Andrew Grant

It’s been a wee while, but then I’ve been a wee bit busy lately!

Part of that is because I’ve left behind the sun-drenched beaches of Los Angeles for the slightly chillier climate of the Bay Area – San Francisco to be precise. Despite dropping about 10 degrees in temperature (5.5 degrees, Celsius readers) I’m very much enjoying the change. It’s nice being back in a city where walking and public transport are a part of everyday life, definitely an improvement over the car-centric nature of Los Angeles. Also I’m living in the North Beach district which means I have a huuge number of bars, restaurants and shops just a few blocks away, which is fantastic for those summer weekends and evenings

And with a change of city comes a change of job! About a month ago I started at LucasArts and so far it’s been brilliant. I’m part of a team working on something that’s fantastically exciting, but also highly highly confidential and several years away. I’ve always avoided talking about work here other than in the abstract and that’ll continue, but I do look forward to the day when I can say more

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I think my car (2006 Mustang) was probably one of the last models ever not to feature some form of auxiliary input on the radio/cd player. (Four years after the iPod explosion and Ford still weren’t offering an easy in-car solution – hard to imagine why they’re having financial problems..).

For listening to iPods the only option I have are the “FM” tuner devices that broadcast a local FM signal for your radio, and for an iPhone only the types of these devices that are shielded to avoid interference.

With the closure of LA’s Indie 103, and my rapidly growing podcast backlog, I decided to pick up the Griffin RoadTrip FM for iPhone so I’d be able to listen to something other than the junky commercial stations that decorate the LA airwaves. My only requirements were for something that supported the iPhone and had a cradle/charge stand, which were both covered by the Roadtrip.

The retail price of this device in stores like BestBuy is $99, but Amazon have it for $60 – which is a good thing because for $100 I’d have returned it. At $60 I like it enough to keep it though.

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While Powerline Adapters always sound great the caveats –  based on your home wiring, performance may be reduced or non existent – have always made me wary. Since trying a pair of Netgear HDXB111’s last week I’ve became a complete convert though.

Recently I moved our Windows Media Center into a nice cool cupboard in the office, with the Xbox 360 in the living room taking over as an extender for TV/Media duties. For the most part this works very well but had one problem – our wireless network wasn’t fast enough to reliably stream HDTV.

We have a wireless bridge (two routers connected wirelessly with physical clients) between the office and living room. While Wireless-N clients can expect speeds of 70-80mbps a bridge will only see half of that. This is fine for streaming photos/music/videos/SDTV but borderline for HDTV and any interference or other wireless activity would cause the picture to breakup. Laying Ethernet isn’t an option so instead I decided to give Powerline Adapters a try.

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Although I use a MacBook & OSX there are several Windows programs that I can’t do without and thus have VMware Fusion running almost constantly. In the year or so that I’ve been using Fusion I’ve discovered a lot of things that can improve performance, some obvious and some not so.

This will be the post I wish I could have found when I began using Fusion

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I’ve been running the Windows 7 beta for around a week now and decided over the weekend that I like it enough to use in place of Vista.

When I tried to set it up with my HP MediaSmart Server though the HP installer would constantly generate a Windows error, before displaying an error message with “RegOpenKeyExW” and then exiting.

Trying the vanilla installer from a system-builder install of Windows Home Server lead to more helpful information, and a series of steps that will resolve this problem;

For anyone encountering the “RegOpenKeyExW” with the HP MediaSmart Server/Windows Home Server, and Windows 7 try the following steps;

1. Click Start button and type “Command”. When  “Command Prompt” appears in the list, right-click on it and choose “Run as Administrator”
2. Enter the following: reg delete HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\SQMClient\Windows\DisabledSessions /va /f
3. Press enter. If you receive an error you are probably not running as an administrator.
4. Close the command prompt. The Windows Home Server connector software should now install successfully.

Currently you’re Windows 7 machine will be listed as “Windows Vista”, but that’s a known issue!

Over the last week I set myself a mini-project of making three improvements to my Windows Media Center setup.

1. Compress recorded shows older than 30 days in WMV to save space.
2. Moved older shows (compressed or not) to a network share to save space.
3. Virtualizing Media Center under Windows Home Server

The results? Complete failure on the first two, and some success on the third but that was ultimately dependent on getting #2 working.

This one of those experiences with Media Center when I start to look at the price of a Season 3 TiVo + lifetime pass. My Media Center’s over three years old now I’ve basically been holding off till a nice (e.g. small) CableCard system becomes available, and/or I know it’ll still work with protected content after upgrading to Windows 7.

I’m happy to trade the out-of-the-box convenience of TiVo for the increased flexibility of Media Center, but at times Media Center seems to have difficulty with scenarios that are clearly popular and this gets frustrating. I love Media Center, but it does seem to have an identity problem.

Anyhow, here are my experiences;

Compress older shows to WMV

Using MCEBuddy I had the compression step working in almost no time at all. MCEBuddy is a really nice program that’s well done – simple to use and setup. I chose the WMV compression option since it would cover all of my devices (Windows Media Center, Extenders and the XBox) and set it to convert a few really old 50+ day programs.

After it’d completed I noticed that the shows were no longer visible in the “Recorded TV” section, despite being in the same location with the same filename. After much puzzling and Googling, it turns out that Media Center will only show DVR-MS in the “Recorded TV” section.

Yeah, there are meta-data aspects to consider but this limitation is a bit annoying. Being limited to using the “Video” section, whose interface is poor and needs careful categorization to be useful, makes this rapidly lose its appeal. It’s a shame because this (background WMV encoding) could be a killer feature for Media Center.

Move old shows to a network share

Accessing a network share and moving old files here is super-easy, but getting Media Center to display those shows is complex and something I just couldn’t get working.

There’s a large number of “how to” guides that cover the the numerous steps and registry and/or policy editor tweaks needed on the both machines, but for whatever reason it would just never work. I added the watched locations correctly and could see/open the files in Explorer, but to Media Center they just did not exist and would not appear in the Recorded TV section.

In the past I’ve found Media Center’s support for network-shared media is poor, and this seems to be another example. For a digital home product I have trouble understanding why this is the case, though at least this does seem to be changed in Windows 7

Quick follow my post about running a virtual copy of Windows Media Center;

• I don’t think the high CPU percentages were related to disk access. One of my early concerns was disk performance which I tested with Disk Throughput Tester (Disk TT) and I didn’t notice any CPU problems
• I think it’s more likely the CPU usage is just a case of VM performance not being that good with the setup of VMware/Motherboard/CPU. I’m not familiar with the intricacies, but I know my other PC has an option for hardware virtualization in the BIOS that isn’t present on the box I was testing with.
• The reference to "somewhat successfully" running Home Server under VM was a mistake, for some reason I recalled the post I linked to making mention of connector and performance problems which isn’t the case. I would still be extremely leery of this setup though, if the Media Center drive fails then any recovery is going to be painful.
• I definitely think this setup has potential, but only if you’re willing to invest in better hardware (high-end Core 2 Duo / Quad Core) with better virtualization support. That requires a bigger box and my aim was to try and get both systems running in the you-have-to-see-it-to-appreciate-it Media Smart Server box.

At this point I’m going to explore plan B – an ultra-small Windows Media Center computer that uses Windows Home Server shares for storage.

I’m thinking of a Dell Studio Hybrid, perhaps a Mac Mini, or even a self-build machine based around an Atom processor. As it’ll be used in conjunction with external storage, tuners, and extenders, it doesn’t need to roar – just to be very very small

Like everyone with both Windows Home Server and Windows Media Center boxes I’d pay a good chunk of cash to have both in a single box featuring shared storage, cablecard support, and a small and eco-friendly footprint. A very good chunk.

A few people have (somewhat) successfully virtualized Windows Home Server on their Windows Media Center box but while I admire their cunning there’s potentially a rather ugly problem. If the OS drive for WMC should ever fail you have a chicken-and-egg situation. No WMC = No WHS = No restore from backup.

I think a better scenario then is to have Windows Media Center running as a service on the Home Server box with all output being through one or more extenders. With a few constraints I couldn’t think of any reason why this wouldn’t work so I decided to give it a go

Note the following were required;

1. A VM package that supports USB devices and can be run as a service.
2. USB Tuners
3. Acceptance of being limited to extenders, and not being able to record protected digital content (for the same reasons you can’t record digital content with a custom-built box).

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This is a screenshot of using Live Mesh on my work machine to login to Vista (running under VMWare fusion) on my MacBook at home, which is logged into my Windows Home Server development box, which is installing a copy of Vista Home Premium under VMWare Server.

It looked neat and kind of trippy so I thought I’d post. Everything is fairly responsive too which is nice.

And yes, there is a reason for this hall-of-mirrors type madness. More later

Last week my latest iPhone App, Better Christmas List, was picked to be one of the featured staff favorites on the App Store. Huzzah!

The kudos of being selected gets your app a place in the “Staff Favorites” on iTunes, and the “What’s Hot” section of the iPhone App Store. This is prime billing, and almost as good as being in the top 10 list.

But what effect does this have on sales? Well so far it seems like a 2x effect

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