I tried out version 0.4.0c of Yougle for Windows Media Center this evening. Because I only use Media Center extenders, I was interested to see if this version had improved extender support.

The short answer is "yes", but only if you are interested in Microsoft Soapbox videos. Aside from a few awkward aesthetic user interface issues, this new version of Yougle played well with extenders. It allows for a nice selection of options for selecting videos and doesn't present videos that can't be played on the extender.

The real problem, is the selection of videos on Soapbox. Simply put: it's no YouTube. The most popular videos were almost exclusively of animals and the most highly rated videos were of people's family events. Not really items of general interest!

It will be nice if and when this works with YouTube (and other services) using an extender.

I tried out a couple of new websites this past weekend.

The first is WishRadar.com, which will take your Amazon or other delimited wishlist and let you know when the prices of items reach target levels that you set. The site seems to work ok and importing your Amazon wishlist is easy, but some additional functionality would be nice, for example:

• It would be nice if WishRadar looked to see if your items were available from other sources, e.g. PriceGrabber.com.
• The site was very slow for me.
• There is no obvious way to import wishlists from other sites.

In short, the site seems too Amazon-centric right now.

The second site I tried is called PageOnce.com. It is in beta, but I received an invite about 10 days after asking for one. It presents a dashboard of key information from other sites at which you may have accounts, e.g. FaceBook, Gmail, Amazon. So that you can see important new information on one page without having to visit each site.

The idea is a good one, but as with WishRadar, some more functionality would be nice:

• Having more sites participate.
• Being able to select what information from each site you want displayed.
• Having new information from PageOnce made available by RSS feed.

I also note that you can include brokerage accounts among those tracked by PageOnce, but I would not want tom include these for a couple f reasons: (i) you must give your account ID and password for any site aggregated bv PageOnce; and (ii) the terms of use of the site absolve PageOnce of any meaningful liability for misuse of the information you give them. Those struck me as a toxic combination with respect to brokerage account access!

Updating the OCUR digital cable tuner drivers on my Media Center PC to version 1.16 wasn't quite as smooth as it seemed at first. I discovered yesterday that after the update, the OCUR tuners had only been acting as analog cable tuners after the update.

A call to Comcast to reactivate the tuners and installation of Vista Service Pack 1 resulted in the tuners becoming operational as digital tuners again several hours after my call to Comcast. I'm not sure whether both were necessary, but, throwing caution to the wind I figured as long the Media Center was effectively out of commission I might as use this opportunity to update it to Vista Service Pack 1 while I waiting for Comcast to reactivate the tuners and their CableCards.

The SP1 install seems to have gone flawlessly and took about 50 minutes. Because all the PCs on our network are updated via Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) running on Small Business Server 2003, I had to download the Service Pack 1 install manually and install it as it is apparently not yet being offered through WSUS.

I used my wife's absence to perform a few updates in anticipation of Vista SP1, which is now available for download:

• Updated Drobo firmware to 1.1.1, which necessitated having to re share all the network shares on the Drobo and restart Windows Server 2003. Other than that the update went fine, but I have to believe Data Robotics can improve this process.
• Updated WSUS 3.0 with Service Pack 1. Took about 35 minutes to install, but otherwise the installation seemed to go ok.
• Updated the firmware on my CableCard OCUR tuners to version 1.16 in hopes of avoiding losing a tuner every few weeks and having to reboot to get it back. What a strange upgrade process: the upgrade must be installed while the tuner has been on more the two minutes and less than 10 minutes. Fortunately this went fine and I did not have to reconfigure the Vista Media Center Digital Cable settings.

Of course all this just happened this evening, so there may yet be issues I am unaware of.

I have been trying to find a working Universal Plug'n Play media player for my Pocket PC phone-- without success.

In theory both the Rudeo Play & Control and the Conduits PocketPlayer should do this, but neither seems to function properly. The Rudeo won't find any server on my network after finding them all the first time I ran it. The PocketPlayer finds the servers and lets me browse, but won't actually play any media.

This is all part of my quest to be able to listen to podcasts at home (when I am not by a PC) and do two things: (i) pick up the podcast where I left off if I get interrupted; and (ii) not have to copy podcasts to a new memory card on a regular basis. If my Roku Soundbridges I have or the Xbox 360's I own could just fast forward audio files this would not even be an issue! Grrr....

I was hoping to put a UPnP player on my HTC Mogul and the listen to podcasts with a nice set of Sony Bluetooth headphones. But it does not look like that will be happening yet.

Knock on wood. This weekend I installed a new external 750GB drive on my Media Center PC. The drive is connected by a USB 2.0 connection. I transferred all of the MPEG files of movies (resulting from ripped DVDs) to the external drive.

I tried playing a movie that had been consistently problematic. No stutter.

Obviously this is just a preliminary result, but I am optimistic that it will hold up-- at least to the extent of being a vast improvement over the performance I had been experiencing previously.

My suspicion is that this is an issue relating to how Vista Media Center reads files for streaming to Extenders-- it doesn't buffer/request enough data so that when the Drobo runs into problems, the video stops. But this is just a guess.

In any event, with hard drives being so inexpensive this solution cost only $165 (including taxes/shipping): $148 for the 750GB drive and $17 for an external enclosure.

Last night I tried swapping in a new gigabit switch with a larger buffer to see if that solved the problem with the occasional hiccup when playing back large MPEG2 files on a Media Center Extender.

It did not, so I'm returning the replacement switch. (One of the great things about free shipping from Amazon and their accommodating return policy is that this sort of experiment is feasible!)

I have higher hopes that moving the video files to a non-Drobo drive will solve the problem. That should arrive in a few days.

Almost six months ago I blogged about the problem that I had been having with Xbox Live Arcade games only working on a replacement console (one sent to me after the first one red-ringed).

The problem was finally fixed... almost six months later and a number of calls and broken promises with respect to when the problem would be fixed and when I would hear back. As others have reported, some adjustment relating to the DRM was made so that when I redownloaded the games from the Download History screen, they would no work on my new console without my having to be logged in on the Xbox Live Gamertag I had used to purchase them originally.

The ordeal wasn't terrible for me, because I am really the only one in our house that plays these games so I would just log on if ever I wanted to play. But the cluelessness of Xbox Live support and the broken promises and lack of communication were really annoying-- and should be of concern to Microsoft. Another ameliorating I think in the course of my complaints about broken promises I received at lease one (maybe two-- it's been so long I can't remember) free wireless controllers from Xbox Customer Support.

My experience after a couple of months of using computer control of X-10 devices in our house has been pretty good, with a couple of minor exceptions. The good:

• I can turn off all the lights in a couple of rooms with a keyfob remote, or using a button on the pad of a wall switch.
• I can turn on and off a whole floor's lights at once.
• I can set certain interior and exterior lights to go on in the evening, making a more welcoming house for my wife when she returns from work.
• I can easily achieve preprogrammed dimming levels for lights in certain rooms.
• We can easily set our lights to go on automatically when we leave on vacation.

This was exactly the sort of thing I though we might want to do when we made the decision to use predominantly X-10 switches (all purchased from Smarthome.com)when we a large remodeling project in 2005.

There are a couple of things that are annoyances:

• In one of our rooms two of the four X-10 controls respond only intermittently to commands, despite replacing the controllers.
• Occasionally (in fact regularly during the time we were having a back up generator installed and the power was often turned off to various circuits throughout the day) the HomeSeer service will cease to respond to any new commands or successfully send any.

I have generally found HomeSeer to be a capable application even if it is not as "slick" as some new applications, it works well for my purposes. I had previously looked as less expensive PC software for controlling X-10 devices and found such software lacking in features (e.g. no capability to control X-10 thermostats). I have HomeSeer running on Windows Server 2003, which is not officially supported, but seems to work fine for me.

There are other things I would like to automate, but right now am in no particular hurry to do so. I'll report on how that goes when I do.

I thought that I had discovered a working method of doing this using Microsoft's Zune software, but alas this was fraught with problems: the Zune service would not scan directories on its own; the Zune service showing no media available after a manual scan.

So I have now turned to the Twonky Vision server and the initial indications are quite good:

• It seems to play all of my podcasts, both audio and video.
• It will run as a service under Windows 2003.
• It is recognized by the Xbox 360.
• It is very small: a download of about 1MB.

Now that our family is using high definition home videos, an existing problem with our video playback on Media Center has become a bigger deal. The problem is that certain video playback will just stop for a few seconds every few minutes or so. This doesn't affect recorded TV shows.

In experimenting (too much) this weekend, I've discovered that only my a certain combination of circumstances gives rise to this problem:

• The video is stored on my Windows Small Business Server 2003 computer.
• The video is stored on the Drobo attached to the Small Business Server PC.
• The video bandwidth is DVD quality or greater.
• The video is being played on an extender.

I have tried a variety of things to no avail, including setting the Drobo to "optimize performance" (i.e. do write caching), making sure flow control is set on my network cards, checking network tuning in the Media Center Extender.

I will trying a new Gigabit switch (the Prosafe JGS524F 24-PORT Gigabit Switch) next week (one which seems to have a bigger buffer than the Dlink switch I bought about 2 1/2 years ago) to see if that makes a difference. If not I may have to face up to pulling video off the Drobo and may end up storing it on the Media Center PC itself. That any video I play from there plays without incident.

I recently purchased the Sanyo Xacti HD1000 Video Camera. It a high definition handheld camera that will fit in your pocket and record standards compliant MPEG4 video to and SD card.

Here are a few thoughts after owning this video camera for about a month:

The good:

• This camera can usually fit in a pants pocket-- always in a jacket pocket.
• An hour's worth of video can be transferred to my computer in about 10 minutes. All the files transferred are of the date the video was taken. Very convenient for dating videos.
• The 720p high definition video (I have not tried 1080i) is a nice improvement over old 480i video I shot with my Sony TRV-18.
• The menus are well designed and make it easy to use some nice features and settings.
• Consistent with my expectations from CES, the camera is very easy to hold. Even for my wife.
• I can get about 80 minutes of 720p video on an 8GB SD card (which I purchased for about $100).

The bad:

• I have mostly shot in high definition and when focused, the quality seems just fine. However, this camera seems somewhat worse in low light than the old Sony TRV-18 that we had in that people are likely to drift out of focus when my hand shakes or they move. I may experiment and do some research to see if this might be addressed by changing some settings.
• Even in good light, the anti-shake system seems worse the my old Sony TVR-18.

Stills:

• The Xacti takes decent stills. As with the video camera, the more light the better, but decent flash pictures are certainly possible, even if not a sure thing.

Adventures in Transcoding:

• Because I have recorded 720p video that I will be playing back on Xbox 360 Media Center Extenders, I have to transcode the video to either MPEG2 or WMV format. I have tried many consumer video transcoding applications in the past (priced less than $50) and none has been more robust that Vegas Video 5.0 (which I have used with Batch Render Pro-- a user written plugin that doesn't seem to be available anymore). A three minute 720p video is transcoded to MPEG2 in about six minutes with my Intel Core2 Duo 6600 processor. The size of the video file goes from 250MB to 381MB. Not too bad. This is better than the time it took to transcode 480i avi files to DVD quality MPEG2 with my old video camera.
• I have tried some transcoding to WMV using Vegas 5.0's interface to the Windows Media 9 Video Encoder, but it is absurdly stopping every 60 frames for more than a few seconds. When encoding 60 fps video, these delays really add up! There may well be better settings for Windows Media Encoder, but with such good results from Vegas's Mainconcept MPEG encoder, I don't yet have a good reason to spend a lot of time experimenting with Windows Media encoding.
• Hopefully in 2008 there will be an update to the Xbox 360's media center extender software that allows it to play MPEG4 files natively!

One of my expectations for Windows Vista Media Center was that the new Media Center Markup Language would spark development of a lot of new "rich" applications. The results (at least in terms of quantity of applications to date) have been disappointing.

Niall Ginsbourg, is one of the premier MCML developers and has written the excellent Big Screen Photos 2 and Big Screen Weather 2. I have recommended them before but these fully extender compatible MCML applications are so cool that I purchased them, despite a lack of real interest in the subject matter.

Niall has a really interesting post about how Silverlight 2.0 is shaping up to be the best of Microsoft's fractured development platforms and aspirational thoughts about how Siverlight might be used to develop Media Center applications. For anyone interested in the future of Media Center Development (even from just a consumer perspective like me), this post is worth a read.