At the start of the month I gave a review of the iPiMP app here and came up with 2 things that would not only turn this into a must have bit of software; but strengthen mediaportal’s position as one of the best media centre applications available for windows users as well.
The first was the ability to stream live tv to the iphone - However, a bit more thought into that and I have come to the conclusion that it’s not such a hot feature after all. Too limiting and would depend on some structural changes to the mediaportal software itself.
The second one is the truly killer feature though… Remote control of a client.
Well, it turns out that I didn’t have to wait long at all after a comment popped up from the developer informing me that version 3.0.0 (latest version is now 3.0.1) now includes that very feature!
The installer now comes with a “client plugin” option that is required on every client you wish to remotely control.
Just remember to untick the server and transcoder options, this could be made a little easier for some people by having a menu before the component selections with 3 radio buttons offering “server and client”, “server only” and “client only” options to auto choose these; but then it isn’t really hard to untick the boxes.
Once installed, remember to enable the plugin from within the mediaportal client settings dialogue and add the port it runs on (55667 tcp) to your firewall.
After you have your server running and all your clients set up and enabled it’s time to fire up the iphone.
Oh, small change - the username field is no longer case sensitive so it doesn’t matter anymore about the recent auto caps’ing Apple included in the latest firmware.
And there we have the addition of “Remote control” to the home menu.
Before you can start controlling any of your clients, you’ll need to add them by tapping onto “administration”.
Tap through to the “MediaPortal clients” and you’ll see a very simple add, delete and edit screen. Tapping onto add will give you the following screen.
Here you can give it a friendly name that can be its location in your house, the name of the PC it is running on and the port the service communicates on.
Unless you changed this within the plugin options in the mediaportal config, you can leave the port setting blank and it will use the default setting; which is a nice bit of design by the developer - fewer settings for users to remember and fiddle with usually results fewer things to break.
Once you have configured your clients and saved the settings tap on the home button and go into the Remote control option.
Select your client and you’ll be greated with a two page interface (transitioned by tapping on the little guy holding a number) that is simple, if busy looking at first.
The little guys on the second page represent the different categories such as music, games, videos, pictures and live tv.
The first page is a simple navigation layout, not a bad first config but one I’m sure will be refined over time as people begin using it - the first suggestion that springs to my mind is having the tv guide button on the same page as the navigation buttons.
It is very intuative when moving around mediaportal with the iphone and this app, I can already see my logitech mx air getting even less use now!
As it is, the only fault I have picked up on so far while testing the remote control isn’t overly the fault of the app, instead it’s more to do with the responsiveness of the touch screen on my iphone - it has never been quick enough to keep up with the speed at which I can attempt to use it, causing many of my taps to not register.
The result, browsing a long list of video files can take a lot longer than a mouse to navigate around leaving you to tap, tap, tap, tap your way around. As I said tho, this is more a failing of the iphone than the app.
I wonder how difficult it would be to implement a slide scroll to it.
Anyway, time to navigate aside, this little applet just joined my list of must have apps where-ever I deploy a copy of mediaportal as it finally begins to make PC based TV’s a real and friendly replacement to a traditional TV and seperates solution without having to own expensive remote controls that are pretty much useless beyond the application they were designed for.
Convergence is always a good thing and if you ever lose this TV remote, you can always just call it and discover where they have been vanishing to all these years!
Verdict: If you’re running mediaportal and own an iphone, this just became a part of your standard install!
For those who don’t know what mediaportal is, shame on you!
I… er.. mean, it’s an opensource PVR solution for windows XP machines and in direct competition with others such as BeyondTV, MythTV and Microsofts own Media Centre. While not as feature rich as BeyondTV it does get the streaming of live TV across your network very well and all for the price of zero. Definately in my top 5 apps you must download if you run windows.
The iPiMP app has been designed by one of the community to provide you with a portable interface for recording shows and playing them back.
It’s not strictly an app that you install onto your iphone, you install it onto the PC running the TV server and it will serve webpages using the built-in apache server, saving you from jailbreaking it - which is nice. Just remember to change the port to something like 81 because it’ll fail to start it’s service due to the TV server already using this port.
When it asks where you store the logos for the channels you need to point it towards here
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal\thumbs\tv\logos
Sadly it doesn’t seem to pick mine up, so I need to spend a little bit of time troubleshooting this.
Once everything is installed without error, connect to your wifi network, open safari on your iphone and point it to the following
http://yourpcip:portnumber
When you reach the logon window to enter the default details, the lack of screen space gives you the only real annoyance when the keyboard covers the text input boxes until you enter something (and I’ve found the auto caps’ing of the first letter to be a pain too, since the default admin account is lower case).
Once logged in you’ll be greeted by a very clean interface with simple tasks allowing you to see what is currently on, schedule recordings and watch recorded TV (as long as you set it up to transcode them to the supported format).
Sadly you can’t stream the live TV feed to your iphone, which would have been the truly killer part of the app but it does turn your iphone into a handy mini EPG and recording unit.
The TV guide is split into days, a now and next lineup (which is a bit confusing when tv logos aren’t working) and a very handy search feature.
Clicking on an entry will bring up some show info and a record button, clicking onto it brings up the various recording options.
As you can see, the record buttons get skewed out of alignment, but it doesn’t stop you from following it.
Returning back to home and then onto the recorded TV section, you can choose what time frame the shows were recorded in and browse the list of shows.
Just remember, if you haven’t set it up to transcode the recordings you won’t be able to watch them. This section also allows you to delete recordings - sadly it doesn’t delete the transcoded files, you’ll need to do that manually on your server - which gives you a small degree of remote management over your burgeoning collection.
Conclusion
Overall, the app is very well put together and would be a very handy compliment to anyone who has implemented mediaportal and also happens to own an iphone. Sadly it is missing a few features such as live tv viewing and remote control of a client, add them and that would turn it into a truly killer app.
As it is, iPiMP functions as a very handy EPG and recording scheduler with the ability to watch your recorded shows if you make use of the supplied transcoder.
A few years back, the PSP had been launched in Japan and I was drooling at the pictures that adorned nearly every gaming site I went to. I even got to play about on an import model at my local CEX store and was mesmerised for a while.
It was a mix of “must have shiny” and “it’s like the gamegear had been thru the slimfast diet!”.
The only thing that saved me from buying it then was the poor line-up of games and the dearth of support for its media capabilities.
Fast forward to today and, while the game catalogue still hasn’t improved much, the media abilities of the now even trimmer PSP slim are very tempting indeed. Yet, I still held out from buying one.. That is, until I got my hands on a single game…
A friend of mine brought over his Japanese copy of Final Fantasy 7: Crisis Core (why do they get all the cool stuff!?) and I had nothing but “I gotta get me one of them” in my head for weeks.
I finally caved in to the voices in my head and bought one and, well I thought I’d put my experiences with it down somewhere!
The first thing you’ll notice is the total lack of a carry case in the box, and the sudden paranoia of “but, I don’t want my shiny to get dirty!” whenever you think about having to carry it around in your bag. For the price they are charging for this thing (the UK is getting gouged for a scary £130!) you’d have thought they’d be willing to give you a few extras to show they cared
If you didn’t get your PSP Slim with a memory stick then it’s certainly advised that you get one otherwise every game you load will scream about it and you’ll never be able to save any games, also things such as favourites and RSS feeds don’t work unless you get a card.
The type you need is a least a memory stick duo (if you have one of the big arsed original memory sticks you’re shit out of luck, if you have one of the tiny m2’s you will need the adapter that makes it big enough to fit into this thing), make sure you don’t get drawn into paying over the odds for a “gaming class” card cause, frankly you’re pissing extra money up against the wall.
To give you an idea of how much you should be paying, a 1Gb memory stick duo card should be going for about £20 and cheaper on the net, don’t get sucker punched by retail shops.
Once you have a memory card in your PSP, the full functions are available to you and allow you to get down to the whole point of it - enjoying yourself.
Having owned a DS for over a year the biggest problem is with the accept and reject buttons - they’re the opposite way around to the DS so I found myself accepting things I didn’t want and cancelling out of things I wanted to do, frustrating for a while but you soon get your fingers reprogrammed.
The extra memory onboard has improved load times of games and the various apps, but I still notice a rather sizable load time when the PSP has to read from its UMD, which does leave you feeling a bit let down - after all, it’s the whizziest and shiniest portable around, which makes you wish this thing would move a bit quicker when loading your game!
Beyond that, when you do get your game going you certainly notice just how much more grunt under the hood the thing has compared to the DS, even though you’ve prolly grown accustomed to better graphics on your consoles and/or PC you still catch yourself being blow away by just what the small thing can do.. You also begin to wonder how the DS is kicking it’s arse in terms of sales until you remember about the choice of games you have and you quickly remember why, even without homebrew titles the DS seemingly has a better selection of games that are fun to pick up and play (you remember fun right?).
I’ve not had a chance to try out the wireless play, partly because I don’t know anyone else with a PSP and partly because I’ve found its wifi to be quite dodgy at times – randomly telling you that it can’t find your access point, telling you the security settings are wrong and then randomly actually getting onto your wifi network – not very helpful in the slightest but something that I chalk up to the intrinsic problems of wifi, tho I did get it complain to me about my dedicated DS wireless network that the key I’m using isn’t a valid WEP key… I think sony have some problems with their wireless comms modules!
Also, with the power of a wifi enabled device that has a web browser on it, I have to say that I quite often caught myself doing a bit of naughty war walking and it not only scares me but makes me concerned just how many unsecured wireless networks there out in the wild.
This leads me quite neatly onto the web browser functionality (funny that ).
The browser powering the PSP’s access is known as NetFront and is quite lacking in features – it has a basic support for flash but not enough for the likes of youtube, revver, break or your other fav flash video sites.
It has problems with displaying other sites (CSS issues etc) and you can often fall foul of the poor space for caching, which can lead to you having to close the browser and open it back up again.
Many of your fav “web 2.0” (I hate that buzz word) sites won’t work if they’re running stuff like AJAX and ruby-on-rails.
That’s not to say that you can’t browse anything, but be prepared for many things to not work at all or to not be fully supported by your PSP.
The way in which you navigate makes good use of the limited interface, you can either use the D-pad to hop from one link to the other or you can flip to a bigger screen and use the analogue stick to move the mouse pointer around freely, hold down the square button to scroll from left to right and up n down.
The text entry is quite tedious, but with some handy quick choices to reduce the number of buttons you have to mash in order to get down the address you want.
Possibly the single biggest letdown is just how painful it is to browse the net using the very small resolution that the PSP’s screen runs at.
When you take the performance, it shows that the PSP is crying out for some opera muscle to power it rather than the limp NetFront. The interface is as good as it’s gonna get on your PSP tho and the lack of a touch interface (I occasionally found myself tapping the screen if I had been messing about with my DS prior to whipping out the PSP) does quite knock back the experience.
With the browser out of the way, we’re left with the movie, music and photo side of the device.
Starting off with the music abilities, it’s pretty simple and easy to use. I did notice with mine it created an MP3 folder on my memory card but it helpfully doesn’t pull the data from there creating a folder called “MUSIC” in the root of the card did the job.
It picked up the album art and displayed it and there is pretty much nothing else to go wrong, it took my test mp3 and played it without a glitch.
For video you have 2 choices, you can use the UMD slot and buy videos – sadly they can’t be used anywhere else and while they have dropped in price quite a lot (many titles are now £4.99), there are still too many with a price tag of £10 and higher that just will never shift.
Your other choice is to go with the memory card by loading up your memory stick with either mp4 or H.264 encoded videos – just make sure to dump them into a folder called “VIDEO” otherwise you’ll be told that there’s no video on your card, chances are you’ll have to guess that it needs this folder and create it yourself… To a not very savvy member of the public, this could prove to be a difficult task and lead to them only ever using UMD’s for their videos (I wonder if this was the plan all along).
I do think that UMD’s are due to die a horrible death anyway, especially with the news from the 2008 CES event that you can use a PS3 to transfer a copy of a bluray movie to the memory card of your PSP by simply inserting the disc, connecting up your PSP and hitting transfer. This is a master stroke and is certainly putting their machines to good use as well as catching onto the fact that we consumers want to be able to take and use our media when, where and how we like!
If only they had figured this out with DVD’s too!
The photo section is pretty much self explanatory really; if you have any pictures in the DCIM folder it’ll simply display them. This is the part of the PSP that I haven’t really used and seriously doubt I ever will too.. some people might find it useful, most people I reckon won’t bother with it either!
My final point on the PSP Slim is with the charging, you have the choice of using the supplied charger or using USB to charge the device. As anyone who has seen my youtube video can attest, I love the ability to charge devices using their built in USB ports. It reduces clutter and pointless unplugging and plugging in of items into and out of my power strips.
Yet, as ever with sony, it’s never as easy as plugging in the USB port and leaving it to work its magic on the battery. Oh no, sony forces you to first enable the setting for USB charging and then you have to activate USB communications before it actually begins to charge the device, breaking the number one rule – keep it simple stupid!
Why they thought it would be necessary to have the device on (so if it runs completely flat you’re in trouble) and to begin talking to your host device (quite blissfully ignoring the potential to simply use a plug with a USB jack on the end of it) is totally beyond me and just smacks of a half hearted effort at what should be a pretty standard feature.
I never bothered to buy the webcam as I don’t really see much of a use for it (plus it’s a bit of a rip off for what it is too).
I have, of course, not even mentioned the promised features that are to be coming in the future – the addition of Skype (tho you need to buy and use a sony headset in order to communicate) and the launch in Japan of a digital TV tuner, which I can only hope makes an appearance over here in the west (stop keeping all of the cool toys!).
Sadly, even tho the PSP has great media features and a handy browsing feature, it still remains quite ignored compared to my very loved DS and this is purely because I’m struggling to find any games other than the Mega Drive collection that actually gets my attention…
Until the time comes for crisis core to be released in the UK, my poor PSP will no doubt gather yet more dust until it gets to show how bright it can shine.
Some small amendments:
The codec is MJpeg not MPeg.
The HD res is actually the res your game runs in.
Other than the minor factual faults, WeGame.com looks like a good, and free, alternative to fraps.
You just need to bear in mind that you will be restricted with which games you can record, but that is something that can be and is improved over time
Check it out and start recording those gaming memories!
A month or so ago, I noticed that my Wii had a nice little blue glow from the cd tray.
This is the Wii’s oh so subtle method of informing you that there is an unopened message sitting in the message board.
So, curious to know I powered it up and checked the board out. Sitting there was a note from nintendo saying that they were offering free wii remote jackets to people who qualify for them.
A swift trip to the address supplied in the message and I had put in my request for 4 of these things and all I had to do was wait for nintendo to review the request and give me a yay or a nay.
A couple of weeks back I got a message telling me that I did qualify
and that they will be shipped to me shortly.
It has taken a couple of weeks (I wonder how much the recent mail strikes affected this) but today they finally arrived.
The envelope they were in was already ripped, but a quick count showed all 4 were indeed in there, along with a sheet of paper informing you how to put them on (which is pretty obvious really!).
They are comfortable in the hand as well as provide a good amount of shock absorption. They will certainly help out the more sweaty palmed players when it comes to griping the remote, which is always a good thing
Final note about them.. they have a feint smell of lockets or tunes on them.. t’is strange!
I decided to take the plunge and grabbed myself a copy of Joost.
For those who might not know, Joost is the p2p webtv offering from the guys who brought you skype.
The thing to keep in mind is that should you have an ISP that considers unlimited net access to mean “you don’t pay for how long you are online but are restricted to a very small bandwidth cap because the net is all about browsing some websites, not about all those other uses for that connection to the entire world because it will expose our poor infrastructure” it might be a bad idea to use this service, I don’t have any stats on bandwidth use just yet, but I will be doing some testing.
For those of us who have real ISP’s, Joost represents one of the potential futures for the TV medium.
Signing up for my logon account was quite painless and the installation wasn’t too bad.
Loading up the application shows that a lot of work has gone into making it appear shiny and toylike.. tho that gloss certainly begins to fade when you notice how laggy it can get and I even had instances where the channel browsing menu either failed to load up the contents of each category or seemed to totally ignore my attempts to change the channel.
The only way to get it to recognise your wish to channel surf is to close joost and restart the application - which can get quite annoying.
You can set it to windowed or full screen, if you have a large screen you’re going to want to run it in a window because the resolution of the video used gets a quite pixellated and distorted on my 24″ monitor.
You can set it to start in windowed or fullscreen mode, so at least you don’t have to keep switching modes after loading it up.
You will be asked for your postcode, name and birth date to “localise and personalise” the offerings to you, my next test will be to take a us zip code to see if it allows me and what the different options are.
I’m always cautious when applications ask for this info and will put as much mis-information into these things (I’ll give my year of birth but I’ll often choose different months and days as well as to give different post codes to my real one because I don’t trust companies to not use my details for spam purposes) as I can because you just don’t need that info.
The parental controls allow the adult to set up a PIN and I did get asked “are you old enough to see this mature content”, of which just clicking on the “I’m old enough” button lets me through.
My biggest gripe so far is to do with its caching system.. which, once again will dump itself into the following path
C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Joost\anthill
and will cache the data into a file called anthill_cache which, depending on what you are watching, will chew up a certain amount of space - I set mine up to watch the golden child earlier and I now have a 700mb file sitting in there.
The bad news is that you cannot change where this file is stored, so if you are pushing the space on your C drive then you’re gonna be squeezed that bit further using this application.
When actually watching the content it has to offer, it does depend on the bandwidth you have available and the quality of the network you are on as to whether you get a choppy experience or a nice and smooth one, this is just the inherent problems with the net and not overly joosts problem.
You do get the option of choosing specific programs out of a channels line up and you can even pause the stream as well as to click on the time bar and skip through entire segments of the program - very nice ability and certainly allows you to escape crappy sections to get to the good stuff or to go back and rewatch something that has just happened, this certainly gets my thumbs up rather than watching a crappy feed that will sit on “buffering” if you try to shift the time at all or is so rigid that you can’t deviate from just watching it in real time.
Joost is certainly missing a record function - something I’m sure has to do with not getting their arse sued out of existence, however I can certainly see it as a feature of a subscription service, as long as it doesn’t come infected with DRM and is in a decent format.
There is a surprising amount of content on there, from some classic films (breakfast at tiffanies!) and some great tv shows to the utter tripe that is the entire lineup on channels such as frag.
It seems like an interesting service, provided it survives and as I said I can envisage a subscription service being brought into existance.
I’ll continue my playing about with it and keep this up to date.
30/10/07
Well, having played about with just using it I decided to have a look and see what kinda strain this app will put onto my net connection.
When streaming a 15 to 30 min tv show you will be looking at an average of about 60KB/s with some fluctuation, sometimes hitting 80 to 90k, when streaming a movie it does tend to spend more time in the 80 to 90KB/s bracket but nothing rediculous and certainly nothing that can bring an isp that isn’t over subscribed to its knees, I can see those who have very strict bandwidth caps (BT, when will you learn that 5Gb is unacceptable!) having problems with their ISPs and if you are one of those poor unfortunates then I have 1 line of advice for you: Don’t use price as your only metric for deciding on who you wish to supply your net connection, would you put up with a phone service that throws a tantrum if you happen to use a certain amount of network time?
When you are browsing the list of channels, it did spike into the 100’s and the highest I saw was 184KB/s, tho I have to say that when you have a 4 or 8Mb connection this is nothing really, tho you might get complaints from any camper shite players that share your connection.
Upstream is very light, tho it did quite often chatter a bit and would often hit between 1 and 2KB/s, with the highest being just shy of 5KB/s. Something to keep in mind is that I did also have an IRC client running so a bit of that chattyness will be down to that.
However, for something that is meant to be p2p this is practically nothing and makes me wonder where the upload burden is occurring.
This does lead me onto the fact that when you click on the “standby” button to exit the app it leaves a presence in your system tray (the part down by your clock), so far I have left this running and there hasn’t been any other traffic other than the irc client.
The good news is that this system tray do give you the option to right click on it and select “exit”, so even if you do feel the paranoia you can have it exited and ensure that it doesn’t do anything behind your back.
Hmmm.. actually, whilst writing this I have just noticed that the upload is now occationally jumping from 3KB/s to 29/30KB/s and then calming down, so it appears that leaving the Joost system tray process running, it will begin its p2p aspect and upload a bit of data.
I mentioned earlier about how Joost will ask you for a post or zip code to do some “location tuning”, so far I have picked out microsofts zip code and substituted my uk post code (not my actual home one tho) for this zip code and not noticed anything new so far, but I will keep my beady little eyes open for it - also I don’t know how this will affect the uploading aspect of the application (if it has any kind of peak time demands or if it will provide capacity for people who are awake when you aren’t).
For now, the bandwidth requirements aren’t that hefty, but remember that it is constantly chewing thru about 60 to 70KB/s when you are watching something (if you take it as 65KB/s average it will chew through 239MB in an hour) and has shown itself to be “bursty” in nature when it needs to be.
I’ll be keeping an eye on things and I’ll see how the application changes with a bit of usage.
03/11/07
It appears that changing the zip code doesn’t really change much at all and that the regionalisation is, as I had a hunch it would be, based on the IP you currently have.
In my eyes, this is a major failing for an internet service such as this.
While I can understand that Joost has entered contracts with content providers in order to provide the content to its customers and that these contracts will be drawn up with a mind on what agreements the likes of WB and paramount already have with different companies in various territories (good example would be an exclusivity deal with a tv station in one country could be easily broken by signing up that exact same content to joost without restrictions), it does leave a sour taste for those who do suffer and goes against the very attribute that I love about the internet - it doesn’t have the physical and boundry limitations that traditional broadcast faces.
There is a massive demand for unrestricted content that forces sites such as tv-links.co.uk to exist in the first place. Rather than firefight the effect, look at the root cause and realise that your customer base is crying out for a certain type of service rather than turn us all into criminals and waste your resources trying to hunt us down.
Many people would willingly pay for a decent service like this, is it really worth cutting off your nose to spite your face?
It does give me concerns for how joost will operate in the future and whether it can or will adapt once it gets big enough to actually negotiate with the content providers rather than have limitations foisted upon them.
I have, over the course of the past 4 or 5 years tried to have a pc running as my TV in some form or another - the sheer capability of a pc, tv tuner and as much networked storage as you can afford makes for a potential entertainment system that puts everything else in the shade.
I have tried usb digital tuners and their buggy as fuck software (avermedia, pointing at you buddies), pci cards sporting analogue tuners (my trusty hauppage pvr300 or my first foray into the tuner market, the voodootv!) with a whole mix of operating systems - be they linux, media center edition 2005, xp with additional software such as snapstreams beyond tv or just the software that came with the tuners across multiple PC’s that have, in one way or another proven to be either not up to spec (don’t bother with snapstream on a P3 IBM netvista… it’s not worth the folicle damage ) or just outright died on me (my beige box called wrekgar who was using a mobo that was knackered anyway).
My reasons for rejecting most of the items I tried are as follows:
Media Center Edition 2005 turned out to be xp home based, and as such I refuse to have that crap on my network, not to mention the shitty tuner support at the time.
Linux was too much of a hassle to bother with, full stop.
XP and the TV software that came with the software - This wasn’t too bad but usually it was a collection of disperate applications in a mishmash of conflicting screens that it wasn’t a pleasant and seamless experience not to mention the constant penalisation for having the audacity to live outside of the US, which means shit like the EPG services perpetually wallow in “coming soon” status.
Snapstream is by far and away the best that I had tried in the past, the only problem was that I never had a pc that could handle it as it did have a bit of an overhead on the machine that would host it, however it still has a number of features that not even the vista revamped media center has. This was back when they first launched their version 3 software.
Now, this past month and a half I found myself gaining possession of a P4 based dell server that was capable of taking vista as well as having a vid card that could meet the aero system requirements - “great” I thought to myself “I’d get to try out vistas media center now” especially as vista can allow you to effectively trial the OS before it goes about crippling itself (gonna do a podcast about what it does when it does begin the “license me” whinge).
So, I got the dell home and slapped in one of my spare 120gb hdds and then plugged the vid card and my old pvr300 card from the stricken husk of wrekgar and began deploying vista from my deployment server (anything to get to play with these services).
The installation environment for vista is certainly a vast improvement over the win2k and xp with the one exception being vistas inability to handle dynamic disks during this stage (I seriously couldn’t believe it that you can’t do a single fucking thing with it and have to either reboot fire up an xp cd or plop it into a pc that does have an os on it to convert it and nuke it! get your act together microsoft).
Apart from that niggle, it’s pretty smooth and I do like that there’s less menus to go thru.
I have to make a point that it would be nice if MS could release a version that auto assumes I’m in the UK rather than the US, if you can’t do the smallest of changes to your OS location defaults and insist on deploying the US version of the OS then give us american prices cause you can’t even hide behind the translation excuse ya thieving gets.
Once the installation is over and I’m now logged in, we begin the search for working drivers - which is not as bad as it was on release because the lazy 3rd party lot have finally put out some drivers that don’t feel like rush jobs and don’t give your vista install an enema whenever it borks out on you.
After getting all of my drivers installed, I slide my mouse over to the media center icon and start ploughing thru the setup interfaces.
As much as it goes against my cynical being, I have to give them credit when it is deserved, it is very easy to go thru the setup and I finally get to have a working EPG as well, bonus!
Once it is, quite surprisingly painlessly, set up the navigation menus are well put together and you can see how they are positioning the xbox360 as the set top box du joir due to the built in extender (something that is confirmed at their recently unveiled home server flash site), I do wish that they had swapped around the “live tv” and the “guide” buttons because I just don’t use the “live tv”.
My biggest gripe is coming up now, this is the navigation of the program guide section, quite often I end up going from playing ping pong between several hours in the future and back to the present time again when trying to click on the directional button that is only meant to skip you forward 1 program at a time on the guide rather than spin off to several hours into the future (I can click on the button when I’m looking at things at 11pm and it’ll scroll off to 6am!).
Other than that, it’s very easy to select a program to watch, to schedule a program for recording or to put the whole series on record (tho this just looks for the program name and will trap any repeats in between, you have been warned). This does lead me to one slight UI niggle that I noticed was that once you have set a program for recording the series, it’s not immediately noticable how to stop recording the entire series as the only button is for stopping that one recording, putting this out to a seperate “stop recording series” under the “stop recording” button would have made the interface so much nicer and reduce newbie confusion. Little touches make for an overall nicer experience, apple figured this out surely you can too microsoft!
The recording format is an mpeg2 based codec and pumps files out with a format of dvr-ms, it also keeps a load of meta data including the program info from the EPG, which is a nice touch. The quality is as you would expect from mpeg2 and the major limitation is going to be your signal quality - if you’re using an indoor aerial then expect it to be of poorer quality than that of an outdoor one.
However, as to be expected due to using mpeg2 the file sizes are quite scary - 1.2 to 1.6gb for a 30 minute recording can easily swallow up your hdd space, which can cause performance issues since we’re talking about the C: drive in most cases - it’s never wise to run out of hdd space on C when it comes to windows and its demand to save everything to your desktop/documents folder as well as using the temp folder regardless of where you are working (rar and zip fold being unpacked/compressed are very guilty of this!).
It does have the setting where you can keep these recordings for X amount of time or to keep them until they need to be deleted in order to make space for the next recording, being a natural horder of videos I produce I would have much rather they offered the ability to compress the files within the application so that I could dump them to my network storage in a more manageable size.
Quite gleefully I am yet to find any DRM infections on the files it pumped out and it does allow me to go ahead and compress them without hitting a brick wall, tho because of the lack of inbuilt compression options you do have to sift around the net for apps to do the job for you. The best way to do this on windows xp is to use an application called AutoDVRconverter to strip out the bumph that media center adds to the file in order to turn it into a normal mpeg2 file for you to throw over to your encoding application, which in my case was divx since it is the one I have paid for
This begs the question that can the normal “user” be arsed with this?
I highly doubt it and so they will find themselves having to make the tough choices of keeping which recordings around or using the DVD burn option - which, for someone who doesn’t want to have self recorded dvd’s piling up (still have memories of my once large collection of vhs tapes that I had to decide to either chuck or convert to divx) especially when the home network is just perfect for a media library that is available at the click of a few buttons rather than having to stand infront of a perpetually growing bookshelf trying to think of one to watch, only to find either the disc missing or the wrong one in the box it’s just not an option.
Now, my other largest gripe is with the actual recording itself. Quite often it will either record a few minutes of the previous program or miss of the first few moments of the program you want to record. Now, I do accept that this isn’t always MC’s fault, schedules don’t always follow what the guide says and it’s like blaming a captain of a boat for choppy water.
Still, it is an annoyance and I’d be interested to hear what other peoples experiences have been with either their own vista installs or with other devices like tivo and sky+ to see if this is also partly down to the scheduling system as well.
This has all been with using an analogue tuner, I’m yet to see if it would play with my digital tuner (a usb avermedia box) tho the main reason has been that freeview with an indoor aerial just doesn’t work and our external aerial is a bit shit and so I have been tempted to simply stick with my analogue tuner for now.
Also, I have purposefully stayed away from the plug ins because I wanted to experience the out of the box features as well as the simple fact that many normal people won’t ever bother with the addons because they would prolly feel too scared of breaking it and maybe just don’t understand the concept well enough.
So far, media center has a polished feel to it but still has a few imperfections that could get in the way of truly enjoying the experience as well as not having some of the more advanced features of the likes of beyondtv (remote scheduling via the net as one example) that would really make microsofts offering blow plenty of the other options out of the water, and they still might make an appearance in the future tho I wouldn’t hold my breath and would more than likely have to look for plugins (which may end up costing money) to give it that extra functionality.
Now, as a whole I have enjoyed using it especially when I use my MX Air mouse as a damn fine remote control for it (even if my GF felt too intimidated to use it, tho part of that will have been down to the mouse I used ) and it has left me asking the question, do I simply spend on the license for vista and continue using it or should I consider nuking the vista install and plonk another evaluation of vista onto it and then try out beyondtv - especially as one of the killer features of snapstreams product is to choose your recording format.
As it is, I am still not fully won over enough to immediately go out and buy a copy of vista, especially as the cost of their “flagship” os is a scary amount, tho it’s something I’m still gonna have to spend on when I bring that machine out of “evaluation” and into a live system, tho the phoning home nature of vista is something that still creeps me out enough to keep with xp as my platform of choice.
If you guys have any suggestions or comments please lemmie know, as always the input of others is very welcome
This work in progress of a project is not over by any means.. I’ll be updating it with my experiences of beyondtv once I get my lazy arse up to rebuilding the machine.
