I've had the media center PC for over a year now and its changed the way we watch TV dramatically. But the other day I found something new. I always knew the media center could backup recorded TV to a DVD but I was surprised how the media center laid the DVD out. I fully expected the shows to run back to back with no DVD menu, but what I found was that the media center put a really cool media center themed menu into the DVD. I was really surprised and really happy that after all this time I can still be amazed at how cool the media center is.

Jason over at Digital Media Thoughts sent me an email about his new article on The Powers and Perils of a Platform.  Jason talks about the trouble he had when a Media Center 'plugin' went bad and couldn't be uninstalled.  It's not clear if it was an HTML application or a managed code add-in, but based on the description I'm assuming it's the latter.  He ran into problems when trying to manually uninstall the application so I thought I should post something on what to do when an add-in goes bad...

In Media Center 2005 add-ins can do pretty much what they want to do without restriction, if one starts to misbehave the best thing you can do is to disable it:

1. Start Media Center
2. Click on Settings
3. Click on General
4. Click More Programs Options
5. Click Edit More Programs
6. Deslect the app to disable and click Save

This will disable the app from starting and hide anything entrypoint it's registered throughout Media Center.  It won't uninstall the app, but it will prevent it from running.

MSN Remote Record is live and out of beta.  In simplest terms it's a way of browsing the same TV guide as your Media Center PC uses and then remotely instructing your Media Center PC to record something.  Pretty clever stuff.  There's a small download for your Media Center PC and then it looks pretty easy to use.

Try it and let me know what you think.

All the keyboard shortcuts for Media Center for those times when you just don't want to use a remote control are documented here.

Update: If the page doesn't display, try again later, it's propagating around servers or something like that I'm told

Betanews reports that Gateway/eMachines will be offering a new Media Center PC for $599!  The specs are pretty impressive for such a cheap computer:

• AMD Athlon 64 3400+
• 1GB DDR SDRAM
• 200GB hard drive
• ATI Radeon Xpress 200
• 8 in 1 media reader
• Rewritable dual-layer DVD drive
• CD-ROM drive

Wow.  No mention of a TV Tuner, monitor or remote though... 

I've never bought an eMachines computer before, but that seems like a great deal for a pretty powerful system.

I've had a couple of questions by email that I should answer (note I've paraphrased some of these):

What fonts should I use for my HTML Media Center application and can I use Flash?  The SDK is where to go for design guidelines for HTML applications (the short answer is to use a sans serif font).  Yes, Flash can be used in HTML Media Center applications - Napster and MSN Music both use Flash.

How can I add an application to the Start Menu?  You can't.  Well OK, you can, but we recommend that only OEMs use this functionality as there is a limit to how many applications can appear on the start menu and adding a new app will stomp on existing applications.  If you intend to distribute your application you shouldn't do this, but if you really want to know, the details are in the SDK here.

I've seen the Media Center software for sale online is it OK to buy it?  I'm no lawyer so I'm not going to comment on this.  Media Center is an OEM product and only available with new PCs is the official answer though.

Uninnovate.com hasan interestingarticle on Apple's new support of 'Reverse syncing' of content with the iTunes7 release yesterday:

Today, Apple released iTunes 7.0,among otherthings. In earlier versions of iTunes, Apple didits best to prevent users from being able to copy music from an iPod back to adesktop computer. Now, Apple has changed course and is marketing “ReverseSyncing” as a new feature of iTunes 7.

But there is one giant catch:

1. Music and media not purchased from the iTunes store only syncs one way, fromyour computer to your iPod.

This is uninnovation in its most frustrating form. It’s easy to spot and avoid drm-saturatedjunk, but these kinds of subtle limitations in an otherwise great product frustrateusers and drive them to alternative applications.How about trusting the user enough to let them get at their own files without thesechildish restrictions?

WMP11 added reverse filetransfer support back in March which works with purchased, and clear content.(It’s also had album art matching in WMP9, dramatically improved in WMP11). I thinkthe author is being a bit overzealous however in his claim of “uninnovation”- it'salways been easy to transfer music off your iPod, it's just a little hidden. Here it’s a little less hidden.

I’ve seen lots of chatter on iTV - Apple's Media Center Extender-esque device forstreaming video to the living room.  It feels like we’ve been here before. LongZheng at istartedsomething.com hasa good recap of the relative strengths and weaknesses of products in this space.  It seems a bit odd that Apple would break from long-time tradition and givea 'sneak preview' of a product that won't be available for at least Q1 '07, particularlywhen they could have held the announce to availability around MacWorld in January.It's clear they had to do this to try and spur purchase of movies from theirnew store- with no rental model, people just don't want to buy movies towatch on their portable players. Tell them they'll be able to play it in other placesas well around the home and their likelihood of purchase is higher.  It’s the battleof cognitive dissonance - buyer's remorse. After all, you're already dealing withthe psychological barrier in that the user is buying an intangible good, somethingwithout physical form that perceptually has less value than physical media such asDVDs. But... you're going to charge about the same as a physical DVD. Without theBonus DVD content.  Oh and the 640x480 video quality people are downloading isgoing to be between VHS and DVD quality (which offers 720x480p).  Never mindthat it will be potentially less for letterboxed content since the new iPod doesn'tsupport 16:9 (widescreen) display.  In the time it will take most customersto download one of these movies, I could have gone to the store, bought the DVD, popcorn,a 6-pack of Coke, dinner, come home, cooked dinner, and be ready to watch. Ina rental model, all of these issues can be forgiven for immediate gratification anda lower price, as witnessed by the popularity of Video On Demand and InDemand services.

The challenges in streaming TV from the PC aren't just the hypothesized need for higherspeed wireless (802.11n) which should be provisionally approved in early 2007. This might be delaying their launch, but streaming 640x480 video across the home hasbeen possible with Media Center Extender for just about two years now.  A challengeis going to be convincing consumers to buy and set up yet another single-purpose devicein the living room, another remote, another input on the TV for this thing.

Today, you can get an Xbox 360 that includesMedia Center Extender at no additional cost. Over 16 million Media Centercustomers can use this today, no additional charge. Even if you don’t have a TV tunerin your PC, you can connect a USB tuner and record TV or HDTV (OTA today, DigitalCable with equipped PCs with Vista). No additional fees.  As announced at CESlast year, multiple HDTV manufacturers are putting Media Center extender into theirdesigns, something that costs less than a night at the movies to implement.

As for another box in the living room, the Xbox 360 does HD gaming, DVD/HD-DVD Playback,Music, Photos, Video, TV/HDTV playback, runs rich media apps from a multitude of providers,and delivers an increasing amount of media content via Xbox Live, including HD.  And it's going to get significantly better with WindowsVista Premium's Media Center features – automatically updating your Xbox 360 tosupport in the family room with the same level of animation and experience. 

Either way, a saying comes to mind: “A rising tide raises all boats” and for thatI welcome Apple's foray.  But if Apple's iTV costs the same as an Xbox, offers nothing more than a 'simplified remote' and fewer mainstream features whichreally makes more sense when competing for  consumer dollars outside the Job'sfaithful?  With Sony and Nintendo's Wii also vying for that same space, it'sabout to get a bit more crowded. Or perhaps just noisy.  So begins the 'Great FamilyRoom Battle of 2007'.

(Disclaimer: I used to work on Media Center, but haven't for over a year, andspeak only for myself.)

I'm back home from @media 2006, which as you probably know took place in London last week. I'd like to follow suit with the many other people who have posted their reflections on this year's conference.

Like last year, @media 2006 was a success. I enjoyed myself thoroughly during my four days in London, mostly thanks to the fantastic people I met and spent time with.

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Posted in:

• Life
• Web Standards

...For nearly five years, George W. Bush and other members of his administration have been proclaiming proudly that they have been tracking terrorist financing through international financial institutions.

...The House of Representatives passed a resolution saying it 'expects the cooperation of all news media organizations.'

Although my first thought was to Twitter this (apparently the frequency for which I do that is starting to make cats salivate), but it deserved more than 140 characters. That being said, had it been a little tweet it would have said this:

@veen: increasingly, it’s clear that everything I learned, I learned from HotWired

I’ve mentioned it before in a couple of posts, and in person to Mr. Veen, but as I do some work for a media client examining their competitors and forming some online strategies and best practices, that site and its primary colours raced back in mind.

Maybe it was the electronic music being streamed into my headphones (the first online music I regularly listened was webcasted from HotWired via Beta Lounge).

Maybe it was that nearly every guideline I outline was done by that crew back in in the mid-1990s.

Maybe it was the nature of my client’s business.

Maybe its the the current debate over “purpose.”

Nevertheless, it’s inspired me to collect my thoughts and respond to a point I made a few weeks ago. After the Online News Association’s conference in Toronto, one of my posts alluded to the fact that mainstream media has failed to pick-up on some of the independent Web’s best practices.

Over the coming weeks, I’ll start posting some longer essays collected under the tentatively group under the title of “Saila Suggests” that will respond and expand on those best practices.

The first, appearing this weekend will be an overview, and will be followed by an piece on created user-friendly Web addresses. Although my self-imposed schedules are infamously erratic, I hope to a have a few more posted before the year is out.

In a few days I'm leaving for London to attend the @media conference. I hope it will be as much fun as last year was, but it's a bit different for me since this year I am one of the speakers. I'll only be sitting in on a panel (Strategic CSS Project Management), not holding a full presentation of my own. I'm still a bit nervous about the whole thing, and looking at the names of the other speakers gives me a surreal feeling.

If you're going to @media and see me standing in a corner trying to make myself invisible, come and say hi. I promise I won't bite. Well, unless you start talking about alt tags ;-). I am a very approachable kind of person most of the time, but I do tend to be a little shy among people I don't know. In other words, don't wait for me to start any conversations.

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A client recently reported that there was a problem with their print stylesheet causing content to be cut off at the right margin. I had a look at it and couldn't see a problem until I tried printing from Internet Explorer. There was a problem alright.

It was really puzzling since all the print CSS for that site does is basically hide parts that are irrelevant when printing. There shouldn't be any conflicts with other style sheets either since the screen style sheets use a different media type. But I was wrong - in some cases IE will apply CSS that it shouldn't.

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Posted in Browsers, CSS.

I've decided to take all the questions I get by email and answer them on Fridays in one post, so do please continue to email me any questions you have.  That said, here's this weeks questions:

How can I keep the Media Center window on top so I can work on other things?  In Media Center go to SettingsGeneralStartup and Window Behavior and select 'Media Center window always on top'.

How can I associate an HTML application with an add-in?  Register both the add-in and the HTML page together.  Instead of registering the HTML app and the add-in you need to register them both as a single application with multiple entrypoints - one entrypoint for the add-in and one for the HTML page.  This will make them both part of the same application and so from a background add-in a call to ApplicationInfo.IsForeground will return 'true' when the HTML page is currently being displayed.

MSN Video Download  apparently went live today with a choice of two membership types  Premium and Basic.  Premium is $19.95 a year and has more content than the free Basic membership.  Not wanting to commit myself to a membership yet I signed up for the Basic membership, thinking I could load some videos on to the miniSD card in my smartphone....

Sign up was easy, I used my passport account, agreed to the terms and installed the download software.  The download status page showed content was downloading from Fox Sports.  In order to sync content to my phone I needed a smart playlist so I followed the instructions to download one.  This was the first problem, the instructions used Windows Media Player 9 and I'm using Windows Media Player 10, a little strange, but not a huge problem.  With the smart playlist in place I thought I'd be good to go...

That wasn't going to be the case though.  I started by trying to play a video in Media Player directly and got prompted for a username and password which was being requested by 'admin.theplatform.com' not 'msnvideodownloads.com'.  I tried my Passport email address and password which might not have been a great idea, but it didn't work anyway.  Meanwhile I could see that Activesync had been trying to sync the content to my phone so I checked the Sync page in WMP.  Nothing had been synced, instead  there was an error message 'Windows Media Player can not synchronize the protected file.  Protected files can not be converted to the required quality level or format'.

Now I have almost half a gigabyte of content (and it's still getting downloaded) and I can't watch any of it.  If anyone gets this working I'd love to know how.

I've had lots of questions recently and no time to really get answers and post them up here.  If I haven't answered you question it's because I don't know the answer and haven't had enough time to get to the bottom of it yet.

First of all I had a couple of questions on MSAS which I don't know that much about.

Can I tell which tuner is being used when a recording takes place using MSAS? No, you can not.  What you can do, which may or may not help is use OnTVRecordStateChange from a background add-in which will give you a GUID and you could track which was in use - this won't help if a tuner is being used for live TV though.  Here's a code snippet on how to use OnTVRecordStateChange:

void IAddInEntryPoint.Launch(AddInHost host)
{

host.Television.OnTVRecordStateChange += new Microsoft.MediaCenter.AddIn.TVRecordStateChangeDelegate(TvRecordStateChangedHandler);

...

}

public void TvRecordStateChangedHandler(object obj, Microsoft.MediaCenter.AddIn.TVRecordStateChangeArgs TVArgs) {

if (TVArgs.Started)

mcHost.HostControl.Dialog('Recording started on tuner ' + TVArgs.Tuner, 'TV Recording',1,10,false);

else if (TVArgs.Stopped)

mcHost.HostControl.Dialog('Recording stopped on tuner ' + TVArgs.Tuner, 'TV Recording',1,10,false);

}

Can I use remote desktop to connect to a Media Center PC? Yes.  You can even use Media Center, but it won't play video over a RDP connection

Can I use animated backgrounds in an HTML page? Not really a media center question, but I don't see why not, use an animated gif.

Could I create an add-in that played a selection of WAV files with a gap between them? Yes, using Playmedia and Playrate you could contstruct an addin to do this - waiting until the playrate was stopped, then wating however long you want before playing the next file.  You could also use More With This  to make this work with any folder of audio files.

Can I use ASP.NET for development?  Yes.  You can use any web technology that outputs HTML.

Can I use WinForms for development?  Yes, but if you're running as a .exe you won't have access to Media Center APIs.  If you're running as a .NET applet in a webpage you'll have access to the Media Center APIs from the HTML page and will have to communicate between the page and the .NET applet to use the Media Center APIs - non-trivial to do, but not hard.