Controlling Your Media Centre with out a remote

December 15th, 2011

Can this be done?? Actually it can – if your media centre is connected to a network with wif-fi capability.

I must stress here that I do NOT advocate a media center using wi-fi – it is flaky at best and is horrendously difficult to get working when the media centre is located next to or under a plasma TV. Plasma TVs have a lot of interference behind the screen which disrupt wi-fi signals.

But if your network has wi-fi you can use your smart phone or tablet to control, or even view, content on the media centre. This came about from a client request.

Control. Using my iPhone 4S I have been able to effectively control the media centre without using the TV. This is achieved by creating a remote desktop session on the iPhone giving me access to the media centre ON THE PHONE. To do this you need to use the iPhone/iPad app – Splashtop Remote Desktop. You can read about it at their site: www.splashtop.com/remote.  It is available for Android, iOS, HP Touchpad, Kindle and Nook devices.

Basically you install a small piece of software on the Media Centre and then install the app on your phone/tablet. The device app pings the wifi network to find the Media Centre and once connected you get complete access.

Streaming. The software will allow you to stream media from the Media Centre to your device, however:

1. Device speakers do not have good fidelity – that’s why you have a media centre right? – so listening to music is going to be tinny at best. Having said that you could use a dock speakers, but this is not ideal.

2. Streaming hi-def content via wi-fi is not ideal. The system will downscale content to match your phone/tablet, but again if you wanted to watch hi-def content, that’s why you have a nice big flat screen TV, right? But there are scenarios where you might want to watch a tv show on your tablet: You’re in the kitchen cooking trying to recall that recipe your saw on your favourite cooking show. Why not watch the episode on your tablet, pausing when and where you like? Didn’t quite get the instructions? Rewind and watch it again.

Anyway, the real reason for doing this is to control your media centre with out turning on the TV and for this Splashtop is excellent.

Posted in Media Centre, Remote Control, Vista Media Centre, Windows 7 | No Comments »

Playing ripped DVDs on Media Extender

January 9th, 2011

Can this be done?? After installing a new Xbox 360 in the kids playroom the wife needed to play ripped DVDs for the kids (to save the discs). At first the extender would not see the ripped DVD folders.

A bit of research uncovered a great little program that will enable you to do just this. A warning though – you will not be able to use menus or chapters – you will only be able to play the movie/program. But it is the best we can do at the moment…

The program is called Transcode and is released by Mikinho. The program can be found here: http://mikinho.com/wmc/transcode/

To quote:

“Transcode is another simple add-in for Windows 7 Media Center that enables movies stored in the VIDEO_TS folder structure to be both visible and playable via the Movie Library on Media Center Extenders. The add-in does not do any transcoding, it uses to the “transcode.dll” loophole to create an on-the-fly playlists.”

How does it work? I don’t know. All I know is that it DOES work and it is the only solution I have found so far to watch ripped DVDs on a media extender.

Enjoy!

Posted in Media Centre, Media Extenders, Plugins, Ripped DVDs, Windows 7 | No Comments »

Internet TV – Revision 3

November 23rd, 2010

Internet TV has had it’s share of problems over the years which is why is has never taken off here in Australia. It seems to be more popular in the US where IPTV (as it is sometimes known) is being driven with a range of services available.

A new product has come across our desks here at ASENT and we’d thought we’d give it a go – Revision 3. Revision 3 offer a convenient Media Centre plugin that makes it accessible from the Extras menu of Windows Media Centre.

I would currently consider this program in beta, although the version number is 1.0.3. I say this because installation requires use of a keyboard to “Press any key”, twice. Comments about the Any Key aside, that seems a bit clunky in 2010. There was also an issue with the screen resolution. My old-school plasma (it’s 10 y.o. – believe it or not) has an optimal resolution of 1078×600. Revision 3 installation insists on a resolution of 768 or higher, so I had to trick the software by resizing the desktop until it was installed and then resize back to optimal resolution when it was done.

Once installed, and after restarting the media centre, the plugin was readily available in the Extras menu. Starting the plug in gave a blue screen with no copy while the program loads. Since it is web driven it took about 30 seconds to load up, which seemed like a life time while my wife was watching over my shoulder!

Once loaded there was a selection of TV shows available that all seem to be produced by the same group of people. Don’t expect Fox or HBO programs here. But there is some cool techy stuff which is up to date and there is no shortage of actual content. How frequently that is updated remains to be seen.

Selecting a show to watch requires buffering and because we have such rubbish download speeds in Australia it does take a minute or so before the actual program started. I should also note that it had to re-buffer a couple of times during the shows that I watched.

That aside, the quality of the program was very good. I am not sure if it is hi def, but it certainly appeared to be at least 720 resolution – possibly 1080 (remember my screen only runs at 600!). It was very clear and very crisp and the audio was terrific.

Overall I think this is the best attempt at IPTV for media centre that I have seen. The plugin worked well, the content was hi definition and well produced – the whole experience was very slick. The only disappointing part – and this has nothing to do with the actual program – is the download speed.

I can’t wait for the NBN roll out…

8/10

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Posted in Media Centre, Plugins, Windows 7 | No Comments »

The New Media Extender

August 2nd, 2010

Having  used media extenders for  some time (and not being overly impressed with them) I was eager to try the new xBox 360 250Gb – also known as the xBox 360 slim.

I gotta say this unit impressed me! Quite. Reliable. Quiet. Plays everything I can through at it including MKV and some dodgy AVI movies. Did I say quiet? Brilliant! There was only one little hiccup which was relating to MKV playback. Although the unit can play back MKV files natively it does need an update to handle AAC audio formats. This was an issue because most of the MKV files I tested had AAC audio formatting. Interestingly with out the update the xBox would not see the MKV files at all. Once the update was installed – viola! – all the MKV files were there.

Being an xBox novice (yes there are some of us still out there!) it did take me a bit of navigating to find how to update the xBox. However I found the settings quite easily and it is a simple matter of changing a couple of settings to make the xBox boot up into Media Centre mode straight up. You can even turn off the xBox controller so the kids can’t hijack what you are watching – it will use a normal media centre remote which follows the RC6 remote protocol (pretty much a standard these days).

The really cool thing is the way it interacts with Windows 7. Unlike previous media centres whose movement and scrolling was very jerky, the xBox is smooth as silk, emulating the Media Centre interface beautifully. All the transitions between menus and options are smooth and the response from the extender is almost as quick s the media centre itself. Buffering movies was also quicker than a normal extender too.

Overall, it is stylish, very quiet (that has been the problem with previous xBoxes), simple to use and powerful. The Media Extender has just been perfected!!

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Why I use Windows 7

December 24th, 2009

Windows 7 has been out for a few months now so I thought it time to comment on why I choose to use it and why we use it in our media centres.

Essentially, I use it because it is more stable that Vista – crashes far less often – and has some nice eye candy to boot. I am not going to discuss the pros and cons of using Windows 7 in an every day sense – there are plenty of sites for that on the web. Rather I wiull talk about why Windows 7 is better than Vista from a Media Cenrte perspective.

As I have described to several customers, it is the small things that make 7MC better. Things like:

- being able to fast forward / skip forward avi files
- TV guide data pulled from the antenna (not internet) – known as ETIT data
- The ability to have nice station logos in the guide
- Native DVD playback
- a really cool slide show screen saver, where you can choose what folder to display images from (excellent for family photos, holiday snaps, etc…)
- Better slide show functionality
- Improved ability to control when secheduled recordings start and finish
- ability to colour code TV shows in the guide based on content (uses ETIT data)
- nice user interface
- Better 64 bit usability

As with most things there are some draw backs:

- no native bluray playback capability (ASENT uses a very good third party application)
- inability to customise the location of third party apps in start menu and sub menus

Not a long list of drawbacks, to be fair, and this highlights that Windows 7 Media Centre is a strong improvement over its predecessor.

Overall Windows 7 Media Centre is very good and ASENT is proud to use it in our media centres. Having tested Windows 7 for about a year now we are confident that it is a worthwhile contribution to any lounge room.

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Windows 7 Beta 1 – First Impressions

January 23rd, 2009

With the release of Microsoft’s new operating system in beta, I thought I would give it a go and see how it performs in it’s current form.

I created a new partition on one of my drives and did a fresh install of Windows 7 Beta 1. The install process was virtually identical to Vista – no surprise there. However as the system rebooted in to the Windows 7 GUI (graphic user interface) for the first time disaster!! A black screen. The system was still running, but there was no image.

I grabbed another monitor and rebooted. No change. In the end I found that the boot loader has a setting that runs the GUI at a low resolution 800 x 600. Viola! I had a screen and could get to the desktop. From there I ran Windows update which downloaded two driver updates – ethernet card and Nvidia driver for the graphics card.

After the updates the system worked fine – I could change the resolution to my preferred setting and everything worked OK.

Onto the media centre. The first thing I notices was the changed layout. Like all things different from what we are used to I was not too sure about the new layout, but the more I use it the more I like it. Having switched between Vista and Windows 7 and can say that the Windows 7 Media Centre interface is very intuitive.

Why? The Menu titles are clearer and in a stylish, thin font. The layout of the menus is slightly different with the more common menu items easier to get at. Also the menus are left justified, rather than centred as in Vista. The only thing that I found I did not like was that you can not continuously scroll through the menus. In Windows 7 once you get to the last menu it will not continue. To get to the other end of the menus you need to scroll all the way to the other end. A small thing, but annoying. Hopefully it will be fixed before the final release.

The big thing for Windows 7 is the fact that most codecs are pre-installed. That means that DVD’s, DivX and avi’s will play straight away with out the need for a codec pack. The exceptions to this are MKV files and Blu Ray. There has been much discussion about blu ray and Windows 7 so I will not go into it here, except to say that native blu ray playback is unlikely for some time to come.

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Blu Ray Update

January 23rd, 2009

The final piece of teh jigsaw was installed in my system the other day. To play Blu Ray I needed a dual core processor, as the single core processor was just not gutsy enough. It kept maxing out at 100% which made the movie play back with minor, but regular, jitters. This made watching movies very frustrating.

But now the equation is complete:

1 x Core 2 Duo Intel E2200 processor
1 x 8400 GS Nvidia graphics processor
2 x Gb RAM

with these pieces I have enjoyed my first Blu Ray movie – and it was great! The resolution is superb – highly recommended.

Posted in Blu Ray, Vista Media Centre | No Comments »

Plugins – Music Browser

November 24th, 2008

If you have a large collection of music (mine is over 40Gb) then you might find the standard Media Centre Music Library interface is not meeting your requirements. Issues arise especially if your MP3 tags are not correctly filled out, as this is what Media Centre uses to sort and categorise your music collection.

A common way to over come this is to store your music collection in folders by artist name or by genre. So you would end up with a file structure like:

A –> Anthrax
Ant Farm
Aphrodite

B –> Beastie Boys
Boogie Pimps

But Media Centre can not display your music collection by folders. Luckily there is a plug in that does: Music Browser. This little application enables you to browse through your music collection by folder. And the great thing is that it uses the album images the Media Centre download, so you can still see your favourite album cover.

The plugin is easy to install and it’s free! You can get it here.

If you have a large music collection this plugin is essential!!

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Plugins – Big Screen weather 2

November 17th, 2008

Once you have started using your ASENT media centre you start to do one of two things:

1) Wish there was some other useful information/tools available

2) Wonder what there is that will help you do point 1

The most common thing that people want with their ASENT media centre is a weather plugin – a way of checking the weather without leaving your couch. There are several on the market, but the best I have found is “Big Screen Weather 2”.

You can down load it here. Subscription cost $US 20 per year. What you get for that is access to the BOM (Bureau of Meteorology) information which is used in the plugin. This includes weather info, 7 days forecasts, weather maps, satellite imagery, tide forecasts plus other really useful stuff.

The user interface is super slick and integrates beautifully with your ASENT media centre. The remote controls the plugin seamlessly – everything is accessible and nothing needs to be manually configured (as with some other plugins). You can choose any location in Australia or the US and there is forecast data for many locations around the world – very handy if you travel a lot.

All in all an excellent (essential?) plugin. And it’s Australian made!

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Re: Blu Ray

October 30th, 2008

Well it turns out I was not quite right – although upgrading the GPU to an 8400GS was a vast improvement, it is still not quite right. It seems that the CPU carries a bit of workload when paying Blu ray.The processor is running at between 60% and 100% during play back. And this is causing it to stutter slightly – enough to be annoying.

For the record the CPU is an Intel Pentium D 3066 MHz. So it seems that I DO need to upgrade my CPU

Which is a shame, becasue I really don’t want to. Although it does mean I can use the exisiting CPU in my yet-to-be-built home server….

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Posted in Blu Ray, Vista Media Centre | 1 Comment »

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