Virgin Media STB TiVo upgrade

Virgin Media have announced their new STB based on TiVo tech.

http://shop.virginmedia.com/tv/tivo.html

I've never used a TiVo, but the UI looks pretty cool. I'd go as far as saying that it's potentially a 7MC DVR beater, esp. when we consider 3D, 1 TB storage & able to take data from that cable that carries your TV signal.

It's certainly a serious step forward for VM, when we consider their clunky, two press to make it work current STB and will certainly put the Sky+ box in second place in the consumer STB space.

I expect this package to be a premium STB offering, probably coming in at around at least £50 pcm.

BUT, for many Sky customers, they pay a bit of this anyway as £13 has to go on BT line rental - I think, whereas you get a 'free' landline with the TV package on VM, IIRC.

7MC certainly has some competition now with YouView & this offering.

Remote Potato

I've been fortunate to be part of the Remote Potato iPhone App trial.

So far, the work that Carlos Remote Potato and his team has done is nothing short of steller stuff.
On my iPhone, I can now browse the Windows Media Center EPG, set recordings (all in realtime, not like with the Sky+ 30 min buffer), stream recordings, stream films, stream music and view photos all from my Media Centre.

Of course, to get this far, there's some tech that you need to do with DynDNS. You'll need to choose your domain name and provide appropriate configuration, but it's all straight forward.

It's great stuff.

www.fatattutude.com

Microsoft MVC Programme

Earlier this year, Microsoft started an initiative called TV on your PC, with the incentive of a free USB TV Tuner supplied by AverMedia. The scheme was to find 1000 users (or TV Ambassadors) of TV on your PC (or Xbox) and provide reports via a Live Spaces blog.

I signed up for this, as did around 4000 others, so I was honoured when I was selected to move from the TV Ambassador scheme to become a Microsoft Most Valuable Consumer, along with 4 other MVCs (Phillip, Graham, Steve & Andrew) and spend a day down at Microsoft, discussing the highs & lows of Media Center, Sky Player & MSN Videos.

I've been using Media Center since 2005, so it was really enjoyable discussing the tech with everyone, especially Andrew Edney; he runs the usingwindowshomeserver.com website and reports with Ian Dixon over at thedigitallifestyle.com - two big hitters in the Media Center arena.

During the day, we met key members of the Media Center EMEA team (Louise, Helena, Rob & Abid) and talked on video camera about our thoughts and concerns. Despite their best efforts to get us to go to sleep in the afternoon after a great al fresco lunch at one of London's best Italian restaurants, everyone was still geared up for a great afternoon.

Overall, I thought the day was a great success and I hope any momentum isn't lost, as we've all (Microsoft included) put in a lot of work to get this far!

Superstar Nano Tech Pedals

The Superstar Nano-Tech Pedals arrived this morning!!!

http://superstar.tibolts.co.uk/product_info.php?cPath=42&products_id=127

Managed to get the other pedals off, with the help of Powderdawg's pedal wrench - these pedals are massive - twice the size of the basic plastic ones supplied at purchase!!!

Sky Player & Windows Media Center

I've been using Sky Player on WMC7 for a few days now and feel it's worthy of some comments...for the unaware, Sky Player is an app that Microsoft kindly downloaded to your Media Center, to provide you with some extra TV channels & functionality (whether you wanted it or not!).

There have been many comments on the forums about 'how do I remove this Sky Player thing' and 'I don't want this, my investment in Media Center is why I don't have a Sky sub' etc but if you look at as an exercise in Silverlight, it seems to be pretty versatile on the face of it.

Now, I'm no Flash expert (rightly or wrongly I've considered Silverlight to be a bit of tech to go against Flash), but I'm not sure that Flash is able to regulate it's quality depending on your bandwidth. If it did/was, I'm sure the original boo.com wouldn't've folded.

So, with that in mind, Sky Player running from my 10 Mb Virgin Media connection, watching Sky Sports News, on it's high quality setting at 1.8 (out of 2) the quality still seems a bit like watching Friends on Friends+1. Is it like a reduced frame rate or something? Interestingly enough, the adverts seem fine though, as good as good SD. Clearly, live encoding at high quality is still short of the mark: compared to the low quality setting, it looks like a MUX4 transmission.

Watching PNE v Hull on Sky Player at low quality, looks like a dodgy internet stream from Iraq or something. Whacking it up to high yields better results, but it's frame rate reduction and subsequent jerkiness leaves me thinking whether or not I'm going to switch on Black Ops or not. Even a couple of shots of Mother's Ruin don't appear to have sorted out the jerkiness. Again, pre-rendered stuff is perfect. Looks great.

Live, high speed sports like football & rugby (not F1!) really test the tech these days; watching live Sky Sports 1 via Sky Player (on my top drawer Panasonic), is like watching broadcast Sky Sports on my old cheap LCD: it couldn't keep up.

Anyway, the audio is flawless, as is the non live content and even the info overlay looks great; it wouldn't surprise me if the next version of WMC has the Sky Player, or similar, overlay. But I'd expect that by then they'd've integrated the Sky Player EPG fully with the remote. While I can bring up the programme info by pressing 'i', and see what is on the other channels right now, I cannot see what is coming up next, unless I grab the mouse - this is not doing anything for the GAF or WAF. Also while I'm at it, there are no recording, or pause/resume functions available. All we're getting is straight feed. Annoying to say the least if you're watching a film and you're suddenly tired half way through. You'll have to resume from the start...

Sky are really protective of their IP, which I have no problem with, but it oversteps the mark when I'm only allowed certain content on certain a PC; it's almost as if I have to have a per-user license for TV when Sky are involved. That extends to Sky multi-room to a certain extent too, IIRC. It should be done on IP address. I'm sure there's more to this than I understand, but it seems overly complicated.

It's an interesting package, I'm sure the take up would be really high if the price was lower. I don't think that they'd run the risk of current subscribers getting the hump; if that was the case they'd all build a media center...and I just don't think this is going to happen, it's too easy to get a Sky or Virgin TV sub - plus most other halves are not happy with PCs in the living room - I'm fortunate; my girlfriend thinks its brilliant; all of our music, pix, films & TV all in one place.

I've been using Sky Player on WMC7 for a few days now and feel it's worthy of some comments...for the unaware, Sky Player is an app that Microsoft kindly downloaded to your Media Center, to provide you with some extra TV channels & functionality (whether you wanted it or not!).



There have been many comments on the forums about 'how do I remove this Sky Player thing' and 'I don't want this, my investment in Media Center is why I don't have a Sky sub' etc but if you look at as an exercise in Silverlight, it seems to be pretty versatile on the face of it.

Now, I'm no Flash expert (rightly or wrongly I've considered Silverlight to be a bit of tech to go against Flash), but I'm not sure that Flash is able to regulate it's quality depending on your bandwidth. If it did/was, I'm sure the original boo.com wouldn't've folded.

So, with that in mind, Sky Player running from my 10 Mb Virgin Media connection, watching Sky Sports News, on it's high quality setting at 1.8 (out of 2) the quality still seems a bit like watching Friends on Friends+1. Is it like a reduced frame rate or something? Interestingly enough, the adverts seem fine though, as good as good SD. Clearly, live encoding at high quality is still short of the mark: compared to the low quality setting, it looks like a MUX4 transmission.

Watching PNE v Hull on Sky Player at low quality, looks like a dodgy internet stream from Iraq or something. Whacking it up to high yields better results, but it's frame rate reduction and subsequent jerkiness leaves me thinking whether or not I'm going to switch on Black Ops or not. Even a couple of shots of Mother's Ruin don't appear to have sorted out the jerkiness. Again, pre-rendered stuff is perfect. Looks great.

Live, high speed sports like football & rugby (not F1!) really test the tech these days; watching live Sky Sports 1 via Sky Player (on my top drawer Panasonic), is like watching broadcast Sky Sports on my old cheap LCD: it couldn't keep up.

Anyway, the audio is flawless, as is the non live content and even the info overlay looks great; it wouldn't surprise me if the next version of WMC has the Sky Player, or similar, overlay. But I'd expect that by then they'd've integrated the Sky Player EPG fully with the remote. While I can bring up the programme info by pressing 'i', and see what is on the other channels right now, I cannot see what is coming up next, unless I grab the mouse - this is not doing anything for the GAF or WAF. Also while I'm at it, there are no recording, or pause/resume functions available. All we're getting is straight feed. Annoying to say the least if you're watching a film and you're suddenly tired half way through. You'll have to resume from the start...

Sky are really protective of their IP, which I have no problem with, but it oversteps the mark when I'm only allowed certain content on certain a PC; it's almost as if I have to have a per-user license for TV when Sky are involved. That extends to Sky multi-room to a certain extent too, IIRC. It should be done on IP address. I'm sure there's more to this than I understand, but it seems overly complicated.

It's an interesting package, I'm sure the take up would be really high if the price was lower. I don't think that they'd run the risk of current subscribers getting the hump; if that was the case they'd all build a media center...and I just don't think this is going to happen, it's too easy to get a Sky or Virgin TV sub - plus most other halves are not happy with PCs in the living room - I'm fortunate; my girlfriend thinks its brilliant; all of our music, pix, films & TV all in one place.

BTW, despite threatening to go over to the PS3, I've not played Black Ops yet, I had to wait for  the PS3 to finish updating, for 3D Blu-Ray no less.

Spiceworks

This afternoon, I finally got around to configuring my Spiceworks desktop / server / LAN infrastructure management software - really impressed with how straight forward it was! More comments when it's done and in.

VMCmote

I found an app called VMCmote, that allows remote control of your music. This allows you to control what's playing on your Media Center via your iPod Touch or iPhone over your wireless network. It works like the iTunes remote, but for 7MC.

Have to admit, it was pretty good choosing the music from outside.

7MC playlists

I've been using iTunes for ages now and find it easier to create playlists using that than creating playlists in 7MC.

In iTunes, just export your playlist as m3u and then import into WMP and they'll appear in 7MC

Once WMP knows about the playlist, it reads it in from the disk location, so it's easy to make additions to your playlist in iTunes, then just export out over the top of the original file.

Media Centre Spec & customisations

Sony Vaio XL-201
Windows 7 Home Premium (from hereon 7MC)
3 GB RAM
64 GB SSD - OS
750 GB HD: Recorded TV & Films
500 GB HD: Pictures & Music

750 GB USB external disk for robocopy backup

3 x DVB-T Tuners:
1 x Twinhan USB Tuner
1 x AverMedia PCI

1 x DVB-S2
Hauppage HVR 4000

In addition to the above, the following other customisations have been done:

Remote Desktop enabled, so I can RDP to iTunes while 7MC is still running things.

We use iTunes, because I've got an iPod and MP3 tech is a 20 year old codec and it shows (sounds?). We use a combination of AAC encoded at 320 kbps and Apple Lossloss for music storage. Hard drive space is cheap and if you're going to rip, do it well. The cover is than dl'd from Amazon and called folder.jpg, albumartsmall.jpg & artwork.jpg for the covers.

Modified The Guide to display 10 lines of channels, instead of 7
Installed Remote Potato to allow remote scheduling
Installed Media Browser for Film trailers
Installed Auto Rip & Compress
Installed TunerFree MCE for all Internet TV
Installed MacroTube for YouTube
Installed Music Browser (prefer to browse via folder list sometimes)

Sky Player
MSN Videos

Optical out for music

The Freeview feed is split using a non cheapo splitter i.e not a 99p supermarket special. We use always use a decent metal splitter (£10) from Maplin and gold plated decent RF coax cables, as we found that cheapo RF cables didn't carry the split signals too well.

As with decent hi-fi separates, you shouldn't just use the standard thin 13-strand or whatever phono cables that are supplied; these are just to make the units functional - they don't necessarily get the best from the tech.

There's a satellite dish that has a quad LNB; we use two of those cables, one to the Media Centre, the other to the Freesat enabled TV (no point losing out on another tuner).

I'll be expanding on some of these points in future posts, as otherwise we'll just end up with one big rambling post and we don't want that.

Installing Wifi using NPS

Windows Server 2008 Enterprise