After reading this (norwegian) post things start to be more official. A cinematographer called “johna” states that a movie he has photographed will be the first Scandinavian movie released in WMVHD. I have an anticipation about the very interesting fact that I will be one of the first persons to have a look at this WMVHD version of the movie.
I promise to post back pretty soon!
Jon Bøhmer just pointed me to this. I can’t let that one go without a comment. But, I’ll make it a short one.
1. Yes, I totally agree that the ugly, noisy, unstable and $1000 PC will not be a success in everyone’s living room
2. But this one can turn into a classic:
“…the vast majority of Americans will never — I will repeat that — never think of the PC as an entertainment device. The PC is for work and the TV is for relaxation. End of story.”
The media center is not about a noisy $1000 PC in your living room. It’s about an architecture that lets you access your media in a user friendly and convenient way. It’s about the fact that young people can not think of music, video and pictures that is stored anywhere else than on a computer or on a network. It’s about a platform that accepts content and services from flexible feeds and different content creators. It’s about the fact that the computer eventually will be more user friendly and convenient than loads of different boxes, cables, remotes and user manuals.
“The PC is for work and the TV is for relaxation.”
That is if you have a time machine that can drag you back to the ninties and let you stay there.
I continue my quest to find a PDA based remote solution that lets me control my music without having to pick up the stylus on the PDA. I have talked about other solutions here and now I have played around with a promising package from Germany.
Meet HighPad – another PDA-remote solution. Here is my first impression.
The approach is quite ambitious. The HighPad Media Control solution promises to do the following:
1. Give you remote control of your media libraries
2. Give you remote streaming of your media to your device
3. Give you a possibility to sync media to your PDA
4. Function as a plain remote control for MCE
5. Give you a possibility to program the PVR in MCE
The HighPad Media Control will be able to control a full Media Center Edition System or a plain Windows XP computer running Windows Media Player. The system consist of a server application running on your media box and a client application running on your PDA.
And if you are like me, you want the conclusion right away:
This is an impressive package that is very powerful already (it is in version 1.02). It packs huge amounts of features but not all of them works perfectly well. Because of the fact that the most important features works well, and the other ones have great potential this is an addition to your home media center that is very interesting. Still, you should spend some minutes on testing the Niveus Remote (for ease of use) and NetRemote (for flexibility). You can read more on those here.
The installer is one file. During installation you choose if you want to install the client, the server or both.
At this point I ran into a little trouble.
Continue reading “HighPad Media Control – PDA Remote for Windows Media Center”
Ian Dixon’s brilliant Media Center Show has reached episode #14. And this time he’s had a chat with the admin of eirikso.com. That happens to be… me… As a modest geek that spent years of education to make sure he always could stay behind the camera I am honoured to guest the show.
I was invited to talk about the little roundup I did of different media center softwares. We had a nice chat about that, and a lot of other digital media related issues.
Pick up your player or listen directly on your computer
This is dedicated content for the people that are interested in HTPCs in general and Windows Media Center Edition in detail. It is time to pick up whatever audio player you have and start subscribing. My favourite is to use my Nokia 6630 cellular to listen to podcasts. Have a look at my guide here.
The simplicity of the technology behind a show like this is interesting.
Ian calls me up through Skype. I’m in Norway, he’s in the UK. He records the conversation, edits it and posts it on his web page. People out there subscibe to the feed and get the show as soon as he has published it. The audio quality of the Skype conversation is far better than any regular phone line.
Related posts:
Everything under my HTPC category and Windows MCE category.
Placeshifting, the art of making your media available where you want it.
Okay, you have a computer at home with some music, some pictures and some video files. Maybe you also have connected a TV-card and a web cam. Now, how cool would it be if you could access all of this whenever you where connected to the net with a device that was able to play your media?
This has been possible for quite a while, but as much of the stuff that is possible with computers, it has been too difficult to set up. To make streaming of media out of your home happen doing advanced firewall configuration and setting up a DynDNS service was necessary.
Content owners – watch out!
I said was. I have written about ORB and SlimServer here before, and I am still amazed over how well ORB works. What makes it especially interesting for content producers and copyright lawyers is the fact that it makes your own media inependent of borders and regulations regarding protection of content within countries.
I have all my Norwegian television channels available no matter where I am. At the same time the content producers work hard on their business model that depends on dividing the world in regions.
Availability
MP3 is a technology that forced its way through despite the fact that it was not marketed and actually heavily worked against by the music industry. People wanted availability. Actually people was willing to sacrifice quality on behalf of availability. (While the music industry was working hard making Super Audio CD because they thought that people wanted better quality).
Placeshifting is all about availability. After using ORB for a while I have been quite addicted to having my music available on all my computers. At work. At a friends house. On my mobile.
So what do I do?
Continue reading “Placeshifting – your media everywhere”
A couple of days ago I had a true WOW-experience after installing a free piece of software on my mediaserver at home. I have been talking about SlimServer and how you can stream your music out of your house using that software.
Guess what, I have found something that is easier and more powerful.
Meet ORB:
– Free
– Stream music, video and photos
– No need for a fixed IP
– No need to open extra ports in your firewall
– Streams to your laptop, PC, PDA and mobile
This is what you do:
Continue reading “Checking out ORB!”
Edit: I have just tried a product called ORB. And, my first impression: truly amazing! Register at Orb, install a free application on your media server and Orb lets you access your music, video, TV-Stations and pictures from wherever you are. No hassle. No opening of extra ports in your FW. No need for a static IP. If you want access to your media through streaming then Orb is something that you should consider. Not as flexible as SlimServer, but extremely easy to set up, and it gives you access to all your media.
Edit2: You can now read more about my ORB experiments here: Checking out ORB!
I am still amazed over the power of SlimServer. It is a very stable and user friendly tool that lets you stream your music to wherever you want. It is multi platform and it is free!
It works very well together with different standalone harware players, but can be used to stream your music to any networked computer as well.
So, here is a short guide to encourage you to try it out.
My attempt on an illustration to describe how it works (click the image to enlarge):
The concept:
Continue reading “Setting up SlimServer”
Update2
Here you find my complete list with links to all the HTPC-frontends I know of.
Update:
Tivo has recently made headlines as people have discovered a horrible functionallity that lets content providers delete shows on your box. My god, what a stupid move!
Kind of like:
You can buy this VHS tape, but you’ll hand over the keys to your apartment so that the content producers can come and take it when they decide that you shouldn’t be able to watch your recording anymore.
Open solutions like MythTV and MediaPortal suddenly became even more interesting. Still, even Microsoft haven’t implemented something like the Tivo “we’ll delete whatever we want”-functionallity. So, you’ll be better of with Windows MCE than with a Tivo.
This roundup boils down to:
For flexibility, total freedom and control: MythTV and MediaPortal
For usability: Microsoft Media Center Edition 2005 (MCE)
Original post:
I have been messing around with home theatre PCs (HTPCs) for a couple of years. This is my software roadmap:
1. Early experiments with an ATI All-in-wonder RADEON and the ATI Media Center
2. ShowShifter
3. MyHTPC + SnapStream PVS
4. Meedio + Beyond TV (+ tested Beyond Media)
5. Microsoft Media Center Edition 2005 (MCE)
Software that I have not testet seriously: SageTV, MythTV, MediaPortal
Conclusion
ShowShifter worked fine and offered a complete suite with PVR, DVD, a photo module, a very good music module and a movie archive. However, they did not provide an EPG and did not support hardware encoding cards. Unfortunately, Home Media Networks (the maker of ShowShifter) are slow on updating ShowShifter, so they lost me as a customer while I was waiting for hardware encoding support and EPG. ShowShifter now includes this, but as far as I can see, they’re still slow on updates…
If you are running ShowShifter, feel free to use my HTPC Backgrounds here. It could make the GUI look better…
Update:
I have played around with another PDA Remote solution as well here.
I have been using NetRemote for a long time. NetRemote is a little application that runs as a server on the box with your music. You can then connect from a client running on another PC or a PDA. From the client you can control what is playing on the box running the server.
This works very well towards J. River Media Center and Meedio that I have been using before. Of course, I could install J River on my new MCE box, but it would be much more interesting to directly control the same media library that I have in MCE.
There are some dedicated remote solutions for MCE out there. I had to test them…
Continue reading “Remote control your music collection in MCE”
I just got Windows Media Center edition up and running with 3 tuners. I am using one old standard edition Hauppauge PVR-250 and one new Hauppauge PVR-500MCE. The PVR-500 has two tuners, so together with the 250 I have three.
It took some experimenting to get this up and running, so I’ll post some of my experiences here.
Continue reading “Windows Media Center Edition with 3 tuners”
eirikso 