the other PC is running Windows 7 Professional. Here is what I found:

• No videos can be played from within the Media Center application itself.
• Garden variety MPEG2 files can be played from within Windows Media Player (these were home videos transcoded with the Vegas Video MPEG encoder).
• DVDs ripped into MPEG2 files that still have the AC3 can be played, but there is no sound.
• HD MPEG4 files (720p) play without any problem.
• Attempting to play WTV files recorded by Media Center in Windows Media Player results in a single frame with no sound being shown. The time indicator reflects that the file is being played, but what is shown on the screen does not change unless you manually move to a different location using the scrub bar.

I recently had the opportunity to do a custom install of Windows 7 on my home office PC, which gave me the opportunity to catalog the applications I installed within the first couple of weeks. Here they are:

• MS Security Essentials
• Office 2007
• Windows Live Essentials
• J River Media Center 14
• ListPro (I should try converting these lists to Splash Shopper for access on the iPhone)
• ITunes and iTunes Folder Watch (used solely for transferring media to my iPhone)
• WinZip (11.2)
• Printer Drivers for our HP Photosmart Printer and Brother MFC Printer
• Power DVD 8 (for the Blu-Ray drive I installed in the hope of doing rips soon)
• AnyDVD HD, Video Redo and DVD Shrink (used for ripping DVDs into movies watchable on Media Center Extenders)
• OggSync (to sync Outlook with Google services)
• NannyPay (used to run payroll for our nanny)
• Feed Demon (love the ability to sync read articles between home and work)
• Foxit Reader (to avoid the intrusiveness of Acrobat Reader upgrades)
• Quicken 2007 (almost time to upgrade)
• Paperport 11

I noticed that Engadget HD recently expressed some skepticism regarding whether anyone has actually used Tru2Way on any of the Panasonic TVs that offer it. I can report that at my suggestion my mother-in-law (who lives in a suburb just outside of Chicago served by Comcast) purchased such a TV (the TH-50PZ80Q – a 50” plasma) and had the Tru2Way cablecard install done two days ago.

Having completed the installation of the related receiver (Onkyo HT-RC160), speakers and Blu-Ray player (LG BD 390) myself a day later, I can report that the Tru2Way feature works well. It saves the hassle of dealing with a cable box and delivers and experience virtually identical to having a cable box. Most importantly, this includes on-demand programming and a nice program guide.

I have used Media Center for our house for the past four years (and had one of the first CableCard Media Center Center PCs in existence) so these features actually seemed novel to me. (Not that I would prefer them to Media Center!)

Two key notes:

First, the install actually took the Comcast technician about five hours for some reason. It was clearly a learning experience for everyone involved on the Comcast side, In fact at one point during the install, I received a report that for some reason on-demand was not working. That evidently got addressed before the tech left.

Second, the big advantage of Tru2Way in her house will come with the next two TVs that will be installed in secondary locations (a study and bedroom) where there will be no equipment besides the TV itself (which will just be hung on the wall). In those locations it will be nice to get the features of a cable box without having to find space for one (especially given that there is no good space for one in these locations—at least none that is consistent with the clean aesthetics of just a wall mounted flat screen TV with no associated equipment. In these locations, the on-demand feature will make up for the fact that there won’t be a DVR attached.

When did a custom install of Windows 7 on my office PC, I had to reinstall all my applications. Those included Paperport 11.1 and Microsoft Office. When I took this opportunity to start using Office 2007, little did I realize that the installation of Paperport would render Office 2007 virtually unusable, with Word usually crashing upon startup.

I discovered this was due to an incompatibility between Office 2007 and the Paperport toolbar installed in Office. I was able to solve this problem by deactivating the Paperport Toolbar by running the following from an command prompt that had been run as an administrator:

regsvr32 /u "C:\Program Files\ScanSoft\PaperPort\PPDFAddin.dll"

Where C:\Program Files\ScanSoft\PaperPort\ is the directory into which Paperport was installed.

Paperport is one of the few applications for managing a collection of scanned files, but it has a terrible reputation for bugs not being fixed until interim or follow on releases, which generally require additional payments by existing users. Bug fixes are not generally rolled out. This is a particularly egregious example: how can your product not be compatible with Office 2007? How absurd.