Peoples Republic Of

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.

Libraries are a pretty cool feature of Windows 7. By adding folders to a library, or creating a library, they allow you to aggregate content from multiple folders, even network shares. For example a Music Library can contain my personal music files as well as those that are on our SBS 2008 server in a network share. Searches can be limited to a library and the files within can be sorted by things like album regardless of what folder the file happens to be in. Libraries can be used more generally for documents.

I find them most useful for aggregating personal and shared files in this manner.

There are a couple of nice discussions of libraries here and here.

The only unfortunate thing is that they appear to be specific to each user on each PC that is a part of our network. It would be nice if certain common network shares could be automatically added to all libraries automatically, but that does not appear to be possible, at least in a domain.

Instead to create libraries for the five users in our family on all of the five PCs that we share requires setting up a set of libraries 25 times: once for each of the users on each of the five PCs!

Libraries in a Windows Server domain, where “My Documents” folders for each user are redirected to the server, should allow users to have common libraries and source folders accessible from whatever PC in the domain they log on to (at least with respect to folders that are network shares)!

Here’s hoping this appears as an add-on to Windows Server 2008.

There is a nice The Digital Lifestyle post that describes some very useful features for easily skipping ahead multiple commercials or to a place X minutes into any video file. It works with extenders as well:

Enter a number and press the skip forward button. This will then move the playback forward by that number multiplied by the skip amount (30 seconds). For example, enter 10 and press skip forward and it’ll move by 5 minutes (10x30 = 300 seconds = 5 minutes).

Also:

Just type in a number of minutes and press Play. Then, regardless of how far through the video you already are, the playback point will instantly go to that number of minutes from the start. So, enter 65 and press Play and you'll instantly be a hour and five minutes from the start of the video.

 

I discovered this evening that my nice new Windows 7 installation would not search for files on our servers network shares. The problem appeared to be that for some reason the Windows Search Service on our Small Business Server 2008 machine needed to be manually installed.

Fortunately Olav Tollefsen provides instructions here on just how to do that.

Given the importance of search, I don’t know why this role isn’t installed on Small Business Server installations out of the box.

We are upgrading all of our home PCs to Windows 7 Professional (not Home Premium because we also run Small Business Server 2008). We are doing in-place upgrades rather than clean installs because unless there is a problem, a clean install is just too big a hassle.

The in place upgrade requires several hours (and minimal attention during that time). In contrast, a clean install would require time consuming manual reinstallations of 10-20 applications per PC (more for my own personal PC). Those would take several hours sitting in front of each PC after the install.

I fully expect that were I to do do, I would probably get some marginal advantage in terms of speed or reliability. However, given that (if the in place upgrade is similar to Vista) the in place upgrade basically installs Windows 7 and then ports over the installed applications, I suspect those marginal advantages are not that great.

When I have some significant problem, I may end up doing a clean install of Windows 7, but I see no reason not to postpone that day—maybe until we replace the PC in question. Until that day, I’m betting that my in place upgrade serves me well—and if it doesn’t, what have I lost?

In preparing one of our home laptop PC’s from its Windows 7 upgrade yesterday, I was surprised to discover that it had less than 20GB remaining on its 80GB hard drive. I was surprised because: almost all data is kept on our server not each PC; and this PC this had not had that many applications installed even though it has been operating since around the time Vista came out.

A common explanation for such bloat is log files (on our Media Center PC, I recently discovered that Orb had left 80GB of log files), but that was not the case here.

There were about 6 GB of system restores (which I would delete using the More Options tab of Vista’s Disk Cleanup.

However, most surprising were the WinSXS and CSC subdirectories of the Windows directory. Each had about 10GB worth of files. They keep, respectively, alternate copies of DLLs and offline files. I decided not to touch the WinSXS directory. As this PC no longer uses offline files (cached copies of files available elsewehere on the network) I elected to delete this directory—but with only limited success due to file security constraints that became a pain to override.

One of the more annoying aspects of having a home network with multiple PCs is the annoyance that is the task of keeping them all updated with the latest patches both for Windows and for their applications.

Most of the commonly used applications seem to need regular patches, e.g. iTunes, J River Media Center, Adobe Acrobat.

The Windows patches are generally handled thru WSUS (Windows Server Update Service) running on our Small Business Server 2008 server, but even those require approval of patches and often patches require a PC to be restarted or make a PC slow down while they are installed.

On the server itself, patches often requires a restart-- a 10-15 minute process best done late at night that requires restarting a few applications that don’t run as services.

In general the patching process should be far less intrusive than it currently is and require far less time.

A week after the upgrade of our Media Center PC, some things are working better, but there have also been some significant hiccups.

First, the on-motherboard audio system (soundcard equivalent) is now functioning properly. Upon install, Windows 7 had not recognized the existence of any audio device despite functioning perfectly under Windows Vista. After the round of updates and the reboot associated with Microsoft’s “patch Tuesday” earlier this week, the SigmaTel audio device appeared in Device Manager as if it had always been there.

The hiccups were that the installation of those patchesand the automatic restart also resulted in a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) linked to a power management driver. Or as the Reliability Monitor put it “The computer has rebooted from a bugcheck.  The bugcheck was: 0x0000009f (0x00000003, 0x85277690, 0x82d44ae0, 0x86ff02c0).”

After the restart, I also had to run Windows Media Player again (which acted as if it had not been run before) on the Media Center PC to get our media center extenders to play audio files.

I hope these issues don’t recur the next time a restart is required for Windows Update.

Here are the things I did after setting up Windows 7 Media Center to better the user experience:

Set up media libraries for each of Music, Videos, Pictures and Movies by deleting the default locations for these files and adding the locations where we store these files on our SBS 2008 server. Note that as we have over 30,000 such files, adding these files was a multi-hour process for each extender (and the process must be repeated for each extender. Even after this, albumn art takes a while to display the first time creating a somewhat sluggish initial experience.

Installed mcShoutcast. This add-in provides access to a bunch of internet radio stations from the Extras menu. It also adds an “Info” extra that will supply photos and other information to complement whatever music is currently playing.

Installed channel logos for the TC guide. These are both a functional and an aesthetic addition.

Deleted all the channels we don’t subscribe to or don’t want to ever see (e.g. Spanish language channels) by going to Tasks\Settings\TV\Guide\Edit Channels and unchecking those channels to be removed. This makes the Movie Guide useful because it no longer shows movies from premium channels we do not subscribe to.

Set up the color coding of shows in the TV guide by going to Tasks\Settings\TV\Guide\Guide Page Options and checking the option to apply colored backgrounds to shows.

Set up a group of core channels that broadcast a significant amount of HD content as a group of favorite channels by going to Tasks\Settings\TV\Guide\Edit Favorite Lineups.

Soon I also plan to combine channels that are present on both the CableCard and ATSC (digital broadcast) tuners and then set tuner priorities to the ATSC tuner. This will hopefully get me non-DRM’d recordings of the shows when possible. But that was a little too much work for now.

Here are a few of the enhancements to Media Center in Windows 7 that I have been enjoying so far:

Better conflict resolution between series recordings. Now all of the shows that overlap in a block are identified and you can choose which among them you want to record throughout the length of the overlap, not just the current portion of the overlap (which is seemly how Vista Media Center handled such conflicts). I have read that Media Center will not pick up the rest of a partial recording later if a conflict (including use of live TV) prevented a complete recording.

When setting up a series to record, you can now specify that HD showings are preferred. This is not really an issue for us, where all tuners (2 ATSC and 2 CableCard) always have access to the HD version of a show if at all. But if we had some NTSC tuners, this would allow us to record a show in standard definition in lieu of missing it entirely in cases where higher priority shows were on at the same time.

The guide is much improved. Channel logos make it much easier to identify channels (something I would not have believed before). Channel logos aren’t available out of the box, but the APIs that make them possible are and can easily be installed by downloading myChannelLogos.

The guide can also been enhanced by turning on color coding by type of show. The is set by going to Tasks\Settings\TV\Guide\Guide Page Options and checking the option to apply colored backgrounds to shows.

You can also set up favorite lists of channels, so that when viewing the guide you only see those channels. This filtering is pretty important when dealing with several hundred available cable channels (which we have on using just the first tier (beyond basic) of Comcast’s digital cable service.

With several hundred cable channels to choose from, finding a channel you want an be a pain, but now you can search for channel from the guide instead of having to look for it manually.

I can now easily play all my video podcasts (vodcasts?) using our Xbox 360 media center extenders. Before, quicktime or Mpeg 4 encoded videos could not be played back using the Xbox 360 acting as an extender. I am also looking forward to not transcoding our home movies (which are all taken in MPEG 4 format).

The Movies section of the Media Center Start menu has made MyMovies unnecessary for the time being. I look forward to version 3 of that application, but until that time I can still now easily access our ripped movies. This would not have been possible in Vista (and was the reason we used MyMovies.

There are several interface differences that give access more information, e.g. moving the selection to a previously recorded show displays a thumbnail of the show at the bottom of the screen along with more information on that episode. Selecting an episode to play allows access to a variety of additional information and actions with respect to that show by moving left or right (similar to the type of menuing (pivot views) in the Music Section. That information now includes a “Cast + Crew” section with hyperlinks to other content involving listed cast and crew members. I don’t remember any similar functionality in Vista Media Center, but maybe it was buried in a way that I never noticed it.

These are just the features I have noticed so far in our setup which consists of a PC in the basement that acts as a server and Xbox 360’s hooked up to TVs throughout the house. This configuration means that many of the new features that are not available on extenders, e.g. thumbnail views when using the scrub bar at the bottom of video files when using the mouse to select a new position in a video are not things we have been able to use. Even for us, there are some significant enhancements that make Windows 7 a nice upgrade to Media Center.

Yesterday evening, my package for the Windows 7 launch party I agreed to host arrived containing a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate. After everyone else in the house had gone to bed I began the process of upgrading the Windows Vista Ultimate installed on our Media Center PC to Windows 7. I did the in-place upgrade so as to preserve the ability to watch all of the shows recorded using our twin OCUR CableCard tuners (which put DRM on everything).

The install went relatively smoothly, taking less than two hours. A word to the wise: take out the Windows 7 DVD before the first reboot or you risk booting from the DVD when the PC restarts. Other than that the install process required little attention beyond answering a handful of questions at the beginning.

Here is what went well:

The upgrade left the PC connected to our home domain (we run Small Business Server 2008 as well).

TV shows recorded with CableCard tuners under Vista play back fine under Windows 7.

Scheduled recordings also carried over, but not counts of how many shows had been recorded. So if I have Media Center set up to keep only five episodes of a series, Windows 7 applies that limit only to episodes recorded under the new Windows 7 installation not those recorded under the old Vista installation, i.e. the Vista recorded shows don’t seem to get deleted automatically.

Extenders did not need to be reconnected. On their initial connection to the Windows 7 Media Center PC, they downloaded new software and connected without any need to reconfigure anything.

“Extras” that aren’t designed for extenders (e.g. that rely on capabilities missing on extenders) don’t seem to show up on extenders. I do not recall this being the case under Vista.

Here were the glitches I have discovered so far:

Strangely, Windows 7 did not recognize the onboard soundcard in my media center PC, necessitating hooking up a spare USB sound device. This had not been flagged in compatibility test I had run previously. This proved to be important because Windows Media Center won’t play back recorded TV files without an audio output device installed.

All of the non-TV media on network shares that had been part of the libraries needed to be added again using each extender. Fortunately, the process of selecting network shares to add to media libraries has been streamlined, but it still a multi-hour process to add about 30,000 audio files to the Music Library. The process of adding files to media libraries doesn’t appear to have improved significantly in Windows 7, but I hope to pbe proven wrong about this.

MyMovies 2.56 works, but does not appear in the main Media Center menu. (I noticed by perusing the MyMovies forum that others have had this problem with an upgrade but not a clean install.) Hopefully My Movies 3.00 (due to be released October 22, 2009) will not suffer from this problem. Fortunately the new Movies menu item built in to Windows 7 did a nice job of scanning the directories containing my movies and picking up cover art, making MyMovies less important.

Before playing any music on extenders, you must first try playing music on the main Media Center PC, this does some necessary initialization of Windows Media player. If you don’t do that, I discovered that attempting to play music files on extenders generates a cryptic error message.

Overall I am pretty pleased with how well the upgrade went. More to come as I explore some of the new features in Windows 7 Media Center.

Two things:

• Don’t jostle a woman carrying a pot on her head
• Most women are in league with vigilantes

Some real life lessons here.

Cablewholesale.com recently wrote a really informative piece on HDMI 1.4, which I highly recommed reading. It discusses the new features to be offered in the new spec, including an audio return channel so that no longer will you TV need a separate audio connection to your receiver when playing audio that comes from the TV tuner.

BTW, I’ve purchased many cables from Cablewholesale.com over the years, especially speaker cables and banana clips for them. They were around long before Monoprice.

With the imminent arrival of Assassin’s Creed 2 in November, I figured I would try out playing the original Assassin’s Creed released in November 2007. Five hours in, I am really enjoying the game.

I had originally avoided purchasing the game because many people found it its mission far too repetitious. Although that may prove to be a problem, it hasn’t yet for me and it it does, I’ll just stop playing and catch up with the rest of the story via YouTube. Given that the game now costs $15 (like-new shipped on Half.com), I have already gotten my money’s worth.

Nevertheless, I expect to get many more hours out of the game because its gameplay mechanics are pretty satisfying and fun:

• It’s fun to be able to jump effortlessly over rooftops and obstacles.
• It’s fund to be a badass fighter and assassin in combat. The animations are excellent, the mehanics are not too complicated. The difficulty ramps up nicely. It reminds me of the combat in Fable 2.
• The open world nature of the game is appropriate. You feel like you have a fair amount of freedom.

The premise of the game world (reliving memories of a furtive assassin) is well adapted to the limitations of the game, which makes the game itself more enjoyable. For example, the inability to interact with any people on the street isn’t really bothersome because the nature of the game dictates that you try to keep a low profile. The last thing you feel like doing is drawing attention to yourself by talking to strangers in strange cities, so your inability to do so doesn’t draw attention to that limitation of the game model in the same way it does in an RPG where you collect information by talking to everyone. In addition, when playing the game, you are supposed to be reliving memories of one of your ancestors, which makes a nice organic explanation for why you can pick up from the last autosave after dying.

I don’t know if I would feel the same way about the game if I had paid $60 for it, but I value my time more than $60 and I don’t regret at all the time I’ve invested so far.

First the good. Unbeknownst to me, the iPhone is better than Windows Mobile and Blackberry OS at listening to an MP3 that is available for download on the web. To listen to any podcast available for download, all I need to do is click on the download link and the iPhone’s Safari browser becomes a Quicktime player plays an MP3 of the podcast. I can even move a scrub bar to move to a differently location in the file—all without downloading the entire file. This proves quite convenient for listening to new podcasts that I have not yet sync’d with the iPhone.

Alas, using Orb (via the Orb Live app) is not so great. Orb allows listening to all the media on my home server via remote devices. The interface is better than the web interface I used to access Orb on Windows Mobile, but there appears to be no function to resume listening to the last stream. This makes it really inconvenient when I temporarily lose an internet connection (which happens more often with AT&T than it did with Sprint).

In my last post I explained why sharing a media library between PCs is a really useful thing to be able to do.

Here is how that capability is implemented in J River’s Media Center 14 (MC) and used on our house: We have a server in the unfinished part of our basement designed for (mostly) unattended operation. MC runs constantly on that server and acts to download audio and video podcasts when they become available, to serve as the UPnP (DLNA) server that provides media to our three Roku Soundbridges, and acts a Library Server for the five PCs scattered thoughout our house that also run MC. When MC starts on those PCs, they contact the version of MC on running on the server and download its library providing each PC with the same metadata on media files, the same playlists, the same algorithmically generated smartlists and the same view schemes (customized drill down menus for finding media) as on the server. I can also connect to the Library Server from the PC in my office outside our home.

What is new in version 14 of MC that has prompted me to write these posts is the ability for versions of MC running on the client PCs to make changes to the library on the server: at the end of each session on a client I select to menu item Library Sync and the changes I have made to the library on the client PC are replicated on the server. (Without this ability in prior versions I had to access the server itself before making library changes either physically, by remote desktop, or by ending the instance of MC running on the server so I could edit the library (which resided on a network share) on a client.)

Now my wife will be able to make a playlist or rip a CD herself, something too cumbersome to do before. Now I can easily create smartlists from any PC in the house. This change has made a big difference in the usefulness of the shared library.

That is a big step forward in the practical enjoyment of our media!

Sharing media like music, video and photos should be easy, right? Just put it all on a networked hard drive (e.g. on a server or network attached storage box) and get access to your media from multiple devices around your house.

Unfortunately, that addresses the sharing of files not the “library” that organizes those files in ways you might find useful, allows for fast access to the file you want, let’s you add additional information on each file. Even if your organizational needs are pedestrian, almost all media players have a library that acts as an index to allow easy access to the files you want to play. Without that library finding media files would be as cumbersome as finding a file in Windows folders and maintaining a structure for thoe folders (not impossible, but not exactly easy either).

In addition to the index function, libraries may contain playlists of favorite music, smartlists that generate playlists on the fly in accordance with a given algorithm (e.g. play a hour of my favorite music, play podcasts that came out today), additional information about files (e.g. what people are featured in a home video, when a file was last played) that is not embedded in the file itself, thumbnail images that provide a graphical representation of the file (e.g. an album cover or a frame of video).

Most media player software only allows the library to be edited on one PC, the one on which the media player is running. Of course you can run copies of the media player software on multiple PCs, but they usually then each have their own library meaning that if you want to add playlist for use anywhere in your house, you need to make changes on each PC that will be using the library. With networked audio devices like the Squeezebox or Roku Soundbridge, the library is kept on the one PC that acts as a server and changes can only be made there—but they show up when the devices access the server.

This is a serious limitation because often the computer on which the library is present is not the one on which one would prefer to edit that library, for example it make be hooked up to a TV, off in a closet acting as a dedicated server, or in the office of one family member.

What would be nice would be to have a media library with a client-server architecture that allows instances of the media player application running on PCs around the house to easily make changes to a central library shared by all the PCs.

With the release of J River’s Media Center version 14, we are much closer to that goal in ways I’ll detail in my next post.

I recently discovered that when running J River’s Media Center on Windows Server 2008 (specifically Small Business Server 2008) no WMA files showed up inside the application (in the Drives and Devices view); nor could such files be played, imported or streamed as MP3s to our Roku Soundbridges.

After a couple of hours of work, I discovered that the problem lay in the fact that Windows Server 2008 does not have Windows Media Player installed by default. Instead it must be installed by “enabling the Vista user experience.” Enabling the Vista user experience is fairly straightforward, although it does require a reboot. The instructions can be found here.

Opponents of the healthcare reform legislation in Congress are rightly accused of making arguments based on misinformation.

But there is a good reason why they are having some success in doing so, and why the tactic isn’t totally unfair: the proponents of reform are incredibly slippery with respect to what such reform will entail, making a variety of inconsistent claims or claims that are little more than aspirations.

It is pretty hard for opponents of healthcare reform to debate confident assertions that healthcare reform will be all things to all people: that we’ll have better coverage for more people that costs less. Who could disagree with that? If one makes the (correct) natural counterargument is that it is extremely unlikely that we could achieve that result through a new government initiative, that sounds like defeatism.

That response also prompts an outpouring of assertions and analysis from political advocates of the current healthcare reform proposal that purport to show that this really is possible. The problem is that those claims are pretty slippery and misleading themselves. Keith Hennessey does a great job of describing those claims in a post contains links to 10 Hennessey  posts on the same subject. (Hennessey’s description of why healthcare reform couldn’t be passed through reconciliation (which would not require 60 votes in the Senate) is also excellent and analysis I have not seen elsewhere.)

At this point, opponents could complain about the nature of those assertions and analysis, but that sounds like carping.

It appears that a more successful rhetorical response is to make claims about what is really entailed by healthcare reform that the proponents are not mentioning and in fact even disclaim. That is what is going on at the town meetings we see and it is getting traction because of the inherent unpersuasiveness of the analysis behind the case for current progressive healthcare reform legislation—including the implausibility of various assertions about what the results will be (e.g. if you currently have insurance or Medicare nothing will change). People don’t believe the assertions about what will be in healthcare reform, so many are assuming the worst (with some cause!),

If the case for such changes to healthcare did not have significant problems, the scaremongering at town meetings would not be successful. The fact that it is having success tells us something significant about the case for progressive healthcare reform.