not42

I’ve been using the Windows Media Player 11 Beta (WMP 11) for a couple of days now as a test really.  My music collection is a little curious as it is a mix of MP3 files, OGG files and AAC files.  I guess over the years I’ve tried different players and they’ve ripped CDs in different formats, hence the variety.    WMP 11 doesn’t actually help play anything other than WMA and MP3 files, however with the addition of a few codecs, I’ve found it is possible to play all my files better than in iTunes.  I say that because while you can squeeze an OGG file into iTunes, it is impossible to use the graphic equalizer to customize the way it sounds!  Fortunately WMP 11 employs the simpler concept of if it plays it, you can manipulate the sound.

Things haven’t been completely rosy though.  The album lookup tool is a real pain at times:

- It can’t find some tracks.  Sometimes this is because someone added a – sign to a name.  Sometimes it is more fundamental:  if the name employs one or two simple words (you/at/in/on etc), it is impossible to find a track.  And I mean impossible.  Even though you can view the track in the Album Details link on another track you cannot select or locate the missing one!

- It is annoying that you have to select each track in turn.  Surely there must be a way to select the album and have it allocate the correct details to the rest of the tracks using the track number or names.  It takes forever to find the XYZ album for each track.

Other annoyances include the music stores functionality.  The URGE store if you select it appears down the side and is hard to get rid of.  I like the iTunes method of disabling all store functions.  One for Microsoft to learn from.

A few of the scroll bars don’t actually work either, but I guess it is a Beta product – in fact it is a very stable Beta.  No crashes to date.

The new user interface is very intuitive and looks pretty too.

Under the hood it looks like you can now create Converter plug-ins which will be very useful for file synchronization to mobile devices if you have your music in different file formats.  This will enable say an OGG converter plug-in to be written by someone that will automatically convert any say OGG files in your play list into a lower bit rate WMV file if you plug in your PDA or mobile phone for synchronizing.

There appears to be a slight performance issue on the visualizations front – mine stutters every so often.  There are also no new visualizations, but perhaps that will change before release.  Personally I don’t use them so what is there is probably fine for everyone, if a little dated.

One annoying thing for me is lack of use of the mouse scroll wheel on the volume control.  This is so basic and is in every player these days… click on the volume or hover over it and scroll up and down to change the volume.  Please add this feature!

The task bar integration looks pretty rubbish.  I just don’t like the black and grey color down there that takes up so much space.  An icon in the notification area as used by Every Other Player ™ would take up a lot less space and fit in color-wize.

Other than that, it plays music ok, so I guess it’s about as good as WMP 10.  Now if they’d just finish it by adding these suggestions then it might be an upgrade worth installing.

One of the hidden secrets in the Xbox 360 is its capability to run as a Media Center Edition 2005 PC Extender. So, what does that mean you’re missing out on? In short you could be using your Xbox 360 to watch movies and TV that you’ve either recorded yourself, or have downloaded.

What do you need?

Currently you can only stream videos to your Xbox 360 from a Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 PC. I say currently because there are rumours that this might change one day, but here today, that’s the only way. Do you have to buy a new PC to do this? Not if you don’t want to – you can buy an MCE OEM CD and install it yourself.

So what is this MCE? Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 is basically another version of XP, the very same XP you enjoy now but it has one key addition: the ‘Media Center’ program. When you run it you get a simple menu driven interface that simplifies access to media files (music, videos, photos) along with the ability to watch and record TV if your computer has a TV tuner card installed.

Do you actually need a TV tuner card on your Media Center PC? The answer is no, not unless you want to have the ability to use your PC as a TIVO type box. That alone is a very useful feature but you can watch downloaded files without purchasing any extra hardware at all.

So, to stream video you need a copy of Microsoft Media Center Edition 2005. If you want to record TV – to do the Tivo thing for ‘free’, you will need an analog tuner. Make sure it’s one with a hardware encoder on it, or it won’t work. Something like the WinTV PVR-500 MCE is a good choice, or the WinTV PVR-150 MCE will get you started. I notice Amazon has the OEM WB (white-box) version going for around $56 with free shipping.

Playing back video

Once you have installed MCE (Media Center Edition) on your PC, you will need to first install the multiple Windows Updates that exist by running the Windows Update tool. Apply the updates repeatedly until none are left. You may also need to use the Custom option in Windows Update because the Media Center specific updates are not critical ones and must be manually selected.

Once all the updates have been installed (and after several reboots), on your Xbox 360, go into the Dashboard and go to the Media blade. You will see a link to Media Center. Follow the instructions there to link your Xbox 360 to your MCE PC.

Once you have installed the download from xbox.com, you will have the ability to play videos on your Xbox 360 that are on the MCE PC, but there is a limitation… you can only play WMV files and MPEG 2 files. Not so good for all those downloaded files.

Adding support for DivX playback

Fortunately for us, an tool has been created that extends MCE to allow it to stream DivX files. You can download it here:

http://www.runtime360.com/projects/transcode-360/

What this tool does is adds a menu to video files visible within the Media Center, allowing you to play a DivX file by transcoding it on the fly. Transcoding means your PC converts the DivX file to an MPEG steam that the Xbox 360 is capable of playing and sends that to your Xbox. All in realtime and behind the scenes.

The installation of the tool is easy – run the setup program and just accept the defaults that it offers.

So how do you actually watch the DivX files on the Xbox 360 at that point? Assuming that your files are in a shared location, e.g. My Documents\My Videos, you navigate to the movie file but instead of clicking on it to play it, you bring up the menu (Using the X key from a standard controller) and select the ‘More’ option. Then click Transcode to play it.

Pretty simple really

This week I finally got hold of an XBOX 360 Premium for $399 from my local Walmart.  The first thing I then purchased was a Wireless card ($99) for it and GRAW – Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter ($60).

Good things:

• Game quality
• Media Center integration
• XBOX Live downloads

Bad things:

• Noisy when playing games (gets hot)
• Dashboard really needs to have a download queue
• Dashboard really needs to retry connecting when a download fails
• Doesn’t play AAC through Media Center
• Doesn’t play DIVX through Media Center
• Game instability – GRAW locked up at the end of the training session, so I had to do it again although no problems since
• Games are so focused on HDTV that they don’t work well on a regular TV – hard to read text on the screen

Will update as I find other things.

Occasionally I read an article on a website and just feel sad for people. Today that person is the IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industries) chairman John Kennedy. In this BBC News article he is quoted as saying:

DRM “helps get music to consumers in new and flexible ways”

Clearly something must be wrong here since I have never purchased music online, and currently never will. Why? Because of DRM.

Ironically he says

DRM was a “sometimes misunderstood element of the digital music business”

Yes it is John. By you. I enjoy music. I enjoy purchasing music. I would probably purchase more music given the ability to buy unprotected CD tracks online, however while you guys keep forcing DRM on me, and millions like me, you are in effect restricting your sales to those CDs that I buy. You are loosing out on all the opportunities of me hearing a good track on the radio and going and buying it as a spontanious purchase. Not only that, you are probably loosing out because some people will go and find those tracks that are unprotected and download those instead of wasting money on something that is restricted in personal use.

Believe me, the world will come to hate DRM even more than it does now. There will be users who download gigabytes, spent hundreds or thousands of $ on iTunes music, only to have their hard drive crash. They will be pissed, believe me, and guess what they’ll do? Will they re-purchase it, or will they quite rightly feel they own that music, and will then go and download it from sites where the tracks are unprotected. And guess what? Do you think they will then stop with only the files they previously purchased?

You need to get it. You need to realize that people who download a music file expect to be able to do what they want with it – to be able to download it multiple times if lost, to burn it to a CD for their car, to load it on their MP3 player. To use it on a Mac or Linux PC that doesn’t have the same DRM system.

Basically you need to realize that the only way to grow music sales is to offer freedom with that music sale. That and find quality artists that your consumers enjoy listening to. Go spend your time finding the next sound. The next disco, pop, rap, whatever. Give us something new to buy!

Remember. People don’t like being controlled. It is human nature to revolt against controlling forces, and DRM comes into that category.

In 2005, the music industry lowered themselves again. People don’t like stories of corporations suing children for downloading a few files that they can’t afford – for goodness sake, I bet as a child you recorded your favorite songs off the radio charts to enjoy. What is difference? Nothing to the child. It’s not that every kid is out to get you, far from it, they are your future market – so I hope you like the picture you are painting of the music industry.

Give us freedom John. Freedom to buy and do what we like with our music. Don’t give us DRM. And don’t give us some story implying that you understand it, because the truth is it is harming your business.

For the last few months I’ve been getting really frustrated with my computer randomly running slower than it should, using 100% CPU usage in the Explorer.EXE process. Now this process is critical to the way Windows works, it being the taskbar at the bottom of the screen as well as the directory browser, so when it uses 100% CPU, suddenly things take a lot longer to work, or lock up and appear to stop running.

In the past when things have slowed down, I’ve either waited until CPU usage reduced to 0%, or in the event that it didn’t, have terminated the Explorer process and restarted it using Task Manager. Tonight however I decided to investigate what was happening, and by using the SysInternals Process Explorer, have discovered that the cause was Explorer opening this registry key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\
UserAssist\{75048700-EF1F-11D0-9888-006097DEACF9}\Count

Manually opening this key from regedit took about 15 seconds – Yes, that’s 15 seconds to open one registry location!!! – and while I didn’t count the exact number of items, I believe it contained hundreds of thousands of keys. No wonder the Explorer process was going slow when it kept opening this key!

This site here discusses this registry key: http://www.utdallas.edu/~jbs024000/articles/explorer_spy.html. Basically the guy has investigated what information is stored there and it includes things like websites visited, files accessed etc. ever since you installed Windows. Amazing stuff.

For me, the biggest issue was the performance hit rather than the privacy issue. I guess the registry has problems when more than a certain number of keys are stored in a single node, perhaps from fragmentation or just the sheer number of items, however I found that deleting the key immediately made Explorer.exe run at 0% CPU and it’s behaved perfectly ever since.

Quite why Microsoft decided to store all this information infinitely is beyond me, but if you are suffering from performance issues, or simply don’t like the Big Brother style logging system, then might want to consider tidying up your registry. I’ve not noticed any bad side effects, but be warned – editing your registry can have bad consequences, so delete keys at your own peril!

I’m looking forward to enjoying Windows working as it should do again – it was almost at the point of me reinstalling from scratch, but I feel I can put that off now until something else comes up! Enjoy.

Since the early 90’s, a select few have participated in annual competitions, pushing the limits of computers and programming. This is known as the demoscene.

An example of this can be found here: http://www.farb-rausch.com/fr08_final.zip

This demo runs from a mere 64k disk file which is basically unbelievable but true.

You can find more at sites like these: http://www.pouet.net/ http://www.scene.org/

For those of you who have never lived in the UK, you’ve probably never had the opportunity of watching the BBC Top Gear TV programmes. Some would say you’ve not missed much and are better off watching Dallas, but most would say you’ve missed some fine entertainment, including the US who just gave the show a Global Emmy.

Google video comes to the rescue once more with a short clip for your entertainment:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6784354703472305949&q=top+gear

If you enjoy Clarkson’s humour in this episode, check out your local TV guide as episodes do play all over the world.

The guys at Xiph.org have been working hard and have now released a Windows version of the Quicktime 7 OGG plugin. Essential if you enjoy using iTunes but have a library of OGG files.

You can download it here.

Spotted Google now has a video search engine up.

This one made me smile for some reason, perhaps it was the culmination of watching several other people try to dance too

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5184484629705931447

This one took some time but is very good, much more serious:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2451231318029772790

You could spend all day on here just find nuggets!

This post really made me smile:

http://www.emilyhambidge.com/blog/emily/66/

There are a lot of truths and experience in there somewhere…