How to connect your PC to your HDTV

Boy has it been a while...I mean in the past month or so between my last post a bit has happened:

1. Switched to yet another project team (although related to what I was working on before...still hush-hush)

2. Hongyun's parents have gone home a bit early due to a family emergency. Everything is seemingly ok now

3. Hongyun's open studio came and went with nary a whisper. I'd say the event was a dud, but she did get a bit of exposure with a nice article about her and her paintings in a local newspaper.

4. Hongyun found out that she was accepted to UC Berkeley for the Fine Art Studio major and we've been preparing for the move over to the East Bay.

Anyway, I'm not at liberty to talk about the latest stuff that the "TV Services" (yes, that's our new moniker) team has in the works, but here's a hint about some info I need for the particular project I'm working on:

How to connect your PC to your HDTV - HD Beat

Have a great Memorial Day weekend...I know I will.

Strip Out Commercials and Compress DVRMS files

This looks like a promising tool for working with DVRMS files that windows media center creates. So far, I've been using autodvr convert to strip out the mpeg from the dvrms wrapper and then Auto Gordian Knot to compress to xvid. These are great for DVD backup, but they still have commercials. With this tool, it looks like it will strip out the commercials AND compress to WMV files. Then I'll transfer them to my phone to watch.

Check it out: Media Made Easy Newsletter

12 drive bays...and a partridge in a pear tree

While bumming around the net this morning, I noticed a really interesting looking case from a company called OrigenAE. This thing has 12 (holy cow!) drivebays, a 12" LCD touch screen that flips down to reveal the drive the DVD drive and what not.

I think if I would have attended CES 2006 and seen this thing I would have either:

1) Broken down and cried tears of joy
2) Got down on my knees and worshipped my new pagan idol
3) (Probably) both

I can't wait to see this thing in person...just hoping the price tag won't keep me away like a 50 foot restraining order on an episode of Cops.

See For Yourself.

Oh TV, I love thee

Oh TV, how can I watch thee...let me count the ways:

1. Live TV in the living room (so 1983)
2. Tivo'd shows in the living room (goodbye commercials)
3. Media Center PC in the living room (Tivo + $1000 - $13/mo.)
4. Tivo'd or Media Center'd shows on the Portable Media Center or Windows Mobile device (slow transcoding sucks)
5. Tivo'd or Media Center'd shows on the PSP (via some series of
decryptng and transcoding)
6. Video Ipod ($1.99/show is mighty pricey and they look ugly on any screen bigger than credit card)
7. Some off brand portable running Linux or BSD straight out of Taiwan or Korea (LOTS of formats supported, but usually bad UI, and bad PC software)
8. Windows Media Center Online Spotlight - Comedy Central Motherload from your sofa with a remote control...'nuff said (man we need some folks to fix the naming of our products)
and so on and so forth, forever and ever

You get the point...there are a LOT of ways to get your daily fill of Days of our Lives and guess what, there are going to be a LOT more ways coming up.

Yahoo Go! links Web services to phones, TVs - Wireless World - MSNBC.com
Microsoft partners with Murdoch in video pact (I guess no one remembers how DirecTV screwed Microsoft in the heyday of UltimateTV...here we go again)
Google sets up the Video Lemonade Stand

And soooo much more. Yes folks, TV 2.0 is finally upon us. I, like you, have been waiting for this for a long time. Man, I'm kicking myself for missing CES this year...CES TV junkies, I envy you.

MSNTV Cats Flying Out of the Bag

During his keynote, BillG showed off some stuff the MSNTV team has been working on. It's quite an honor to grab such a large chunk of the demo especially since our team is so tiny and we've only been working on this stuff for a few months. I'd like to say I had a hand it in, but alas I did not.

At any rate, I was proud that our team is on the right track so much so that BillG and company decided to use our technology to spotlight Windows Live.com, Messenger, and MediaCenter. We also got a plug for Remote Record!

There were also other cats let out of the bag this morning by our marketing folks. MSNTV has announced a partnership with a company called KVH that creates RV, boat, and car sattellite TV and communications products. We're going to put MSNTV2 in RVs, boats, and cars! Using the power of EVDO (think broadband speeds with cell phone coverage), users will be able to surf in their RV at current EVDO speeds (300Kbps-2Mbps). I recently uploaded the photos of the mobile test to the dodoskido gallery. Basically we took an MSNTV2 box and the green Junxion box that hooks up to the Verizon EVDO service. We tried to take a TV along, but my power inverter was too overloaded so I brought my laptop with an RCA to USB adapter. We found a couple of minor quirks that occurred when using the broadband while on the freeway (which we've since fixed), but overall we were quite surprised at how smooth the performance really was. I'm not sure if I'll get one in my car, but rest assured, I'll have some form of broadband in my car soon as I just signed up for Sprint's EVDO service on my new Sprint PPC-6700 (goodbye Tmobile Wifi!).

Tweak MCE Update

I just spent the better part of the day figuring out why my Media Center 2005 test machine at work has been crashing left and right. Looks like it had a case of the "Mundays."

Anyway, here's the knowledge base support article that tells you how to fix it.

I also uninstalled all of my MPEG-2 decoders and decided to try the Nvidia PureVideo decoder which seems to be more stable than the InterVideo decoder I got with WinDVD7.

Now, I'll try to install the updated Media Center Tweak MCE Powertoy so I can re-customize my setup. Ahhh...it's nice to be back at work

Microsoft PowerToys for Windows XP Media Center Edition

Google TV coming

As expected, Google is getting into the TV business. They look like they're going to implement a search engine for content and, of course, derive compensation from related advertisements.

See for Yourself.

Apple to sell video downloads

While my time with the Creative Zen was short and sweet, I realized that a technically great device was hampered by the lack of a great content acquisition model. It was damned near impossible to get a DVD that I owned onto the device; I had to use a few illegal products to break the encryption of the DVD and then wait hours for it to encode the file properly. Also, the content available from MovieLink and CinemaNow offer an array of mind-boggling license terms that were difficult to keep straight (some were downloadable, some weren't; some were active for 3 days, some were active for 24 hours after beginning to watch it; etc etc). Not only that, these companies rarely provided any really good movie choices.

I know the idea of the Portable Media Center was to acquire content from your Windows Media Center PC, but you still had to wait a major amount of time for the video to transcode to the proper format for the PMC. There really was no concept of instant portable gratification like that found with the iTunes Music Store. While Microsoft is planning on a second coming of the Portable Media Center, unless the content model is hashed out, I think it may be another extremely niche product, catering to a subset of those Windows Media Center users with money to burn and TV on their minds just about everywhere they go.

Enter Apple. The company that, dare I say, perfected the music download model (while others have tried to immitate, none have gained the adoption of the masses that Apple as thus far garnered) is planning to bring music videos to your hand. It's an obvious leap to see that Apple will be offering movie and TV show downloads (assuming their lawyers can play nice with the TV and movie industry lawyers) in the near future. Why will this win too? Because Apple knows how to create a viable content model. They'll make it work right. I'm hoping for native Xvid, Divx, MPEG-2, OGM, everything-and-the-kitchen-sink support, but will settle for some sort of super speedy conversion or wrapping technology that obviates the need for the Windows Media Player model of hours-long transcode sessions.

Hannibal of ArsTechnica speculates on Apple's upcoming video download service (quite an interesting if not most-likely accurate portrayal of things to be):

The iTMS video section will initially be limited to music videos in QuickTime format, as well as some Pixar content (shorts, and maybe a few films). All downloadable video will come wrapped in proprietary Apple DRM, and (as is the case with AAC) this QT + DRM format will be the only DRM-enabled video format that the video iPod will be capable of playing. Video iPod owners will be able to use the device to play a few non-DRM types of video, like MP4, DIVX, etc., and they may be able to rip DVDs and play them on the iPod, but they won't be able to play DRM'd video downloaded from competing online video services. In this respect, Apple will attempt to replicate in the video download space the successful business model that they innovated in the music download space. They'll also be going into direct competition with Microsoft's Windows Media format.

Link.

Windows Media Center Keyboard

Now here's a nice keyboard. Backlit keys! Woohoo! Does it work with MSNTV2? Maybe...if it's IR then we may have a chance. If it's bluetooth, kiss your MSNTV2-with-super-cool-keyboard dreams goodbye...

MediaPortal...the ultimate Windows Media Center clone

I've been using SageTV for some time now and I must admit that it's a nice piece of software. My two complaints are that it's ugly and is expensive. Now there is an opensource Media Center clone that is gorgeous (I haven't taken it for a spin yet, but look at this screenshot):

Anyway, it's called MediaPortal.
Download, install, contribute, enjoy.

[via Download Squad]