
Having a Media Center PC somewhere in the house and extend the content from it using an Xbox 360 is absolutely a good idea. But does it work? Chris Anderson thinks it does.

Having a Media Center PC somewhere in the house and extend the content from it using an Xbox 360 is absolutely a good idea. But does it work? Chris Anderson thinks it does.
I have been fortunate enough to attend and present at the TiDE conference hosted by Lillehammer University College. Here are some recommended links for the people that attended my presentation:
Digital Rights Management:
How bob the millionaire became a pirate
BMW don’t get it
Placeshifting – your media everywhere (ORB)
Remixing and open APIs:
Give the kids something to remix
Panoramio – place your pictures on Google maps
BBC Backstage
BBC Mood News
Flickr hacks
Google Earth Hacks
Media centers:
The Media Center Software List
NRK makes one of the world’s largest Media Center services
Apple Media Center – At last!
Google Video and Media Center Edition
The Media Center Blogs
Usability:
Bad usability and the nokia memory card
An example of good and bad usability design
Why your camera phone will outperform your compact camera – bigtime!
Some words on Flickr, blogging, RSS, del.icio.us etc:
Help for “the left behindâ€
Top 10 essential blogs
YouTube and the Flickrs of video
Insane, still slightly interesting experiment:
Everything you would ever want to see!
Other stuff:
The Gizmo Project
Flickr related tag browser
Picture: The streets of Lillehammer

Thanks to Oyvind I have just installed Mint on my server. This gives me very nice statistics from my site. It runs locally and stores the data in a mySQL database on my server. It works in realtime and shows statistics as people browse your site.
One very nice feature is that Mint supports Peppers. Peppers are plugins made by all kinds of very cool people.
Some good peppers:
Referrer Rollup
Gives you a very nice and tidy list of all your referrers
xxx Strong Mint
Show the IP of your visitors
Sparks!
Sparks! visualizes your visitor data.
Adsense Click Pepper
Get valuable info on how people click on your adsense ads
Foreign Pepper
Show where your visitors are coming from
Feedburner Stats Pepper
Show stats and circulation from your Feedburner RSS-feed
Fresh View Pepper
Fresh View uses XML-based SVG to visualize your Mint visitor data.
Google Images Pepper
Tracks hits from Google Images and let you know about the most popular images on your site. This one is supposed to be replaced by the Referrer Filter pepper, but that one did not work on my first install – so I kept the Google Images pepper.
Trends
Trends analyzes your website’s usage over a set period of time.
Some of the Windows Media Center remotes has the ability to control other hardware in addition to the Media Center. The most common one is the one in this picture. On that one you can program the “TV”-button and the Volume-button. Most likely you would want to control the ON/OFF-function on your TV and the volume on your amplifier.
This is how you do it (from the MCE Remote Manual):
Update2: The manual is no longer available from Microsoft
Update:
Link to the manual (PDF).
Continue reading “How to program the buttons on your MCE Remote”
Windows Media Center edition records video in MPEG2 wrapped in a format called DVR-MS. Basically a plain MPEG2-file with some metadata. I can’t understand why Microsoft has not included a tool to automatically recompress DVR-MS to Windows Media Video 9 in Media Center Edition.
But, as always – if it is something that people want, people make it.
Just a quick list of alternatives:
AutoDVRConvert
DVR-2-WMV
Tsunami MPEG Xpress
dCut
PowerCompress
GraphRenderer
CyberLink PowerDirector
PQ DVD to iPod Video Converter (Can convert DVR-MS according to spec, but look in the comments here in this post, seems like a user have had problems and that the DVR-MS conversion doesn’t work)
VideoReDo
DVR-MS Toolbox
I know that I have forgotten many tools that does this kind of stuff. In addition to the fact that I am going to expand this list please feel free to comment and suggest other tools.
I remember a comment in a forum at a point where the talented Mr. Mastiff posted some pictures from his impressive home theatre. He had a question about some technical issues and the first answer was something like:
“You should not concentrate on the tecnical problems. You should have a serious talk with your interior designer.”
I would agree on that comment, but interior design is something very personal and something that many of us have quite a bit of possibilities controlling. And we do. And the brilliant Mastiff, owner of the home theatre in question here likes it. So, he don’t need to talk with an interior designer.
I follow huge amounts of home theatre blogs and forums. It is a strong tradition to post pictures and specs of home theatres on the net. That’s a very nice tradition and helps people solve problems, get inspiration and comment on the work that has been done. And, if you look past the technical issues, these pictures can be quite interesting cultural studies as well.
I used a picture from our own living room in a previous post. One of the comments was:
“Wait, your LIVING room? How in the world did sneak a conference table and chairs into your living room without getting thrown out of the house!”
Fantastic. And I can understand that comment as well. Still, urban Scandinavian interior design is something quite different from American interior design or rural Scandinavian interior design. And, fortunately your own home is something that you can control quite well. Mastiff likes coulour and pinewood. I like black, white and clean surfaces. Now have fun looking at some Norwegian Home Theatres: AVForum min hjemmekino. Never mind the strange norwegian language. It’s the pictures you’re after.
I have posted on Oyvind’s Amazing Circles before. I could not resist and went through his tutorial. The method is ridiculously easy and once you start making circles of your pictures it is actually quite addictive! You find the Eirikso Amazing Circles Photo Set here. You can do this using Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. The Amazing Circles Flickr Group is growing and now counts more than 350 circles.
I just got a question about presenting software and how to explain certain features without using these hated bullet points.
Let’s take an example. I am going to present four of the features in the video editing software Sony Vegas Video. Worst case scenario is this slide:
This one is slightly better and works fine as an executive summary that you can hand out after the presentation:
And another one, also good as an executive summary:
But, in the presentation you are going to tell people that this software has “Unlimited amount of video tracks”, “Simple integrated video trimmer” etc.
So you make four slides. One for each point:
If its possible to walk up to the picture and point at it you can also do this on one slide.
I have been doing a lot of presentations lately. So, inspired by the classic Steve Jobs and Bill Gates comparison, and after reading these comments over at Presentation Zen:
If someone emailed you both presentations, you’d probably be more likely to make out Bill Gates’ message.
How would you scape from bullet points and charts if you are presenting a technical subject?
I’ll have to throw in my little presentation guide as well. Hell, I’ll even give you an example. I am going to show you the presentation I use to tell students about pixels, colour schemes, dynamic range and a complete explanation of run length encoding of pictures.
Without one single bullet point.
The typical bullet point hell version of one of the slides would be like this:
Nicely done with a horrible default gradient background and an ugly font.
The first quote from the comments is answered by my presentation rule number one:
If someone that did not attend to my presentation can understand anything if I mail them my slides I have made a really bad set of slides. Really bad.
Why the heck would I bother spending money on a ticket to London and do a presentation if I could just mail the people my presentation and they would get the same? Ladies and gentlemen: slides are an illustration to what you are saying.
…but what about the people that did not attend? If they are important you’ll have to do another presentation or you’ll have to produce a document that people are supposed to read. A set of slides is not a document that people are supposed to read.
I’ll show this with my example.
Continue reading “How to avoid making boring presentations”
Another reason to think twice about DRM on all content.
The BBC has an interesting article based on research from The Pew American and Internet Life Project.
Mainstream media is already responding to adults who want to have more power over their multimedia content, enjoying it when they want to, where they want to.
But traditional media companies needed to rethink their relationship with this powerful emerging audience, said Mr Rainie.
“These teens would say that the companies that want to provide them entertainment and knowledge should think of their relationship with teens as one where they are in a conversational partnership, rather than in a strict producer-consumer, arms-length relationship,” he said.