How good can it be, if it isn’t HD?

Last April I told you about how I canceled cable and was living on over-the-air HD and Blu-ray Discs for my families HD needs. At the time my plan was to add cable in time for football season. It was a great plan and it kind of worked, but I did fail to consider one thing; at Engadget I write about cable related technologies. My first clue was actually not long after my post here about my first 90 days of success when Digeo sent me a Moxi HD DVR for review. At that point my plan was to add the service back in order to do the review and then to cancel it again, but that turned out to be too much of a pain since Verizon requires I send the CableCARD back when I cancel, which of course means another truck roll the next time I need service. But despite this I was still prepared to call and cancel right after CES, but by the time I got back I realized that in the next six months there would be at least three or four new CableCARD devices I’d like to review, so I decided to give up on the idea.

The bottom line is that I love me some football in HD, so I can’t ever see myself going without cable year round, and with the hassle involved in canceling and signing back up, the $327 a year ($62 for 7 months minus $110 savings for signing a contract) I’d save just isn’t worth it — not to mention I plan to expense the majority of the cost to offset my blogging income. I suspect for many it just isn’t worth it either. Sure there is lots of content out there available via other legal means, but the bottom line is that when it comes down to it, cable really isn’t that bad of a deal considering all the HD viewing options you get for the price.

Although the 360 has pretty much looked the same since its launch, Microsoft has actually changed the core a few times and the latest chipset is code named Jasper. To you and me what this really means is that it works just like the older 360 but with less power, noise and fewer incidents of RRoD — in theory.

Since the Jasper model looks identical to the older 360 you have to know what to look for to tell you have/are buying one. There are a few ways to identify it, but the most dependable is to look at the power requirements, which are printed on the serial number sticker on the back. While the older models required 14.2 amps, the Jasper only draws 12.1 amps. Now the great news is that you can actually see this sticker without opening the box by looking through the hole for the barcode sticker.

First look through this hole.

This is a falcon, notice it is labeled 14.2 amps.

This is the Jasper, it is labeled 12.1 amps.

These pictures were from an older Engadget post.

According to my kill-a-watt, the Jasper 360 only uses 90 watts while in Media Center mode, while the Falcon uses about 108. It is noticeably quieter than the Falcon as well, but still not silent enough to be in my home theater. The PSU makes some of the noise and the Jasper will work with the older PSU or a newer one (the newer one won’t work on the Falcon). Not sure if there is any way to tell which PSU is included when you buy it, but the one I bought had the older style PSU.

I’ll be honest. Part of the reason I wrote this was because I went looking for this information today and couldn’t easily find it via Google. So I figured I’d Google juice the title and drive traffic while at the same time help those in need find this information. And besides, it’s been way to long since I wrote anything here.

With all the news today about the Windows 7 botnet, it’s a good idea to know how to verify you got a legit iso. No matter where you downloaded the iso, it is a good idea to verify the file has not been tampered with and is is reallly easy to check verify with the MD5  hash.

First download md5sum.exe and grab the MD5 hash from Microsoft’s site. To save you the trouble I’ll post the x86 hash here, but you should always get it when you are downloading a file. 8867C13330F56A93944BCD46DCD73590

Now simply call md5sum from the command line using just the iso as an argument, and after a few minutes it should spit out the same hash. 

Pretty easy huh?

The Windows 7 release candidate (rc) hit the torrents this week and after it was confirmed authenticate by someone via an MD5 hash, I decided to go ahead and try and make the switch full time from Vista.

One of the key add-ins in my household is one that adds the ability to control Media Center and extenders via my Home Automation controller since even the basic operations in my home are dependent on it. I can’t even watch Live TV in my house if this doesn’t work, so I needed a solution. Autonomic homes has supported Windows 7 since beta, but I’m not willing to pay $800 just for this one feature, so I needed the open source project that was free to work, the same one that I was using with Vista.

The now poorly named VMCController is a background MC add-in that features a few control ports so I can fully control any extender in my house via TCP. To get it working on Windows 7, I had to download and install the latest version as normal, but when I launched MC, I got an error about the add-in failing to load. So with some help from Olddog at the projects codeplex discussion page, I was able to get it working. You’ll need to download Olddog’s updated DLLs. But in order to replace the DLLs, first thing you need to do is to delete the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes\Installer\Assemblies\Global\Default registry key as per this MS KB article — always backup the registry before editing by righting clicking on the parent object and choosing export. Now reboot and open Windows Explorer to C:\Windows\Assembly. Find VmcController.Add-In, then right click on it and select uninstall. Now copy the new VmcController.Add-In.dll from the OldDog’s zip file to C:\Windows\eHome and all the DLLs to C:\program files\Media Center Network Controller\ and finally start Media Center and test by telneting to localhost port 40500.

The only problem I’m having is that a few of the buttons don’t work, but I found work arounds. So instead of using button-skipfwd I used the command playrate skipforward, which does the same thing.

Hopefully the main contributer to the project will update the source with OldDog’s changes so that we can just run the installer like the old days, but at least it is working.

One of the commenters on the Engadget HD Podcast recently asked me to do this so here goes. It’s been over two years since I did a post like this and I have to say I’m amazed at how much of my equipment is the same and at the same time, how much is different.

My equipment list

• Pioneer PDP-6010FD (Kuro)
• Saphire towers and center
• Speakercraft surrounds
• XPS 420 running Vista Media Center
• LG BD300 Blu-ray player
• HDHomeRun
• Xbox 360
• Pioneer Elite VSX-91TX AV receiver
• 32″ Sharp Aquas — Linksys DMA2100
• 19″ Sharp Aquas — Linksys DMA2100
• OrigenAE rc197 Remotes in each room
• Elk M1-Gold alarm
• Global Cache GC-100
• MSI Wind PC running WHS
• Insteon Dimmers (about 14)
• ISY-99 Insteon Controller
• HAI thermostat
• MacBook Air
• Latitude D430
• 20″ cinema Display
• Actiontec MI424-WR FiOS WiFi router

I’m working on a newer version of my automatic MKV to DVR-MS process and found myself needing to do these conversions automatically. So I figured I’d share them so people could use them until my entire process is done.

The main uses from my perspective is to make various video files Media Center compatible, but since MPG and AC3 are pretty much the most standard codecs in the industry, there are plenty of other uses. Both of them require the latest version of DVRMSToolBox, written by my good from Andy. In fact it is what makes the entire process automatic. For both profiles, the DTB temp directory is used to create the files and then the final file is moved back to the location of the original file (in the case of the MKV AC3 files, the name is changed for obvious reasons). Until I release the rest of my process, you can create a simple “process conditioner” to automatically convert these files, or you can run them on demand with DVRMStoMPEGGUI (or queue them up manually).

The first is a very simple VOB to MPG converter. All it does is use ffmpeg to repackage the MPG and AC3 streams into an MPG container. The best way to create a vob to convert is to use something like DVDShrink to rip only the main feature and the main AC3 audio to a single vob. You can use DTS, but as you might know, in the case of Media Center DTS is not supported nativly and thus doesn’t work on extenders. To use this drop “Convert vob into mpg – ffmpeg.dpc” into “C:\Program Files\DVRMSToolbox\Profiles” and put ffmpeg.conf into “C:\Program Files\DVRMSToolbox\Applications\ConvertFfmpeg”

The second one was actually very difficult to get right and I’d still like to do some more testing. What it does is extract a DTS stream from an MKV file, then convert it to AC3 with eac3to, then finally remuxes it back to an MKV with AC3. It only retains the original video and audio streams and in fact doesn’t touch the video stream. To use it you’ll need to download eac3to and MKVtoolnix (both free). First extract the eac3to archive to “C:\Program Files\DVRMSToolbox\Applications\eac3to” and install MKVtoolnix with the isntall path of “C:\Program Files\DVRMSToolbox\Applications\MKVtoolnix\” And of course you’ll have to copy the “Convert MKV with DTS to MKV with AC3.dpc” to “C:\Program Files\DVRMSToolbox\Profiles”

Please let me know if these work for you or not, I’m really hoping to get these throughly tested before my final project is complete.

**Update** Already had to update the DTS to AC3 profile, this one should work better. Thanks Rich. 

**UPdate2** Had to update it once again because the AC3 bit rate was too high for dvr-ms files, it is now set to 448 instead of 640.

I’ve loved my HDHomeRun for as long as the product has been on the market, but never really used it heavily until I switched to Media Center about a year ago. Well ever since, from time to time I’ve experienced network issues that have caused less than perfect picture quality — drop outs, blocking, breakups etc. I’ve spent countless hours troubleshooting this and most of the time it ended up being the driver for my Intel 82566DC-2 network adapter. At one point I even spent some money to replace my switch since the NIC refused to auto-negotiate to 100/full with the 16 port Netgear switch I was using. Well for whatever reason the issues came back over the weekend and I finally threw in the towel and did what I should’ve done a long time a go.

The simple solution
I went down to CompUSA — yes they still have them in Tampa — and picked up a $14 NIC. I threw it into a spare PCI slot (you can use a USB NIC if you want) and plugged the HDHR directly into it. The cool thing is that I didn’t even need a crossover cable, in fact all I had to do was rerun the HDHR setup utility to rediscover the location of the device. And thanks to the beauty of APIPA — you know that 169.254.x.x address — I didn’t even have to set an IP on the NIC or configure an IP for the HDHR. 

Now my picture quality is back to the perfect and my only regret is that I didn’t just break down and do this earlier. So if you are having problems with your HDHomeRun, I wouldn’t hesitate to throw an extra NIC in your PC and at the very least isolate the problem.

Just ran across this post today at one of my favorite sites, The Digital Lifesyle, and at first I was thrilled to see somoene appreciate the hard work Warren, Andy, and I put into automatically converting mkv files to dvr-ms. But then after reading through the entire post I noticed that nor my name or Engadget’s was anywhere to be found. Now maybe I’m jumping to conclusions, but it seems like too much of a coincidence for this not to be a derivative work. Now I’m accustomed to being ripped off online, but usually it is some hack site and not a reputable place like Ian’s site.

**UPDATE**

Ian was very responsive to my concerns and has pulled the post — but yet the link still works. Never the less,  the original author has added credit to his post on his blog, but in a way that seems half-hearted to me. But perhaps that is because the intent of his comment was lost in the British to American translation.

Not sure what Extremetech was thinking after they installed their Whisper fan for the Xbox 360 when they asked if the fan was even on? Who knows maybe they are deaf, all I can tell you is that for me it was a waste of time. The 360 might be a little quieter, but lets face it, for $25 I expected it to be silent from across the room. Luckily it was easy to install and kind of fun — the Extremetech instructions were good, but I’d add to use a hair dryer to heat up the tamper sticker so you don’t have to cut it. I hope that the new fan at least moves more air like it is supposed to so maybe it’ll run cooler, that way it’ll do something other than light up blue.

Either way because this didn’t fix the problem I’m going to have to move the 360 into my closet. This isn’t a big deal since I don’t change games much anyways and have a Blu-ray player for movies, but it is disappointing.

After about 10 months of using Windows Media Center I decided to look back at how I use it. I guess it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that the feature I actually use is the very same feature that motivated me to start using it in the first place. That’s right, out of everything it’ll do, for the most part I just use it as a DVR. The problem is that although it has a nice enough interface for listening to music, watching misc vidoes and looking at pictures, these features aren’t useful to me.

Music and Photos
These Media Center components actually work pretty nice, the problem is that my content lives in an Apple ecosystem. Sure you can just copy over your pictures and music, but you lose all your playlists, metadata, etc. There are some 3rd party applications to help integrate iTunes with Media Center, but to someone who also ownes an Apple TV, it just doesn’t make sense. So whenever I want to look at pictures or listen to music I switch inputs to the Apple TV — to my wife this means hitting the blue button on the remote.

Videos
This is the most useless of all Media Center features. Luckily most of the reasons why it is useless are resolved in Windows 7, but just to cover the highlights. The fact that you can’t resume videos, and even worse you can’t fast forward or rewind — only skip — makes it completely unusalbe. And then there is the folder fiasco. I mean why is it so hard to limit the folders that show up here. Do people really what to see the sample folders etc? I know I don’t.

Add-ins
I really only have one add-in that I use on a regular basis and that is mControl. And even with it, I have like 20 things I don’t like about it. Overall the worst thing about add-ins is how difficult it is to add the shortcuts to the main menu. But even once you get in, most of the add-ins feel very tacked on, and I find that programmers don’t seem to like Media Center’s UI as they try their best to not look like it. The most popular add-in for most is My Movies and although I could see it being useful if I still watched DVDs, the cover-art is way too small. And where are the good (free) weather apps? I just don’t understand why there aren’t more great add-ins.

The DVR rocks!
I can’t say enough great things about the way the DVR works though. I have a few complaints, but overall it is very enjoyable and so much better than TiVo. One thing is for sure, the thing is rock solid — when I haven’t broken something. I don’t think I’ve missed one recording because of a malfunction in the past 10 months.

I’ve said this before, but it’s worth repeating. In my household you don’t watch TV without watching it on Media Center. I have my home automation system setup so that when someone hits the power button on my Media Center remote the TV turns on to the correct input, the AVR turns on to the correct input and the Media Center goes to the Recorded TV screen. So it is a true one button, on one remote setup. I use the same remote in every room of the house and it functions the exact same way. From a user’s perspective the only difference is that Blu-ray and Apple TV re limited to the main room. Provided I don’t mess with it — a big if — it is very dependable. 

I look forward to the features in Windows 7 and hope to see other competitors give Media Center a run for its money, but as it stands now when it comes to the ultimate DVR experience for the home, it is Media Center and by a long shot.