Mike's Lounge: Media Center

MCE quiet again

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 03:28:57 GMT

Ever since I upgraded the video card in my Media Center PC to the XFX GeForce 6800 XT card my living room had been sounding like a busy airport. I finally ditched it on craigslist and picked up the Gigabyte GeForce 7600GS card. So far I love it. The specs are not as glamorous as the ones of the XFX XTreme card, but I don’t use the MCE for gaming anyway. Its key advantage is that it’s cooled with a heat pipe filled with liquid that moves the heat generated by the GPU to the other side of the card (by vaporizing). Once vapors cool on the way and liquefy, the liquid moves back to the GPU-side of the card. It’s a pretty nice design which makes the whole living room much quieter than before.

Media Center gets an update

Sat, 15 Oct 2005 01:52:38 GMT

Media center got a huge update. The best feature: smart (non-linear) zoom. Now I can finally start watching shows without the top and the bottom of the screen cut off (before they were getting cut off because the whole screen was getting linearly stretched to fit wide screen).

You can get it from Windows Update (it’s called “Windows XP Media Center Edition Rollup Update Version 2”)

As a side note, Media Center’s home page also got a new look.

Now I can’t wait for cable HDTV support…

Schedule recordings remotely on MCE

Thu, 24 Feb 2005 23:58:13 GMT

It’s christmas in February: MSN just shipped a service which allows to schedule recordings remotely on the Media Center.

http://tv.msn.com/tv/RR/RRInfo.aspx

Can't live without ads

Wed, 12 Jan 2005 03:02:41 GMT

Ever since I got my media center pc I started skipping ads when I watch recorded TV shows. At the beginning I was really excited about saving all the time that I would otherwise “waste” on watching ads, but after a while I realized that skipping ads seriously handicapped my knowledge about what’s going on in the world. For instance, I no longer know anything about new products or can determine which things are “in”; without ads when I go to Target it’s so much harder to pick a detergent because they all look the same (in the past I would get anything that had a commercial showing action on the atomic level: think of all the cleaning product commercials that show how the brave detergent kills the mean bacteria). Even worse, when I browse TV guide nothing looks interesting because all previews get skipped with the commercials (as a side note, MCE needs to do a better job in making the TV guide more informative and attractive). After months of feeling like a social reject I am tempted to start (only once in a while) pretending like the skip functionality doesn’t exist and sit through the important messages from advertisers

The complex world of aspect ratios

Mon, 10 Jan 2005 00:56:13 GMT

Today I spent most of my morning investigating another mystery of watching modern television: the aspect ratio. In summary, even on a 16:9 TV when I play widescreen DVD movies I sometimes get black bars on the top and the bottom of the screen just as if I was watching a widescreen movie on a 4:3 TV. It doesn’t happen with all widescreen movies. It turns out that there are tens of widescreen formats with different aspect ratios. Not all of them are currently used, but unfortunately there are two common ratios (1.85:1 and 2.35:1) instead of making everything easy and having just one widescreen format. The difference is quite significant when the movie is watched on a 16:9 TV because the first format generates hardly noticeable top and bottom bars (if any), while the latter one sucks when it’s watched on my TV. Grrrr… why does it have to be so complicated? Since the issue is directly related to the aspect ratio of the TV there is no 100% fix. As a compromise I have to use zoom to get rid of the bars, but at the same time the left and the right sides get cut off. Alternatively, I can squeeze the image, but then everybody looks awfully thin, which can be depressing. This page has a cool diagram illustrating the issue.

Remote control

Sun, 05 Dec 2004 23:45:49 GMT

When I got the Logitech Harmony 688 remote I thought that it was the perfect solution to my remote control problems (for those who haven’t been tracking my life closely, I have 4 remote controls, and at any time I need to use at least three of them to watch anything). I ordered the remote directly from Logitech and it arrived several days later. My first impressions weren’t too good: the remote was stuffed in an 80s-looking velour container and it looked more like a toy full of colorful buttons than something that I’d like to have in my living room. In the first five minutes of using the remote I also learned that pressing buttons didn’t provide the right response so sometimes I didn’t know whether I pressed the button and the remote was pondering whether it should make me happy and execute the command, or if I needed to press harder. Setup was another problem: after spending weeks on building my media center pc, being close of getting a PhD in acoustics required to understand audio equipment and refreshing my electrical engineering skills necessary to wire everything together I wasn’t willing to spend more than 30 minutes to set up the remote. While setup initially seemed easy, the remote didn’t quite understand everything that needed to happen to get all my devices to work (for example, very often it’d fail to switch the input on my TV while it switched everything else. It had a help button that ultimately fixed the state of everything, but what’s the point of pressing the help button all the time?) After around 4 hours total trying different configurations, creating manual scripts, and browsing through tens of newsgroups I finally gave up and last week, thanks to craigslist, found somebody who might provide a better home for the remote. For now, I’ll keep trying to beat my record in switching between watching live TV and watching, for example, a DVD (currently around 20 secs, with error rate of around 20% due to the fact that, in all the excitement of working with so much technology, I end up pressing the wrong button)

Essential MCE Links

Fri, 03 Dec 2004 16:33:24 GMT

Chris Lanier just posted a list of all plug-ins and applications for Media Center

http://msmvps.com/chrisl/archive/2004/12/02/22045.aspx