I’ve been using the Vista version of Windows Media Center for a little over a month now. Initially I was underwhelmed, but after a lot of tinkering, some media reorganization, and a small hardware purchase I feel everything is finally working as well as MCE2005 did.

From comments and emails it seems I’m not the only one who has teething problems. In this post I’ll list a few of the tweaks I made that improved the performance of Media Center in Vista, and the $40 hardware change that made a huge difference.

Power Settings

By default Vista’s power management is set to “balanced”, and in balanced mode the minimum/maximum processor states are set to 5%/100% respectively. This means during periods of inactivity or low utilization your CPU performance to 5% of the norm. This can seem like a good thing, particularly for a HTPC where heat/noise is a concern, but it can also cause problems. If sudden activity requires more CPU time (e.g bringing up the guide or a menu while watching TV) then there can be a noticeable lag while the processor attempts to ramp back up.

Depending on your processor I’d recommend you switch to the High Performance plan, or change these settings from anywhere between 50%/100% to 100%/100%.

This option can be found in Control Panel->Power Options->Change Plan Settings->Change Advanced Settings.

Indexing

By default Vista will index files stored on your hard-drive for fast searching. Normally this is a good thing, but for a HTPC it’s overkill. You can disable indexing on a per-drive basis. At the very least you should disable indexing for the drive or partition where your recorded TV is stored (keeping recorded TV on a separate drive/partition is a performance tip in itself

Computer->Right Click Drive->Properties->Index this drive for faster searching.

Aero

Aero is the name of the fancy new UI effects in Vista, which are partly the responsibility of a component called the Desktop Window Manager (dwm.exe). I’m not entirely sure why, but with Aero enabled I found dwm.exe would be taking ~5% of CPU time, even with Media Center set at fullscreen. Disabling Aero by choosing “Vista Basic” as the color scheme disables DWM and removes this problem.

This option can be found in Control Panel->Personalization->Window Color and Appearance.

NAS (Network Attached Storage)

With MCE2005 I kept all of my media (Music, Pictures, Videos) on my Windows Home Server box which was connected by a Wireless-G network. Aside from the occasional stutter in a film this worked perfectly. Everything was also kept in a backed-up location accessible by all machines.

With Vista MCE this did not work well at all, with videos being particularly problamatic. When viewing a folder of videos Media Center will attempt to create thumbnails but does this in a decidedly synchronous manner - the interface stalls while each thumbnail is created. When you have a folder of 20+ videos on a network drive you can pretty much forget having a usable interface for a good few minutes.

It’s been said Media Center is not designed to access networked media in this manner although I contend that is an implementation flaw. Creation of thumbnails or meta data should happen in the background and be invisible to the user, whether it takes two seconds or twenty.

Because I didn’t have enough space on my Media Center machine to store videos I plugged in a 500GB external HDD and setup a nightly synctoy task to keep the media files updated with my Windows Home Server. An alternative would be to turn off thumbnails, or network your machines using gigabit Ethernet (sadly the latter is not an option for me).

Video card / MPEG decoder

Vista Media Center now comes with a built-in MPEG-2 decoder allowing you to watch TV out of the box without the need to purchase a 3rd party solution. This isn’t entirely an altruistic move by Microsoft. Providing their own MPEG-2 decoder ensures an end-to-end protected media path for DRM reasons. By default Vista Media Center will not even allow the use of 3rd party decoders such as PureVideo, although they are ways to force this.

Vista’s video rendering supports DXVA (DirectX Video Acceleration), so if your graphics card supports DXVA and has the correct drivers you’ll benefit from hardware accelerated MPEG-2 decoding. Unfortunately, as of now most graphics cards don’t support this.

Under MCE 2005 all of my SDTV/HDTV decoding was handled in hardware by my Geforce 7800 and the NVidia PureVideo decoder. Under Vista, the PureVideo decoder was no longer supported and without DXVA support all decoding was performed in software. When viewing HDTV this put so much strain on my CPU that the UI would often become unresponsive.

I then tried to switch back to PureVideo (as mentioned there is a method to force Vista Media Center to use 3rd party decoders), after which hardware acceleration was again working. Unfortunately if Vista detects the broadcast-flag it will not allow playback via unsecured decoders, so to view premium channels such as HBO you must use the Microsoft decoder.

Fortunately ATI’s range of Radeon HD cards that support DXVA and HDCP under Vista are relatively cheap. The performance of the lower end HD cards for gaming may be questionable, but for decoding MPEG-2/4 they’re excellent and if you’re running an HTPC there’s really no need to buy a more expensive card. I picked up the Gigabyte Radeon HD2400XT for a shade under $50 which had the added benefit of being fanless. After installing it I was back to being able to watch all SDTV/HDTV channels with almost zero CPU usage.

Summary

I found the four tweaks above accounted for about 95% of the performance issues I was experiencing after upgrading to Vista. Depending on your system hopefully some of them will be of use to you.

Aside from the above tips there are also a number of guides on the Internet worth checking out about how to disable unwanted startup programs or services. In addition I have a nightly task scheduled that both defrags and reboots my system. I have no empirical evidence, but it seems to help everything stay nice and fast.

I’ve been using my V2 Linksys Media Center extender for a few weeks now and thought I’d post some thoughts on the experience.

• The form factor is great. It’s very small and utterly silent.
• Linksys include a set of each cables (aside from HDMI) which is nice.
• The included remote feels much cheaper than those included with V1 extenders.
• Setup was super-easy and the non-extender setup pages are well implemented.
• Startup times are abysmal. It takes around 60 seconds over Ethernet and longer via Wireless-N. Powering down also takes a surprisingly long time.
• Video quality is excellent for both SDTV/HDTV, as well as XviD.
• The menu and selection transitions are painful to watch. Turning them off gives a much better experience.
• On an HDTV, areas such as the menu backgrounds and fonts are of a noticeably lower quality than within Media Center itself, or when using the Xbox 360 as an extender. These differences are largely unnoticeable on SDTV.
• There is no 4th Zoom option for watching a 4/3 video on a widescreen TV.
• All of the Media Center backgrounds, menus, and text appear embedded in the firmware. Due to this I feel it’s unlikely V2 extenders will be supported on the next major release of Media Center (and since the hardware already appears underpowered, this may not be a bad thing).

Overall I would say I’m neither impressed nor disappointed with the new extenders.  The experience is generally very good (once you turn off the transition animations) but at $250+ they feel overpriced and the startup time is disappointing.

If you’re looking for an extender for the living room, particularly for an HDTV,  then I’d suggest considering an XBox 360 (particularly the quieter model, or if you have a cabinet to muffle the fan sound). For a second extender in the bedroom then the Linksys V2 extenders are a good choice.

Footnote: I believe that the forthcoming extenders from companies such as D-Link are all based upon the same internal hardware, so the experiences are unlikely to differ much.

It seems everywhere has sold out of the first batch of the new Linksys V2 Media Center Extenders. The best I can find is pcalchemy which has an in-stock date of next Friday.

With a new version of Whiist available, and I supect many new owners of WHS boxes, I managed to exceed my monthly bandwidth limit which resulted in this site being offline for a few days. All should be good now. Many thanks to my hosts at AQHost for comping me extra bandwidth for the rest of the month, and Simon at dancingbear.me.uk for temporarily mirroring Whiist.

From questions I’ve seen on the Windows Home Server forums one of the most sought after customizations is changing the default image on the homepage of your server.

If you’ve tried to do this yourself you’ve probably found it isn’t very easy. You need to login via Remote Desktop, find the correct file, and then use an image editing program to paste your new image into the correct place, then resave the file.

Yeah, I never found the time to change mine either

Anyway, one of the goals of Whiist is to make managing all of the websites on your Windows Home Server a great deal easier, and to this end the latest version of Whiist (0.8) now includes a simple editor that lets you change this image.

Go to the Whiist options page using the settings button on the menu bar and you will find the option to customize your home page, along with a preview of how the page will look. In the editor select an image and use the mouse to position/zoom as desired. When you click ‘Apply’ Whiist will generate a new image for your Windows Home Server page and save it in the appropriate place.

I’m still working one a couple of “bigger” features for Whiist that I hope to have ready in the new year. I’m not quite ready to say what these are yet, but if you like blogging and photo galleries I think you’ll be happy

Merry Christmas!

So last month I decided I’d give AdSense a try. I’m averaging about 20k pageviews a month now and my hosting costs have risen quite a bit lately. If this website could pay for itself in an unobtrusive manner then that would be just great.

Below are the figures for the month. Unfortunately Google’s terms and conditions prohibit posting any information about the percentage of clicks from visitors or the price for views, but suffice to say I’m considerably below the quoted “average” I’ve heard of 2-7%.

While I won’t be retiring on these earnings any time soon, they do cover my monthly hosting costs which is good enough It’s scary to think about just how much these numbers would need to be ramped up to make a viable living from blogging though…

Since the release of HP’s Media Smart Server I’ve had emails from several users who have encountered problems while using Whiist. While many MSS owners are using Whiist trouble-free, some have encountered problems where they are either no longer able to access websites created by the HP server, or use Remote Access.

Once person has claimed that Whiist overwrites settings required by the HP MSS - I can assure you that this is absolutely false! I very much believe that Whiist behaves as a “good citizen” in respect to Home Server;

Unless you choose to add/modify/remove a website or link, Whiist does nothing.

When you DO choose to add/modify/remove a website or link, Whiist only changes the item in question.

Whenever Whiist does create/modify/remove a website it does so via the IIS interface built into Windows Server. Whenever it changes a website link, it does so according to the specs in the Home Server SDK.

If you WERE to edit or remove a website that has been created by the HP software then I can completely see that this may cause problems. Within the next few days I’ll be releasing a version of Whiist that hides the HP entries from view so they cannot be accidentally removed or altered.

Clearly there IS a problem and for that reason I would recommend that if you are a HP Media Smart Server you proceed with caution if installing Whiist - and I would certainly recommend that you do not modify/remove any websites or links you have not created yourself.

If you have installed Whiist and are experiencing problems then I deeply apologize. please follow this link and provide as much detail as possible and I’ll endeavor to help you out;

Andrew

While i havent played it yet, I have noticed on Metacritic that Silent Hill Origins is getting some pretty good reviews from the press.

What’s never mentioned is that the team at Climax UK did the whole game in around 12 months, after inheriting it from the previous team who’d wasted a year of development. I saw that teams effort and it wasn’t pretty. There was really nothing in the way of code, art, or even design that was worth salvaging.

That the team in the UK not only managed to turn out a worthy entry in the Silent Hill series, but did so in a year is truly impressive.

Kudos guys, kudos.

I’ve put off upgrading my trusty Media Center 2005 box now for quite a while for a variety of reasons. However, since V2 extenders are imminent, and because I snagged some super-cheap copies of Vista Ultimate from the Microsoft Store, I decided now was the time to try Vista Media Center for a while.

(One of the nice things about Windows Home Server is that you can do things like this, safe in the knowledge your old install is only a few clicks away :).

Unfortunately my experiences so far have been largely negative.

The first problem was more of an inconvenience. When upgrading from MCE2005 some Media Center settings are preserved but others, such as the TV setup, are not. This is a little frustrating as it couldn’t have been that hard to implement, and it takes a good 40 minutes edit the channel list to reflect which of your providers ~700 channels you both subscribe to and want to watch. The method of making this selection has not improved since MCE2005 either and is still slow and cumbersome.

In terms of hardware I only came across one problem; the Microsoft IR receiver/blaster that controls our cable boxes would only emit a signal from one bud. After a couple of reboots I ended up uninstalling it via device manager and restarting, whereupon it was recognized as a new device and began working correctly.

The other problems I’m seeing are all performance based.

Under Vista, the Media Center UI frequently becomes laggy and often hangs/pauses for a few seconds. For example if I press Guide on the remote while watching TV there’s a delay of ~5 seconds before it appears. Other areas of the UI can become equally unresponsive at times, which leads to multiple button presses and general frustration.

Another problem is that VMCE’s handling of video thumbnails seems to be very poorly implemented. Our videos are stored on our Windows Home Server, with shortcuts placed in the "Videos" folder on the Media Center, and browsing these folders from within MCE results in the UI hanging for considerable amounts of time.

For example when I opened the folder containing Heroes Season 1, the UI hung for around five minutes while thumbnails were generated for all of the files. This problem never occurred in MCE, nor does it while using Explorer in Vista, so it’s definitely something within the Media Center UI. As far as I can tell the UI spawns a copy of Media Player in the background to generate the thumbnails, but does so in a very unfriendly way. The episodes themselves stream fine (although there’s still no way to fast-forward xvid files) so it’s not a bandwidth issue.

Speaking of thumbnails, I have very mixed feelings over the "Wall of thumbnails" that Vista Media Center uses for the UI in the Music/Video sections. While it looks fantastic it sacrifices usability to do so. The only way to see the title of a video/album is to select it, so although the UI fits more items on each "page" than MCE2005 it can take longer to find the file you’re after. There’s an alternative "List" view which shows the content as a list of names, but you then loose the thumbnail image and looks boring (strangely the ‘list’ option in Recorded TV includes a mini thumbnail, but not so in Music/Videos).

On the flip-side the new UI looks fantastic and is generally better organized than MCE2005, which now looks very dated.

I’d really like to like VMCE but at the moment the experience is far below my MCE2005 install. I’m going to push on with it for a while longer and see what I can do to improve the performance issues, but so far I’m rather underwhelmed

Quite by chance I came across Mobile Admin, a plugin for wordpress that implements a streamlined admin interface for mobile devices.

It’s very iPhone orientated but has been done incredibly well. The interface is very slick and offers easy access to the most important areas of the admin panel. My only niggle is that the writing section is a little plain. It’d be great if there was an easy way to use some simple markup or insert links (although without copy&paste I’m not sure how useful it’d be anyway!)

One thing that’s very neat is that auto-save still works, which is always welcome when typing large amounts of text into a browser

I also came across wPhone which is another iPhone management plugin. It’s also well done but overall I prefer the look and feel of Mobile Admin.