I saw Live Free or Die Hard yesterday. It's a story that involves, among other things, computer hackers. Kevin Smith makes an appearance in the movie as an elite hacker. It was interesting to see that his preferred input device was a Microsoft Media Center Remote Keyboard. Does that mean his command center is running Windows?
If you're wondering, it was a good movie. Much better than I expected and a lot of fun to watch. If you enjoyed the first two Die Hard movies, be sure to catch this one.
I have heard several Mac users talking very kindly about our new OS. This is encouraging as these are a bunch that are pre-inclined to view Vista in a negative light. Impressing them is a hard task. It appears that, at least in some cases, we have done that. Here's a sampling:
There are a few themes here. They seem to be:
Of course, there are also a lot of contrarian reviews too.
While I'm on the subject, here are some of my top reasons to upgrade:
As you might recall, about 5 months ago I built a pretty cool Media Center PC. I have been experiencing some times where the lip sync is off. This seems to be something in the recording because if I play it back, the lip sync is off every time. Stopping and restarting doesn't fix the problem. I suspect it was the very old tuner I had in the system. The solution: get a new tuner. As the PCIe bus is supposed to be the wave of the future, I decided to get a PowerColor Theater 550 Pro PCIe. This tuner is based off of the ATI 550 Pro chipset which gets the best reviews. The card was even on sale at Newegg for like $65. It's since dropped $5 and now comes with free shipping--shoulda waited. The card arrived yesterday and all seemed well. Then, I went to install it.
When I tried to put the card in my computer, I noticed a problem. The Zalman heat sink on the north bridge got in the way. There are 2 PCIe x1 slots and the north bridge was positioned in such a manner as to obstruct *both* of them. Despite the fan noise, I considered going back to the fan the north bridge came with but that was too tall as well. What to do?
The solution: cut off enough heat sink fins to allow the card to fit. I broke out my Dremel tool, outfitted it with a cutting blade and went to town. Now, sporting about 1/4 fewer blades than before, the heat sink fits under the PCIe card and all is well. The card is in the machine and working. Here's to hoping that my av sink problems go away.
After this fiasco, I started looking around. Most motherboards out today have similarly situated x1 PCIe slots. Almost everything I looked at either had the north bridge in the way or, worse, had the slots right next to the x16 display card slot where it would interfere with air flow and oversized fans. To date not much is shipping in the x1 PCIe form factor. With the current support, that trend will probably continue for a while.
When Microsoft released their remote keyboard for Media Center, I was excited. Here was a wireless keyboard, including mouse and MCE-specific functionality. As an added benefit, it uses the Media Center IR receiver so you don't have to connect another one. It seemed to be exactly what I was looking for. I bought one early but was very disappointed. While I like the eraser-style mouse on a laptop (it's a shame they are disappearing), this one didn't work right. It was very difficult to control. It seemed that I could only get it to move a short distance with each push and it was really hard to center on anything. Despite my wife's request that I return it, I kept it just for the keyboard part. Now, I'm glad that I did. I finally figured out the secret of using the mouse.
There are two things I found make it a pretty decent mouse. First, you need to turn down the pointer speed a lot. This can be done via the Control Panel. This allows for better control and centering. Without it, I overshot the buttons a lot. Second, you have to have the keyboard aimed directly at the IR device. Anything in between, and it responds terribly. With a remote or with the keyboard keys, you don't notice because you are usually only sending one command but with the mouse, you are sending a stream of commands. This seems to make a huge difference. With a good line of sight, and slow pointer speed, it's pretty useful. I can even navigate the small buttons found on regular windows applications.
The one thing I still can't figure out is how to get the keyboard to work with my motherboard's BIOS. I have USB keyboards turned on but no luck. If anyone has this problem solved, let me know.
I recently put together a new Media Center PC. The old one was running on a Pentium4 1.7 GHz and was becoming too slow for my tastes. It ran okay but was becoming slow to bring up the guide, etc. The day following Thanksgiving, I was able to score an AMD Athlon 64 x2 3800+ for a good price and decided it was time to put together the new machine. Here is what I ended up with:
AMD Athlon 64 x2 3800+
1 GB RAM
NVidia GeForce 6600GT
NForce4 motherboard (ECS A939) - it was free with the processor.
Two analog tuners (one Emuzed and the other Conexant)
Silverstone LC14 case
This isn't the absolute fastest machine on the block but it has some getup and go. I'd heard rumors that Media Center glitched on the dual-core processors but following the advice of David Fleishman, I installed new HAL drivers and haven't seen any issues. The machine is definitely snappy. I don't have it hooked up to an HD TV yet but it should be capable of doing WMV-HD 1080p decode with hardware acceleration through DXVA-WMV.
The case is quite cool. It's a little tall but it has a nice black color and fits well with other media components. Unlike some of its competition, it has space for more than 1 internal hard drive. In fact, it has space for 3 of them. It also has space for 2 CD/DVD drives. The drive covers are better than most for HTPC cases. They are flip-down doors, not stick-on cover plates. The only downside is that there is no way to have a card reader in the case. I suppose that is what the other machines on the network are for.
While I'm on the subject, I should mention that I'm using a Home Theater Master remote control. This brings up an interesting issue. Media Center doesn't work well with universal remotes out of the box because it has some technology to stop signal double-taps. The behavior you'll get is that each button will work only once and then you have to hit another button before it will work again. The solution is to follow the advice of Michael Swanson who outlines a registry setting that will diable this feature and let your universal remote work.
I am please to announce something I find pretty exciting. Windows Media High Definition Video (WMV HD) is now able to take advantage of hardware acceleration. Cards from leading vendors such as ATI and NVidia can now assist in the decoding of WMV-HD files. Depending on the CPU and video card, you can expect to see a 20-40% reduction in overall CPU utilization. This is often enough to reduce glitching or even allow for playback not otherwise possible. The acceleration works on WMV-HD streams that are 720p and 1080p. This includes all of the content (I am aware of ) on the WMV HD DVDs plus most other WMV HD content you are likely to find around. To take advantage of it, you'll need supporting hardware, updated drivers, the QFE from the link below plus the required DRM QFE (also on the link below). If you play any WMV-HD and have a sufficiently beefy display card, I suggest you download the update and give it a spin.
Related links:
Microsoft KB Article with the download link.
ATI's Press Release announcing support.
List of supporting NVidia cards.
The Register announcing the release.
AVSForum thread with details and support.
Update:
ATI's Catalyst 5.6 Drivers claim support for WMV9 Acceleration.
