November 24th, 2008

Going back to Windows Media Center

Posted by John Carroll @ 9:15 am

Categories: Digital Media, Media Center, Television

Tags: Channel, Windows Media, Media Center PC, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Windows Media Center, Digital Video Recorder, CableCard, Media Center PCs, DVR, Digital Video

I’d been using Media Center as my primary DVR since shortly after the release of Windows Vista several years ago. At the time, my intention was to learn more about the other TV-oriented technology at Microsoft, which was of particular interest to me as I worked, at the time, in Microsoft’s IPTV division. I also lacked a DVR at home, so Media Center added new capabilities to my television viewing experience that I previously had lacked.

The main drawback, however, is that the computer I was using did not have a “CableCARD” slot. This meant that I could only receive the signals I would receive if I had my cable wire plugged directly into the back of my TV set.

A CableCARD insert would have allowed me to receive more digital cable channels, such as HBO and Showtime. Unfortunately, it is not possible to buy CableCARD add-on hardware for my computer. Systems that have CableCARD slots have to be certified by CableLabs, the standard certification body for Set-Top Boxes used in the cable industry. In other words, if your machine does not have the required interface slots, there is no way to provide them after the fact.

That’s the reason Read the rest of this entry »

January 3rd, 2008

Striking writers and digital media

Posted by John Carroll @ 9:06 am

Categories: Digital Media, Media Center, Television

Tags: Digital Media, Microsoft Windows Genuine Advantage, TVs, Tv & Home Theater, Personal Technology, Home Entertainment, John Carroll

The members of the Writer’s Guild of America (WGA), a union that consists of most of the writers responsible for TV and movie content produced by the LA-based movie industry (a position defended by the fact that union contracts require most sets to use only union writers), continues unabated, thus putting a large crimp in American ability to entertain themselves while seated on couches drinking sodas and scarfing junk food. Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, as we still have 100 years of media content that can be watched, and reality TV is mostly unaffected by the work stoppage.

It has, however, put a stop to new content produced by late-night talk shows. Though David Letterman’s production company, World Wide Pants, managed to negotiate a side deal with the WGA, NBC-based talk shows (Leno, Conan) or shows owned by Viacom (which include Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” and its evil twin, “The Colbert Report,” which constitutes a video “crack” that I have greatly missed these past months) didn’t, thus creating a wedge that the WGA hopes to use to encourage other studios to negotiate deals more to the WGA’s liking.

Personally, I’m of two minds with respect to the WGA. On the one hand, I’m well aware that LA is overrun with hordes of wannabe participants in the movie industry. A poignant anecdote was a guy I ran across passed out at a bar who I tried to help home by paying for a taxi, only to discover that he didn’t, in fact, have a home and lived (literally) under a bridge. He was, he explained, a writer, and he planned to make it big Real Soon Now.

The fear, in other words, is that all that competition would make writing for TV and film an essentially free service.

Likewise, I am Read the rest of this entry »

September 7th, 2007

Media Center Extenders and programmable television

Posted by John Carroll @ 9:35 am

Categories: Digital Media, Media Center, Microsoft, Programming, Television, Vista, XBOX, XBOX 360

Tags: Microsoft Silverlight, Media Center PC, TV, MCML, John Carroll

As I’ve indicated in the past, I’m a user of Windows Vista Media Center. Up till now, however, I’ve mostly used it through my XBOX. That, however, isn’t ideal, as I don’t like leaving my XBOX on indefinitely (for obvious reasons), and restarting the box usually takes time (not LOTS of time, but it certainly isn’t instantaneous).

I would prefer to have a dedicated task-specific Media Center Extender that I could attach to other TV sets in my home and is designed to be left powered-on all the time. That’s where the new Media Center Extenders come in. Of particular interest is the fact that, as the referenced article reports, the new extenders will include decoders for such popular formats as DivX and XVID. Even better would be if the list of supported codecs could be extended (no word on that yet).

Media Center Extenders make it possible to leave the desktop computer, most instances of which aren’t really designed to be placed in the living room, in the office while accessing its media assets and Media Center UI from other rooms in the house. It treats Windows as a high-feature media server (of sorts) with the added advantage that I can create new applications that can plug into the user experience. Media Center represents customizable TV, and given that the Media Center environment runs on Windows, extensions have access to the full Windows development library. Merged Internet and traditional cable viewing experiences (among other things) become very possible.

The best viewing experience in the new Media Center Extenders appears to come from plugins written in MCML. MCML is an XML grammar used to create screen layouts in Media Center. It exists in parallel to other Media Center development options, such as HTML and WPF extensions. It is also a format that gets sent (in a compiled form) to the latest Media Center Extenders, enabling the kinds of smooth animations that wouldn’t be possible if Media Center Extenders performed some kind of Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) access to the Windows box to view the user interface.

WPF Media Center plugins aren’t “remoted” in this way, mostly because the full WPF framework would be far too heavyweight to run in a task-specific consumer electronics device. I expect, however, that that will change in future, and Silverlight will be the agent for this.

It only makes sense for Media Center to eventually support Silverlight. Silverlight is a WPF subset that is more lightweight and a better fit for embedded devices. Further, somewhat like MCML, Silverlight XAML pages get downloaded by clients and rendered locally, enabling the same kind of smooth animations and transitions made possible by locally-rendered MCML.

Ray Ozzie speaks of Silverlight as a common development layer that will extend across product categories. Imagine if you could use the same Microsoft developer tools to target desktop computers (Windows, Linux, Apple), mobile phones, IPTV Set-Top Boxes, and Media Center Extenders.

Since high-level executives are speaking that way, I think its a foregone conclusion that Media Center will eventually support Silverlight. Just a prediction…

July 11th, 2007

Fair Use

Posted by John Carroll @ 10:21 am

Categories: DRM, Digital Media, Media Center, Television

Tags: Digital-rights Management, John Carroll

According to an article over on Ars Technica, today is the 3rd annual Fair Use Day. On the project website for the event, advocates celebrated EMI’s dropping of DRM from its digital music sales and the cracking of AACS, though they also for some reason threw net neutrality into the mix (not interested in touching that discussion right now)

I’m of two minds about fair use. On the one hand, I want to be able to copy all my DVDs to a computer so that I can make them available through a Media Center PC (as an example). I’m a writer, and I regularly lift whole paragraphs from other people’s articles (with references, of course). Citations are common in the printed word. If I wanted to play a segment of a popular song or a snippet from a copyright-protected movie in a low budget film I create, however, I would need to license the rights to those snippets from the copyright holder. Worse, copyright lasts 70+ years…an eternity in media.

I want to be able to play my media on any device. Since DRM is a hindrance to that, DRM is a problem.

On the other hand Read the rest of this entry »

June 28th, 2007

The battle for the living room platform

Posted by John Carroll @ 9:58 am

Categories: DRM, Digital Media, Media Center, Microsoft, Nintendo, PS3, Sony, Television, Wii, XBOX, XBOX 360

Tags: Game, Software, Console, Game Console, John Carroll

Nintendo announced yesterday WiiWare, a program which will enable developers to create games that can be downloaded to the Wii console. Such games can be sold through the Wii Shop Channel, creating revenue opportunities for smaller-scale developers who wouldn’t have the resources to create more labor intensive productions of a sort contemplated by big games studios.

This competes with Microsoft’s XNA program for the XBOX 360, which is good, as I want Microsoft to spend more time promoting the project and making XNA creations more widely available, and competition usually gets them to do that. Nintendo’s move is also part of a wider trend towards enabling mere mortals to create software for game consoles. This is a critically important development, as I consider it the first steps towards software enabling the living room.

If you think about it, very little software has been applied to the living room space. Most people use monolithic electronic devices to manage their entertainment experience (and yes, there is often software inside of it, but not on the same order as found on a typical desktop PC). Where software is most prevalent - namely, inside cable set-top boxes (STBs) - the system has thus far been mostly closed.

On the STB Read the rest of this entry »

April 18th, 2007

Thoughts on Windows Media Center

Posted by John Carroll @ 11:14 am

Categories: DRM, Digital Media, General, Media Center, Microsoft, Television, Vista

Tags:

I just finished signing up for the Media Center "Fiji" beta program discussed by Mary Jo Foley in a recent blog post. Media Center is the way I watch television these days. It provides guide and DVR functionality for my TV watching, turns my TV into a categorized jukebox for all my music, and makes available all the digital photos and videos I have ever created (including a low-tech movie I did on a shoestring with a bunch of Limerick lads and lasses…which is real trip to watch several years later). It is also a highly programmable and customizable environment. I can add new hard drives if I want, and I can write software plug-ins to add new functionality.

Media center has been the proving ground for the creation of software-mediated TV experiences within Microsoft, and that experience should be allowed to percolate as widely as possible within the company.

What I really want, however, is one of the new CableCARD Media Center systems. Right now, I am rather low-tech from a TV standpoint. I don't have premium channels such as HBO, and I can't access things like Pay Per View or "On Demand" content because I don't have a Digital Set-Top Box (STB), a result of past annoyance at the ever-creeping charges levied by my cable company.

New CableCARD technology aims

Read the rest of this entry »