Biggest Flop of 2005: The Media Center PC

August 18, 2005 eirikso6 Comments

Jon BÃ¸hmer 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.

HighPad Media Control – PDA Remote for Windows Media Center

August 7, 2005 eirikso9 Comments

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” →

Google Video and Media Center Edition

June 27, 2005 eirikso5 Comments

Now, I have some suggestions on this one! John Battelle just announced that Google will launch an in-browser video playback feature based on the open source VLC media player. That should be very interesting for both content creators and the people making media center software.

Google have some plans
They have already launched their video search function and made available a video upload function. They are working on a payment system and now they will announce a player. According to John Battelle they will also include their player in the open source program called Google Code. In other words, the system will be open for people to make all kinds of players and boxes utilizing the content that builds up in the Google video archives. That will also lead to systems that can read video from both Google and other video distribution systems.

Considering the way a media center has accelerated my use of high quality video from my computer, a media center front end to Google Video would be very interesting. Because of Google’s open approach, I guess someone will make that kind of frontend for Google Video quite fast. Including a plugin for Microsoft’s Media Center Edition.

VLC Media Player is by far the most platform independent media player out there. The only problem is the fact that it could seem slightly difficult to set up and the GUI itself a bit too complicated for the average user. A version from Google could fix this. Use the very powerful core in the VLC Player and build a user friendly interface on top of it.

The fact that the VLC player is platform independent should also make it very interesting for large content producers and public broadcasters. Quite a bit of the dedicated set top boxes for TV out there run Lunix as the operating system. To make a frontend for Google Video on a cheap set top box seems to be an interesting option as well.

But what about content?
Continue reading “Google Video and Media Center Edition” →

Eirikso on the Mediacenter Show

June 23, 2005 eiriksoLeave a comment

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.

Checking out ORB!

June 8, 2005 eirikso21 Comments

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!” →

Remote control your music collection in MCE

May 30, 2005 eirikso14 Comments

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” →

Windows Media Center Edition with 3 tuners

May 29, 2005 eirikso9 Comments

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” →

Playing smooth WMV-HD in Windows Media Center Edition

May 2, 2005 eirikso8 Comments

I am running Windows Media Center edition 2005 on a box with a GeForce 6600 GT screen card. Regular DVD, TV, Xvid etc. plays smooth in MCE.

For some strange kind of reason WMV-HD did not play smooth when played back directly from a WMV-HD DVD.

I am not talking “not smooth” as in dropping frames and struggeling with CPU load. On my box WMV-HD 720p plays with 40% CPU-load and 1080p plays with 75% load. I am talking “not smooth” as in the way video plays when your mother-in-law would say “So what is the problem, this looks perfect”, but YOU can clearly see that this is not right. It is not smooth.

Could look a bit like the trouble you would have if you use the wrong methods when you convert from NTSC (30 fps) to PAL (25 fps).

It took some time before I managed to fix the problem, but it is now fixed, and this is my theory:

MCE 2005 works 100% in WMR9-mode when rendering video. On my GeForce 6600 GT this works very well. However, windows media player 10 defaults to video overlay. This is no problem, because MCE runs smooth on top, utilizing VMR9-video rendering.

But, when inserting a WMV-HD DVD MCE2005 actually quits and starts a special instance of windows media player 10. If you have left windows media player 10 the way it was installed by default, it now plays using video overlay. And, apparently – on my system overlay will not play completely smooth.

I went into the Windows Media Player 10 settings and changed the following:

Tools->Options->Performance->Advanced->
Uncheck “Use overlays” and check “Use high quality mode”

For my system, this fixed the problem and WMV-HD now plays smooooooth!

Update:
I just installed an update from Microsoft and the CPU load went from 75% to 45% when playing WMV-HD 1080p. You find the update here:
Update to enable DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA) of Windows Media Video content in Windows Media Player 10

And the thread over at AVSForum about this patch here:
WMP10 Patch for WMV Acceleration

HTPC Update – Installing Windows Media Center Edition 2005

April 22, 2005 eirikso2 Comments

I have been playing around with HTPCs for several years. I started out with an ATI All-in-wonder back in 1999. I have been running ShowShifter, myHTPC, Meedio, BeyondTV and Beyond Media. My last configuration was this one:

Meedio
J River Media Center
NetRemote
Girder
BeyondTV
SlimServer

I must admit that I am dead tired of administrating several pieces of software and all the communication between them. Now I want something that just works. BeyondTV is a very good PVR. Meedio is a very good media management tool. However, they both need their share of caring and configuring… And running two different main applications is not as ideal as having one application taking care of the whole frontend.

MeedioTV is not yet released in a version that is simple to set up in my region, so running Meedio only is out of the question.

I have tried installing the plain combination of BeyondTV, BeyondMedia and the Snapstream FireFly Remote. But, BeyondMedia is simply not good enough. Browsing my 400 album music collection by having to scroll slowly from “10 000 Maniacs” to “ZZ Top”? Nope.

So, now I am giving Windows Media Center Edition 2005 (MCE) a try.

I will report back here as my installation progress!