Menu Mender Updated

Yet another one of my utilities or plugins has been updated to support Media Center with TV Pack. This is a great trend to see. I have had a few problems with Menu Mender so I look forward to the upgrade.

BTW, Menu Mender is a great utility app that will allow you to do some customization of the main Media Center menu. Media Center does not allow for this customization and the only way to do it is hack the registry which is not easy and full of potential peril. Menu Mender makes this a lot easier.

Heatwave Plugin Updated

One of my new favorite Media Center plugins has been updated. All the details of the update and the download link can be found at the Green Button.



Heatwave is a great Weather plugin that pulls it's information directly from Weather.com. It has a slick interface and it's super simple to setup and use. It's also FREE!! Great, simple plugin that everyone should have.

A few of the things that stands out on the change list:

• Now compatible with TV Pack 2008, including extenders


• The forecasts on the main page now animate from day to night mode


• Extenders should now correctly use all the same settings as the server

It's nice to see plugins starting to be updated to be compatible with TV Pack. I hope we see more of this.

This update also address my only real complaint with the plugin. Previously I had to setup all the same locations on each extender and the PC. Now I can finally set it up in one place and have it reflected everywhere. I can't wait to get home and upgrade my version.

Share TV Buffer Saved Me

Yesterday was the first time I was actually able to take advantage of Media Center's Share TV Buffer [hidden feature].

I have written about my disappointment with not being able to record fully from the Live TV buffer. Yesterday was one of the days that I needed it.

My wife is a NC Delegate to the Democratic Convention in Denver this year. Because of that I have been watching a lot of CNN coverage of the convention. Yesterday I had gotten behind the live coverage due to pausing for a number of reasons. Not a big deal since I have a 3-hour buffer. I did not set this to record because I do not want to keep it to watch later.

The problem came in when my son came home from daycare. I knew he was going to want to watch one his recorded shows. I also knew that if I pressed record to record what I was watching I would loose my buffer. So as a work around I used the Shared Buffer feature. I went upstairs and tuned into the same channel on another extender. This shared the buffer from downstairs so I had the 2 hrs plus available for that channel. I then was able to turn on Max & Ruby for my son and not loose my CNN buffer. Very Cool!!

I will try and post a video later tonight to help illustrate the point further.

TV Tonic Olympic Content Gone After Sept. 15

Big thanks to Adam over at Entertainment 2.0 Blog for letting me know that my TV Tonic Olympic content will only be around for another two weeks.

I have not been as big of a TV Tonic user as I thought I would be. I have used it more for the Olympics. It has been great to be able to see the performance of the day and to get specific events that I may have missed. I used it a few times to see Usain Bolt's amazing performances.

I hope Media Center gives us more content deals like this in the future.

To Fiji or not to Fiji, that is the question...

Now that some of the dust has settled on the Media Center debacle that is Fiji aka TV Pack I thought I would post a few thoughts. Also hoopla posted some great comments that made me want to post on the topic.

First the rumors were true that the release of the Windows Media Center TV Pack (codename: Fiji) is OEM only and only for new systems. That means that you can only get it from a system builder like Dell or S1 if you buy a new Media Center PC after the OEM has officially started to support the TV Pack. All of the OEM's are supposed to announce at CEDIA what their support and release plans will be.

Since I wanted Cable Card support I actually bought an OEM PC which I also thought would protect me from things like this. I guess I was wrong. Since I am an "enthusiast" and pretty adept at make changes I am not too worried since the TV Pack update has made it's way out on to the internet complete with installation instructions and first-hand upgrade stories.

I am disappointed to not be getting an officially supported update but after all of the conversations I can see why this decision was made. I would like to hear more from Microsoft on the subject though.

As much as I want to get all of the new TV Tuner features offered by the TV Pack, I have not taken the plunge for 2 reasons. The new TV Pack breaks 2 of my most used features and I simply cannot live without them. They are:

1. WebGuide: The TV Pack makes changes to the underlying structure of the guide in Media Center. This update breaks WebGuide which means you can no longer remotely control recordings on your Media Center. I use this feature A LOT and there is no way I could go back on this.
   
2. VideoRedo: VideoRedo is one of the tools I use the most. Along with using this to back up my DVD's to my hard drive, I also use it to archive TV shows and remove commercials. The TV Pack changes the default Media Center file format from DVR-MS to WTV. VideoRedo is not compatible with WTV at this point.
   

Once both of these experiences are fixed I will be joining the bandwagon and updating my Media Center. VideoRedo has already hinted at an upcoming update to support WTV and I can't imagine that there is not an update to WebGuide coming since this application is pushed so heavily by Microsoft to custom installers. And we all know they want to take care of the custom installers!!

If I were about to buy an OEM Cable Card system I would definitely wait until I was sure it had the TV Pack installed (which means after the first weekend in September) and buy it without hesitation. I still enjoy my Media Center everyday and it is world's above what I had before. Right now I plan on having faith and staying the course.

I just got my SDV letter

I received my Switched Digital Video (SDV) letter in the mail yesterday from Time Warner. I have know this letter was coming for a few months now and the day is finally here.

If you do not know what SDV is, let me try to do a quick explanation. Basically the cable companies are hitting bandwidth limitations and are having a hard time keeping up with the demand for more HD channels. To combat this they will start sending a group of "lesser watched" channels via SDV. The SDV technology will only send this group of channels to your home when you tune into those channels (i.e. on demand). This opens up bandwidth since all of the channels are not sent to your house at the same time.

This affects me since I have Cable Card and the Cable Cards I have cannot request the channels being sent via SDV. SDV requires 2-way communication with Time Warner and I can only do 1-way. A device known as a Tuning Adapter has been created to alleviate the problem with 1-way Cable Cards but it currently has only been announced for Tivo devices.

After scanning the list of channels I can't say I am too upset or bothered. I have no problem giving up these channels for more HD channels. We'll see when those HD channels actually arrive.

The channels that Time Warner will be moving to SDV are listed after the jump. The channels in italics are the ones I remotely care about.

Hispanic Tier Channels

Boomerang Espanol	Discovery Espanol	La Familia
Canal Sur	ESPN Deportes	MTVtr3s
Cine Latino	Fox Sports Espanol	Mun2
CNN Espanol	Galavision	Telefutura
TV Azteca

Premium - West Coast Feeds

Cinemax West	HBO West	Showtime West
Action Max West	HBO 2 West	Showtime Too West
MoreMax West	HBO Family West	Sundance West
Thriller Max West	HBO Signature West	Flix West
Showcase West

Sports Package Channels

ESPN Gameplan	NHL Center Ice	NBA Preview Channel
MLB Extra Innings	NBA League Pass

Sports Tier Channels

CBS College Sports Network	Fox College Sports Central	Game Show Network
Fox Soccer Channel	Fox College Sports Pacific	NHL Network
Fox College Sports Atlantic	Fuel	The Tennis Channel
Outdoor Channel	NBA TV

Other Channels

TV One	BBC America	American Life TV
Boomerang	Gospel Music Channel	TEN Blue
Current TV	EWTN (English)	TEN Clips
Ovation	Bloomberg TV	iN Demand PPV Events 1
iN Demand PPV Events 2

Living With Media Center: Photos

This post will cover the out-of-the-box Photo support and feature set of Windows Media Center. The purpose is to explain how my family and I use or do not use these features in our normal usage scenarios.

Read more below.

Importing Pictures - Getting your pictures to show up in Media Center is very easy and pretty straight forward. The experience is greatly improved if you already have your pictures organized in some logical way.

Our picture collection is organized under one main folder called "Pictures" with sub-folders for each year. Within each year folder there all sub-folders for the events such as "Christmas", "Thanksgiving" and "Jacob's Birthday".

So for Media Center I just add "C:\Pictures" as a watch folder. Media Center will scan and automatically find all the folders, sub-folders and files anywhere within "C:\Pictures". Media Center then continues to watch that folder for any updates which are automatically reflected within Media Center.

The process is fairly easy and straight forward. The only issue I have is that there are folders that you have not set to watch that show up under photos. Looking at the screenshot below you will see my main Photos folder highlighted.



To the left there is an Adobe folder that I did not add and to the right is the Video folder that I set to watch for Videos. This is not huge but I cannot remove the Adobe folder as much as I have tried and I would rather only have the Video folder show up under Videos.

Navigating Pictures - Media Center has three main navigation options after selecting one of the top level folders that you see under Photos. The three methods navigation methods are Folder, Tags and Date Taken.

• Folder: This navigation is very straight forward. You will see folders that represent the actual folders on your computer. Your personal photo storage organization method will have a direct impact on how much you like this view.
  
  My organization makes sense for me and my family so this is the navigation method I use the most.
  
  
• Tags: The tags navigation method is slowy becoming my favorite. I say slowly because it takes some effort to actually utilize this method. I tag photos with family member names, locations and events. The screenshot below shows what it looks like when you have tags set and choose to navigate using your tags.
  
  
  
  I will talk about how I set tags later.
  
  
• Date Taken: This is actually a very cool way to look at your photos that I had not really explored until I stared working on this post. Here is what is looks like:
  
  
  
  If you navigate using the folder structure you can further sort within the folders by filename or date. It always thought that meant date taken but it did not. It was using the modified date. So if you tagged the photo or rotated it then the modified date would change to the current date and move this up within the list.
  
  So you need to select date taken as soon as you get into your photos and you can see everything in order based on the time stamp assigned by your camera. This works well with slideshows.
  

Viewing Photos / Photo Slideshow - At any point while navigating you can choose to view a single photo or view a slideshow. The slideshow is just a series of single photos with nice animations and transitions.

To start a slideshow you select it from the top of the screen. In the screenshot you can also see that I have music playing. You need to start the music first and then your slideshow so that it will accompany the photos.



Here is the first photo of the slideshow.



You can also see the overlay showing what music is playing with the slideshow. Clicking the info button on the remote gives you options for picture detail and rotate in case you need that. Here is what picture detail looks like:



So viewing photos is pretty easy and has just enough options. Everything I have described here is the experience through the extender since that is how we use it. There are a few more options using Media Center directly on the PC.

Photo Management - I have not done much photo management to date. Nothing compared to the work I put into my music collection. I basically create a folder with an event name underneath the appropriate year folder and drop my pictures in there.

I have recently started to tag my photos to take advantage of the tags in Media Center. I am using the Windows Photo Gallery application that comes with Vista.



Within Windows Photo Gallery I set it to watch the same "C:\Photos" directory. It even gives me some of the same navigation options as Media Center.

To tag a photo I just right click on the photo and select "Add Tags..." from the sub-menu.



Then on the right hand side you add as many tags for that photo as you want. So if multiple people are in the photo you can add a tag with each person's name.

Plugins - There are plugins for Media Center to view photos from Flicker or view photos from Picasa. I have not had a need to try either one yet. I plan on trying the Picasa plugin since my family shares a lot of photos through Picasa web albums.

Media Center – Photos Experience Video

Wrap-Up - So that is Media Center with Photos. It's easy, works great and for the most part gives you exactly what you expect. I will update this post with a video demo as soon as possible.

Coming soon

I have been slacking on my Living With Media Center posts but I have more coming. My next one is on Photos and the one after that was scheduled to be Hardware. I am going to delay the Hardware post and move the Plugins post ahead of it.

I also have a more detailed video tour to compliment the posts I have written and the posts I am writing. I will be adding those soon as well.

Special shout out to Drew and good luck with the setup. Keep checking back. The posts are coming!

Whoa! EngadgetHD hands on with Media Center TV Pack Update

Ben over at EngadgetHD has gotten his hands on the elusive and ever-so-secret Fiji/TV Pack Media Center update. He just posted a hands-on report.



The features that he highlight would improve my TV functionality and make it an all together better experience so I am very excited to get the update.

The only question is whether I will actually be able to get the update. RUMOR says that the update will be OEM only. I'm ok there since I bought my PC from Dell to take advantage of CableCard. RUMOR also says it will only ship on NEW OEM PC's. If this is true then this BLOWS!!! I am not giving up yet on Microsoft because these just seems like a slap in the face to their hardcore customers that champion the platform.

CEDIA cannot get here fast enough!