My new "production" machine arrived while we were out of town last Friday and I started to set it up yesterday. I had been sufficiently impressed with Velocity Micro's level of support and engagement in getting CableCard PCs up and running that I decided to buy my new gaming/office PC from them as well. I have had my old PC for what seems like three years (it shipped with a Radeon 9800 Pro graphics card!), so it was time for something new. (Fortunately almost all of my gaming has been done on the Xbox 360 since it arrived, so I haven't suffered too badly.)

Here are the relevant specs: Core 2 Duo E6600, 2GB RAM, 500GB SATA HD, EVGA nVidia 8800 GTS 640MB, extended case with blue lights. Cost with three year on-site service and technical support-- about $2700.

After particularly annoying experiences with HP support, and similar experiences with Dell in the past, I decided to try paying a premium for a better supported product. I really won't know whether this was worth it until my first big problem.

As part of the process of setting up the new PC, I added a 500GB hard drive from my old Media Center PC to the 500B drive that the PC shipped with. Amazingly this PC came with a whole bag of accessories, including cables! Setting up the drive was painless although the the nicely tied cables made be reluctant to add my own untied cables, and to break some of the ties holding back the power cables. There was plenty of space to add the drive, but adding other drives would have required removing the frame that holds the hard drives in order to screw in mounting screws for the drives. (Whatever their other problems some of the most easily accessible and user friendly cases I've worked with have been Dells).

The setup of the OS and basic apps went as well as with the other new PCs I've connected to Small Business Server 2003. As with the other Velocity Micro PC I purchased there was no crapware! 

However, setting up this PC would also require transferring 300+ GB of media files that I am working with (e.g home videos in process), games and other applications that I keep only on my PC. That process is proving more time consuming for reasons I'll try to discuss tomorrow.

Yesterday, the new Vista Media Center PC with CableCard failed to record Desperate Housewives. Fortunately the Comcast PVR I have kept around for backup, recorded it just fine.

Vista Media Center makes it easy to locate the reason why a show did not record: Recorded TV - View Scheduled - History - By Date. The error indicated "There was no TV signal when the show was scheduled to record." Looking at the history some more I noticed that this error had occurred before, every few days, without regularity.

When time permits I'll call Velocity Micro to see how they approach this problem, I suspect that the issue is that the Digital Cable Tuner isn't waiting long enough for a signal, or trying hard enough, because I have never has a problem tuning digital cable channels live.

Engadget has described the Amazon e-book reader Kindle as having EVDO wireless capability for downloading content. On the Engadget podcast, they discuss how unlikely it is that people would pay for a $40/month EVDO subscription just to download e-book content.

Isn't the more likely scenario that (i) the Kindle would be limited to using an EVDO network to download e-book content; (ii) Amazon would pay the wireless provider for the cost of bandwidth, with Amazon covering that cost by increasing the price of e-books; and (iii) the consumer not paying any fee to a wireless provider.

The cost of the bandwidth necessary to download content would be baked into the price of the content itself. Note that this model could be used for downloading all sorts of other content (e.g. music, video) as well. This would allow portable media devices to use an EVDO network to get connectivity almost everywhere, without saddling consumers with hefty monthly data fees.

This obviously wouldn't work for more general purpose devices that could access the entire web, but for limited purpose wireless devices, that may only get sporadic use, this model seems like the way to go.

Having owned four Xbox 360's simce shortly after the launch in November 2005, I suppose it was just a matter of time before I suffered from the dreaded "red ring of death." What I wasn't exepcting, was that it would affect the Xbox in our basement that is the least used on any in the house. (It has been used only a few times a month.)

I had hoped for some sympathy in this regard from Xbox support when I called and explained my situation. No such luck. Instead I was treated to a dialog something like this from Mark the supervisor.

So I now must pay $139 to replace this piece of hardware. Aside from the irritation that I am having to go through this because of a product that seems to have some flaws, this isn't a big deal. If I were a high school kid who has saved to buy his Xbox and had this happen, that would be a big deal.

Our family has a relatively large media library kept on our home server.

What makes things complicated is that this media library is accessed from a bunch of different devices: our PCs at home, my PC at work, Roku Soundbridges, Xbox 360s and a Pocket PC.

The media itself can be played on all of the devices without much of a problem, although this is not without its frustrations too.

Right now my largest frustration with this approach is that I have to keep multiple indices of the media in order to access it on different devices.

Adding New Media to J River Media Center

The heavy lifting here is currently being done by J River's Media Center, of which I have previously sung the praises. This software allows me to access media from my work PC and any PC at home, as well as serving as the UPnP server for our Roku Soundbridges. Unfortunately, this runs on our server which is in the basement. This application also acts as a Podcatcher, automatically downloading new podcasts hourly. There is no good way to rip new music or add other media to its index (called a "library") from a client PC while the central server application is running. So I am forced into other less elegant solutions, the least kludgy of which is to add new media to the appropriate location on the server and wait for Media Center's auto import function to notice it. The problem with this approach is that it takes hours for the new media to be noticed and added to the index.

I could have the server run in read only mode and allow the clients to modify the index, but I have found two problems with this approach: (i) duplicates of podcasts get downloaded by the server and the client, and (ii) the server keeps using an old copy of the index that it has in memory even after the index files on the server have been updated from another PC.

Syncing Podcasts to My Pocket PC

Similarly, I like to keep a current crop of Podcasts on the 2GB miniSD card in my Pocket PC. I used to use Mob Sync in combination with Feed Demon's pocatching application to download podcasts that I would manually prune and sync to my Pocket PC memory card. Unfortunately Mobsync stopped being reliable about 10 days ago, so I've searched for a new alternative.

I tried Windows Media Player 11, but its limited smartlist capabilities made it difficult for it to identify the the ost recent podcasts. For example, WMP it can't sort by the date of a file, only by other date related tags that aren't present in all podcasts.

So I am now trying J River Media Center's ability to sync to a mobile device using a smartlist (If there is one thing JRMC does well, it is smartlists!). Unfortunately, the initial loading of 1.5GB onto the card is taking about two hours. Nevertheless, this appears to be the best approach so far.

Vista Media Center

Vista Media Center does handle large libraries better that MCE 2005. At least my library of about 30000 audio, video and photo files is handled with reasonable speed with Vista Media Center, while it was impossibly slow with MCE 2005.

The problem is that I access Media Center though extenders, and the libaries are not easily updated to include new media. Each extender is a different user on the Media Center PC, which means that each extender has its own library which needs to be kept up to date. This is less than ideal, but understandable. What is not understandable is that there is no documented way to update the libraries associated with the Media Center extenders. There have been reports that one has to let the extender sit in the Media Library section for 5-10 minutes while Media Center looks for new media. I tried this for 15 minutes and media I had added never appeared. Even if it does work if I tried this for a longer period of time, this is no way to handle updates to the index. Why not have Media Center automatically looking for new content for the index from the watched folders, no matter what it is doing. This it does NOT do, as the only media accessible from the extenders is media that was added when the extenders were first connected to the Media Center PC at the beginning of April.

If I come across any solutions or better approaches I'll write about them.

After getting the Cablecard tuners installed yesterday morning, yesterday evening I brought my implementation of Media Center back up to where the functionality was under my mature XP Media Center setup:

• I set up a logon script for each Media Center Extender user, e.g. MCX1, so that they could access files in share directories on Small Business Server. I had hoped that with Vista Ultimate being able to join a domain, that this kludge would no longer be necessary, but it looks like I was wrong.
• I installed MyMovies 2.20. This was a noticeable improvement over MyMovies 2.11 in ease of use and slickness. A really nice application.
• I installed Transcode 360, but only with local user privileges-- making it unusable from extenders. I think I've fixed this problem, but have not yet tested it.
• Library updates for extenders are not done very well In Vista Media Center. This was a big problem in XP MCE 2005, along with slow access to large libraries. The latter is not an issue for me, but the former seems to require either a manual update or a long time spent on the music page while Media Center slowing updates its index to reflect new media and delete old media.
• Is there any good reason why each Extender has to keep it library independent of a central library that could be updated continuously?

I don't think I fully appreciated what was necessary to get Vista's Windows Desktop search to index files on Small Business Server. It seems to require more than just installing the latest version Windows Desktop Search on the server. In addition, UNCFATPHInstaller.msi has to be installed on the Vista client and then pointed to each of the network shares you want to include in the seach.

I'm not positive this implements the client-server approach to search that I blogged about earlier, but it seems to work.

Somewhat surprisingly, the install of the two Cablecards in my new Vista Media Center PC went quite smoothly. The Comcast technician was in our house for less than 45 minutes.

The only slight hiccup was that one of the Cablecards was bad an needed to be replaced. This was a surprise to neither of us. (Why is the failure rate for these items so high?)

I can now watch the full range of digital cable and high definition shows on our Xbox 360 Media Center extenders.

Interestingly, I can also watch all of these shows on the old LCD monitor I have hooked up to the Media Center PC in our server room. It isn't DVI and certainly isn't HDCP compliant. I had thought that I wouldn't be able to actually view any digital cable content on this monitor from all I had read. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I was wrong.

There are a few other issues with non-TV media (e.g. connecting to media files stored on Small Business Server with my extenders, and some event log errors that I'll try to sort through this evening) but for now, all seems to be well.

About 68 days after the consumer launch of Vista, my Cablecard PC, finally arrived. Comcast is scheduled to come tomorrow, but I thought I would post an update of what I discovered today as I did the necessary prep work.

I arrived home to find that the box from Velocity Micro had finally arrived. Inside was my dual Cablecard, Core 2 Duo E6400 Cinemagix Grand Theater with 2 GB of RAM. I run Small Business Server 2003 at our house, so I ordered the PC with Vista Ultimate installed so I could join the SBS domain.

In addition to the PC, inside was a keyboard and mouse, that I'll probably use for another system as this one will be hooked up to a KVM switch. This PC will replace our existing Media Center 2005 PC that acts as a server for Xbox 360 Media Center Extenders throughout the house.

This was originally supposed to be an AMD box (for no particular reason other than it was less expensive), but because of problems with the applicable motherboard, Velocity upgraded my to the Intel product at no additional charge (a several hundred dollar value). Due to another small SNAFU, they added my Vista Ultimate at no charge as well. No complaints here!

I disconnected my existing Dell Pentium D820 machine in our server room and connected the Grand Theater in its place. I hooked up the USB connection from the KVM switch, and the VGA connection from the KVM switch (thorough a DVI to VGA converter dongle). I turned on the power switch in the back and the nice vacuum fluorescent display in front came on, as well as the fans but no video. My heart sank, but I quickly realized that I needed to press the circular power button on the front as well. Doh. With that done the PC booted up without incident.

The initial Vista setup went smoothly and quickly. Much more so that the 20+ minutes it took to set up even preinstalled Vista on several HP Pavilion notebooks. When I reached the desktop, I was delighted to discover that there was no crapware at all!

Next, I decided to install an extra 750GB SATA hard drive that I will use for recorded TV. Removing the five screws holding on the top of the case was more difficult that I anticipated and I suspect that one of the screws had been over tightened as it took about 15 minutes to get it loose. Once the top was off, I discovered that unlike the Dell this PC would replace, adding hard drives was not so easy in this beast. There was no way to slide a new drive in and connect the requisite cables. Instead adding the drive required removing the rack holding the hard drives inside and then partially disassembling that rack. When putting the rack back in, I discovered that the presence of the drive blocked access to one of the screws, making it impossible to reattach the rack with more than three of the original four screws. I've never owned a PC in a HTPC form factor before, so maybe this is normal. In any event, I don't plan on adding another drive any time soon.

I attached the Ethernet cable and the PC was able to connect to the Internet without any problem. I tried to connect to Small Business Server and join the domain. I received an error running the connection application indicating that I should have only one network card or Small Business Server was not on the network. After some experimenting I discovered that the problem lay in the fact that the DCT cards were being identified as network cards so that Vista thought I had three networks cards. Once I disabled the DCTs, I was able to join the PC to my SBS 2003 domain without any problem. Once this was completed, I was able to enable the cards again without incident.

After installing several basic applications including antivirus software and QuickTime, I moved my Vbox internal ATSC tuner from the old Dell box to the new Velocity Micro box. This installed without incident, downloading the proper drivers and installing them automatically.

Now that I had a tuner set up, I went ahead and went through the setup for Media Center. The ATSC tuner worked just fine.

Next, I set up the DCTs for Digital Cable. Even though I have no Cablecards yet, they tune all of the analog stations just fine.

Next, I set up the Xbox 360's to connect as Media Center Extenders. This was much easier than in XP, as no additional application needed to be run. As I turned on each Xbox and tried to connect to Media Center, the Grand Theater popped up a request for the 8 digit code displayed by the Xbox. After the code was entered, the PC did a setup routine and about two minutes later the Xbox could be used as a Media Center Extender.

With basic functionality of the Grand Theater now approximating my old XP Media Center I decided it was time to try copying over my old recorded TV shows. I intended to just remove the data drive from the Dell box and hook it up as a third drive in the new Velocity Micro PC, but quickly discovered that there did not seem to be an appropriate power connector for a third SATA drive. So I powered the drive from the Dell box and hooked its SATA data connection to the Velocity box and proceeded to copy about 420GB of recorded TV. It was estimated to take about 150 minutes and is still going as I write.

Lastly, I set up series recordings on the new Media Center by accessing it via remote desktop from my office PC. I happened to use the Small Business Server facility for doing this (as it required no set up), but it is probably possible to do without SBS as well.

So far so good, based on stories like this, I am only cautiously optimistic about the scheduled Cablecard install tomorrow, but I hopefully things will go well. Even if they don't I no worse off with the new PC than with the old, if need be I can still repurpose the old PC (for my wife's office) while waiting for any Cablecard issues to be addressed.

Ok. maybe not, but I am intrigued by articles like "Apple TV hacked for RSS and emulation, plus bounty for USB drive support" on Engadget. This ability to modify the platform has been one of the distinctive features of the Home Theater PC.

Assuming that Apple actually makes money on each Apple TV sold (in contrast to the money that Microsoft loses on each Xbox 360 and makes up in licensing fees for content), there is really no reason for Apple not to embrace modifications like the one in this article.

With enough modifications, Apple TV could be a decent mid-range box for getting PC content onto your TV, i.e. RSS feeds, online video, web sites with decent 10 foot user interfaces. The only thing it would lack would be robust high definition content playback (see Ars Technica). But that might be ok for only $300 for many people.

Of course I suspect that most the people it might be "ok" for are probably not the ones that will be modding their Apple TV.

Vista combined with the Core Xbox 360 is more robust platform, but for one who needs to use a wireless connection between the media player and the PC, the Xbox becomes more expensive. Similarly, the ability of Apple TV to cache content on its hard drive might make it more reliable in some ways than the Vista-Xbox combination. I'll be interested to see how people end up using Apple TV.

In any event, if the mods to Apple TV continue it will be nice to have another media player that people can program to their taste.

My new Velocity Micro Media Center PC with dual Cablecard tuners is on its way and due to arrive on Monday. I hope to get save settings and recorded shows moved to a new drive this weekend, set up the new PC Monday evening (swapping it into the place of my existing Media Center PC in our basement server room), try out the ability to view unencrypted QAM, then get two new Cablecard installed by Comcast on Tuesday.

I have my fingers crossed given the experiences of some others out there!

I certainly have more confidence knowing that Velocity Micro's tech support is available to me rather than that of Dell or HP.

One answer to the above question: the potential to get user requested features put into the application relatively quickly!

J. River Media Center is a full-featured application that maintains a database of users' media and allows the playback of that media. It also has flexible and extensive features that enable it to function as different types of media servers. It may not meet your needs but it has met mine for the the last five years are so. Here are some of the features that I think make it unique:

• The ability to connect remotely to media stored on a home server (like Orb, except it is not web based and doesn't have the bugs orb has)
• The ability to act as a UPnP server for networked audio devices like the Roku Soundbridge.
• The ability to customize the menu structure shown to those UPnP devices.
• A robust "smartlist" functionality that enables me do set up a preset on the Roku to do things like (i) play a contemporary album chosen at random, in track order, or (ii) play a one hour mix of 40% blues and 60% jazz.
• A decent 10 foot interface.
• The ability to play almost any audio or video format.
• An extremely fast database (that put WMP 10 to shame).
• Robust tagging functions for all types of media.
• The ability to have a common media library index shared among all the PCs on a network.

But as I mentioned above, and the reason I linked to their forums is that they generate new builds of the software at an amazing pace, almost all have some new feature or improvement rather than just bug fixes. Many of the new features are direct responses to requests circulated in the forums.

Case in point: they just added a feature at my suggestion that makes managing a library shared among multiple PCs on the network, while running a media server much easier: the ability to specify that instances of Media Center are limited to read only access. This frees up write access for any PC I happen to be using at the time. I suggested this April 3 within two days the feature was in the application!

I ran across a nasty Quicken bug this last night and this morning. When I went to run Quicken 2007 verion 4 (the version that runs under Vista), I got a message saying that Quicken needed to be reinstalled to run. So I used the control panel to repair the installation. The "only" problem was that I couldn't see or accept any downloaded transactions. They were there and Quicken told be they were there, but the downloaded transactions sections showed nothing. I was finally able to fix the problem, but doing a complete uninstall, then reinstall and resitore from a backup. Now everything is working fine, but this experience made me wish there was some decent competition in the personal finance application space.

Oh, another problem I'm having with Quicken 2007 under Vista is that column widths don't adjust properly, they either collapse (and can't be restored) on won't move at all. I haven't tried duplicating this on another PC to see if this might be related to the nVidia drivers I'm using.

Steve Makofsky correctly points out in the comments below (and on his blog) that the plethora of codecs makes life difficult for those of us who try to keep a central stash of media played on multiple devices.

I'm not quite sure how a keeping everything on an iPod would solve that problem (Although maybe he's just saying if he could plug an iPod into any device we would standardize around those codecs.). But the larger point that the plethora of codecs in existence is a royal pain is certainly true.

In my case, the formats I store media in has been driven by what my networked devices will play and my choices of networked devices have been limited by what types of files already exist in my library. For example:

• My extensive collection of music ripped in WMA means that I need audio players that support that format-- and is an additional reason I have never purchased an iPod.
• Before I started listening to podcasts while commuting I seldom listened to music on my smartphones because high bitrate rips were too inconvenient to rip, and memory cards were too expensive.
• I have not ripped but a handful of DVDs because the Xbox 360 won't natively play VOB files. Those that I have ripped for use in MyMovies have either been converted to MPEG2 using VideoRedo or played and transcoded concurrently using Transcode 360.
• My photos are all organized in J River Media Center which (in addition to its library) uses a form of embedded XML in JPEGs that no one else seems to use. If I want to convert everything to be used in the XML used by the new Vista Media Center (and Adobe Photoshop Elements) I'm going to have a major project on my hands.

At least all my media is stored locally, I suspect having it only accessible via certain web applications and their APIs would add yet another layer of complexity.

Tangentially related to this topic, I've come across Heywatch.com, which will do video transcoding for you. I believe you can even give it an RSS feed URL and get transcoded videos from another Heywatch RSS feed. One of these days I want to try using this as an alternative to Transcode360 to allow me to watch a variety of QuickTime encoded video podcasts.

I don't own an iPod, an probably never will in anything like their current form. The reason has less to do with the device itself that my commitment to keeping data in only one place. The success of the iPod shows that my commitment places me firmly in the minority, but I prefer to think of it as the leading edge (with all of the problems that entails!).

This post was inspired by Steve Makofsky's comment that "I would have been much happier if Apple just released an iPod High Definition docking cradle. Imagine an enhanced video dock that had component, HDMI, optical audio and S-Video output that I could walk up to and just drop my iPod into. Put the iPod interface onto the TV with a CoverFlow UI, and that's all I would have ever needed. Heck, I'd buy a dock for every TV then. "

This struck me as a huge step backward-- the equivalent of a video sneakernet. Then it struck me that this is true of many of the other iPod accessories out there, from speaker docks to docks in cars. They all rely on a user physically carrying a hard drive with their data around to get access to it.

Our house operates very differently:

• All music is kept on a central server (running J River's Media Center) and can be played from any PC, Xbox 360 Roku Soundbridge in the house. All of the PCs and Soundbridges have access to customized menus that only need to be programmed once to be accessed from all of these locations. I can also play the music from my server at home using my PC at work.
• All podcast subscriptions are handed by J River's Media Center as well. It automatically downloads, adds information to and autoexpires numerous audio and video podcasts.
• All our home videos get put on the server as well. They can be viewed from any PC or Xbox 360 in the house.
• Our kids movies are on a central server and can be viewed from any Xbox 360 in the house using the MyMovies addin for Media Center.
• All our TV is recorded using a Media Center PC, because of the central location, we can watch shows anywhere in the house and change series recording options from anywhere in the house as well.
• All of the data files on our PCs are kept on a server running Small Business Server 2003. This enables easy access to our files by logging in to any of the five client PCs in the house.
• Likewise, because we also run Exchange on the server, we can access email and other Outlook data from any PC in the house and have easy access to the same from PCs outside the house using Outlook web access.
• Using Orb, I we were able to get (often interrupted) access to our media files from our cell phones obviating some of the need for carrying media files with us.

All of these systems rely on accessing one set of data, media etc. on a central server. The main advantage is that there is only one copy of the data to worry about editing, reorganizing, maintaining, backing up etc. Additional clients can be added easily.

Imagine having to do this with iPods.

All that being said, this approach has not been without its hiccups-- the systems running on our twin servers (Media Center and SBS 2003) are prone to hiccup from time to time and take more sophistication and time  to maintain than the average use is ready for-- but I don't those problems are inherent in this approach, just in our family being on the "leading edge." There is no reason centralized systems couldn't be easier, e.g. use Windows Home Server and hosted Exchange in lieu of SBS.

Even if keeping and accessing data on a server were simpler, the iPod/sneakernet approach would probably remain compelling to many people. I'd like to understand why.

In thinking about the Xbox 360 Elite, I decided it isn't really something I'm that interested in. I like the black case better than the white case, but I don't really mind the while case of the Premium 360s I already have. I don't have 1080p TVs so the HDMI out isn't that valuable for me. I don't download much video content from Xbox live marketplace so the 120GB hard drive isn't worth that much to me. I play games and using my Xbox 360s as Media Center Extenders, and the Premium is just fine for that.

Note that game players don't really get that much from the Elite. The real value of the Elite is the 120GB hard drive and that is really only useful for people who download a bunch of videos from Xbox Live marketplace (and perhaps ultimately for IPTV). The only advantage to gamers is that they could keep a bunch of demos and trailers on their system longer (i.e. before deleting them to make room for new content)-- something that really doesn't strike me as all that valuable.

A quick aside on HDMI: for the most part, HDMI probably isn't that valuable either. HDMI has the potential to introduce a bunch of new problems, contrary to its promise of making everything simpler. Most receivers that even handle HDMI don't do a great job of switching it. The only real 1080p content (which HDMI can handle but component can't) aside from a few games is on HD DVD and Blue Ray Discs. I suspect that HDMI will gradually become more valuable as more components in the AV chain support it and when there is more 1080p content-- but that day is not here yet.