About two times since I’ve installed the TV Pack, this blue bar has showed up on every TV (including extenders) and causes weird issues. For one, I can’t figure out how to get it to go away without restarting VMC and it seems to make the extenders lock up all together. Unfortunately it has never showed up while I was using my media center, only while others have used it, so I have no idea if anything was accidentally selected or a button hit to bring it up.
It’s no secret that I don’t like HDMI, and my most recent experience is yet another great example of why. When I switched from two Series3 TiVos to Vista Media Center a few months back, I made the mistake of ordering a Dell with a video card that didn’t support component out. So rather than switch out the video card, I’ve spent way too many hours trying to get the kinks worked out. Then, last week when I saw the latest budget Nvidia 9400GT was released for $59, I picked one up from Newegg and had high hopes that it would solve all my HDMI woes. Now let me tell you, this is the best $60 I ever spent – well maybe — not only do I no longer have any HDCP handshake issues, or the black screens that go with ’em, but I no longer get juddder on some channels. Then, to tip it all off, the channels change sooo much faster than before. I mean, what a joke HDMI is — with Media Center at least — I only wish I wouldn’t have waited so long to swap it out. Oh, and if you were wondering, the picture quality still looks great, and there is no doubt it looks as good as HDMI on my kuro.
I suppose I should also mention that I don’t know for 100% that the fixes are all due to HDMI vs component, as it is entirely possible that the Nvidia card could’ve fixed all that via HDMI. Maybe down the road if I get curious I’ll try to confirm it, but for now I’m going to enjoy some football in HD.
Believe what you want, but whether Mikey broke the frame with the map, or gave it to Chunk, the result is the same.
Microsoft had a lot of catching up to do with Media Center internationally, and for whatever reason decided July 2008 was when the TV Pack was to be delivered. So because of this self imposed deadline — it was promised to partners — Microsoft didn’t have time to prepare the TV Pack for general release. Microsoft didn’t have time to test all the update scenarios, only had time to support a limited subset of hardware and finally didn’t have time to test all the usage scenarios. So as a result, the choice I believe Microsoft faced with, was to either push back the release of the TV Pack, or to release it OEM only.
**UPDATE** Sorry for the correction, but Charlie Owen emailed me and told me this was simply not true, and that the TV Pack was intended to be OEM only from the very beginning. Not sure why MS would choose to go that route, but since I can’t think of any honorable reasons to do this, I won’t even try to speculate. **end update**
But the good news is that Microsoft listens to the Media Center community and although MS is taking tons of slack for the OEM status of the update, Microsoft did the right thing and gave the RTM to Chunk. I mean how else could you explain what is happening? Sure, Microsoft promised the beta testers a copy since they worked so hard to test, but did they have to send it out last week? Couldn’t they have waited until the official release at CEDIA in September? Sure, why not, but instead it was made available, and as expected, Chunk broke the frame and we all got to have some fun.
Now while I disagree in principal with the way Microsoft is responding to the outcry over at The Green Button, I understand. I mean some members of the community don’t give them any other choice. They demand support and have many unrealistic expectations, and thus force MS to remind them that they aren’t even supposed to have the TV Pack. Some members of the community can’t leave well enough alone, so while I wish the TV Pack wasn’t OEM only, I do understand why it is, and I for one am happy that Microsoft gave the update to Chunk when they did.
Now that I’m a full blown Vista Media Center fanboy, it’s no surprised that I was able to finagle my way onto The Media Center Show. Ian and I recorded this about a month ago and it was a blast. We didn’t talk that much HD, mostly it was Home Automation (my new girlfriend) and why I switched from TiVo. Have a listen, if you don’t mind listening to me ramble on for an hour.
Not sure how new this is, but with the first NFL pre-season game kicking off this weekend, I wanted to quickly check who was playing, and to my surprise the useful — but ugly — m.espn.go.com was replaced with a down right cool website. I wasn’t sure if this was iPhone specific, so I checked on a co-worker’s Blackberry and it didn’t look the same. This might work out better for checking scores than SportsTap, either way I’m happy to have another option.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the new iPhone 2.0 software, but the games are terrible. Sure they are fun after you wait 30 seconds for them to load — when they don’t crash — but the entire point of a game on your mobile device is to fill in the gapes in life. To make things worse when you get a call, or for whatever reason need to do something else on your iPhone, you have to wait for them to load all over again, this makes them almost completely useless.
The other really annoying thing is the music. Do these companies really think I want to listen to their generic game music instead of my own? How can there not be a setting that lets me choose to listen to my own music — or an Podcast in my case?
I’m sure some people don’t care about this, but I’m not a big gamer, I just want to enjoy the occasional game of Tetris or solitaire while I wait for the elevator to arrive, sheesh.
I understand why Apple changed the activation process with the 3G iPhone, and if given the choice to wait in line with other Apple Geeks for 4.5 hours or pay $600 for a 16G 3G iPhone, I’d most definitely choose the wait; but man it’s amazing how much faster the line went last time. The good news is I made some great new friends while waiting and without much fuss was out of the Apple store in about 30 minutes.
Anyhoo, although I love the new iPhone, the real killer new feature is the applications, but with only 25% of them free and no trial period, it’s too easy to burn through all your iTunes credits on crap. So here is my list of iPhone applications, highs and lows — Thanks for the idea Richard.
Highs
Bad
The rest of the apps I tried that were just all right were, Cro-Mag Rally, which isn’t as much fun as Crash’s race game. Blip Solitaire which isn’t bad, but takes too long to load and isn’t as good as the free version I was using on my jailborken iPhone.
Overall I’m happy, but I wish Apple had an RSS feed that would make it easy to keep up with new apps and udpates.
I read on TGB over the weekend that Dell.com was offering the Linksys DMA2100 for $199. A few others got the bright idea to see what their Dell employee discount program price was, and when I used mine it was only $129! So of course I ordered two! Then as soon as I got the “out for delivery” tracking update, I put one on eBay for $189 which sold in a few hours. So now my guest room has access to all my HD content, and it only cost me ~$70!
The bad news is that Dell.com is already out of stock. Some are picking up DMA2200s for $149, but DVDs are so 20th Century. Luckily there are a few other 2100s on eBay for $189 so get ’em while they last.
If you wondering what the best Extender is, then maybe you haven’t seen my shootout on Engadget yet.
“Do I care if it man made or cyclical, no; I just want cleaner air and water, call me crazy.”
Classic O’reilly, he just said this on his radio show and I couldn’t agree more. Whoever thinks he is right wing has never watched or heard him. Besides, who couldn’t like a guy who he can relate to?
Before you get too excited, let me clear up the misleading title, because no, I haven’t figured out how to skip commercials on TV shows recorded via my ATI Digital Cable Tuner. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to skip commercials with the rest of my recordings. It wasn’t as easy as I thought, and for whatever reason without some tweaking my VMC box was unstable. I can only assume this was caused by DVRMSToolbox trying to analyze shows that were copy protected, but either way, why even waste cpu cycles if it isn’t possible?
Lets start from the beginning though. Ever since my first DVR (ReplayTV 5040), I fell in love with automatic commercial skipping, and while 30 second skip works pretty good, there’s nothing like skipping commercials without ever touching a remote. I’ve tried both DVRMToolbox and Lifextender and while Lifextender was super easy to install, by design it edits the files, so if it mis-marks a commercial, it’s fatal. And over the past few weeks it has deleting one too many scenes from my favorite show, so it’s out. This brought me back to DVRMSToolbox, which I started with first — really loved how it analyzes shows that are still recording — but thanks to the complex setup and a few issues, I quickly gave up on it. But now I finally have those worked out, so I’m going to share them here. First starters, here’s how you get started with DVRMSToolbox commercial skipping (BTW, use Comskip, it’s free).
There are two tricks to making DVRMSToolbox work well. One is to exclude it from scanning shows with no commercials and shows that are DRM’d. The other is to change the default skip keys that get in the way of normal VMC operation.
You can exclude on just about any piece of metadata that VMC stores about a show. At first I tried to edit the default Every File condition and say to skip any show recorded on a channel lower than 1032. But for whatever reason the channel number is a sting value instead of an integer, so you can’t use less than comparison! So I had to create two exclusions instead of one. One exclusion says any show not recorded with an ATSC tuner — this covers all the CableCARD tuner shows. The other rule says to exclude any show recorded from a PBS Affiliate — I love me some Nova, Nature and Frontline and they are already commercial free. This was pretty simple once I realized that ProcessContitionEditor was included with DVRSMSToolbox. I still had to dig around my recordings with DvrmsMetadataEditor to figure out what would work. So after a little trial and error I successfully excluded the shows I didn’t want to analyze.
Ok, but DVRMSToolbox and Lifextender both use the same commercial analyzing software (Show Analyzer $10 or Comskip which is free) to analyze the shows, so I expect it to be less than 100% accurate. So for starters, I choose to only mark commercials, and not delete them (the default). But I need a way to turn the automatic part off when things go wrong. By default this is the up and down keys on the remote, the problem is that those keys are already used when you overlay a menu or the guide when playing back recorded TV and since the plug-in isn’t smart enough to know what you want to do. So now I was off hunting for keys on the remote that don’t do anything when watching recorded TV, so I could use them instead. After some troubleshooting, I ended up with the Enter right and left Clear buttons. I setup left to disable automatic skip, and right to turn it back on — I also set the rest of the keys to F-keys so they wouldn’t get in the way. Update **Right and left ended up working better than enter and clear since the only time you use them while watching recorded TV is when the guide is up and you want to see what is on later, in those cases I just hit stop first.**
So now I have automatic commercial skipping on the majority of my shows, and I can turn it off and on whenever I want, I can start saving time. And when you consider the 1 second it used to take me to hit the 30 second skip button each time, compared to the 3 hours it took me to figure this out, I should break even on time in about 3 years!
