For anyone who doesn’t know, Microsoft Windows Home Server is a new product Microsoft is launching sometime near the end of the year.  It is essentially a file server for the home, and is built on Windows Server 2003 R2.  Most home users would have no idea how to set up a server, and the default Windows Server 2003 is way too complicated, and way too expensive to justify running at home.  Home Server aims to address these issues of complexity and cost, and open up the wonderful world of client server computing to home users.

When the product is released later on this year, it will be available in two forms.  The first is as an appliance with specifically designed hardware from PC manufacturers such as HP, Dell etc.  The second way is as a more conventional DVD, although whether you’ll be able to walk into your local PC shop and buy Home Server isn’t known to me at this stage. 

Home Server, as mentioned earlier, is a slimmed down version of Windows Server 2003 R2.  A lot of the management and features have been removed and replaced with a very basic configuration utility.  The server itself, whether you bought specific hardware or are running it on a PC you already have, is designed to run completely headless, i.e. there is no keyboard, mouse or screen attached.  All configuration after the initial install will be done remotely via the Home Server Management Console or via the web interface.  It is meant to be put in a cupboard or your attic or somewhere out of the way and just be a central location for all your media files, and any other files you would wish to store.  It is primarily designed for digital media, and comes pre-configured with shares for Videos, Photos and Music.  Each user account you create on the server will also be assigned a folder in which to store any files they may want. 

The real benefit of Windows Home Server for home users is found in the backup and file redundancy features of the product.  Each client PC on your home network gets a small piece of client software installed on it, and this is where the greatness begins.  Each machine on your network now becomes a managed device, something until now, was reserved for business and enterprise users.  Home Server keeps a constant eye on your PC’s health, and alerts you if any machine on your network has a problem such as Anti-Virus software not running, disk space low, whatever.  Also, Home Server automatically does a FULL system backup of your home PCs after you install the client software, and updates this backup every night with any changes that have occurred.  You get a bootable System Recovery CD with the product which can be used to resurrect a dead machine and get it back to the state it was a last backup.  This is a phenomenal step forward for home users in my opinion.  NOBODY I know backs up their home PC religiously, and these machines often contain irreplaceable information such as personal photos.  You can back up all your network machines to the Home Server, but the disk space used is kept to a minimum due to single instance storage.  This means that if you have 2 machines with exactly the same file, such as Windows system files, the Home Server will only keep one copy of this file on disk, but it can be used to recover any machine that needs it.

Another of Home Server’s real strengths is in the area of disk management.  Gone are the days of struggling with C: and D: on your server, and trying to manage space and who puts what where.  Home server uses the NTSF file system, but adds a new share mirroring feature similar to Distributed File System (DFS).  It doesn’t matter to the user where the file is, just so long as it’s available when and where it’s needed.  When you install Home Server, it warns you that it will completely wipe any disk currently connected to the machine, and it then proceeds to set up its new file system.  Once this is done, you can just start copying files to the shares it creates.  The management console shows you a pie chart of the current disk usage, and breaks it up into system, backup, redundant data, media etc so you can see exactly where the disk space has gone.  You can also add disk at any time.  On a normal Windows machine, adding a disk is a nightmare of partitioning and labelling with a drive letter, and then trying to decide what to store on the new disk to use the space effectively.  With Home Server, you can add a disk at any time, either internal or external USB or Firewire, and it will just be assimilated into the space pool.  Your little pie graph will change to indicate that you now have X amount of GB free, and you can proceed to copy more files to your server. If you want to remove a disk for some reason, you simply go to the management console and click remove disk.  It will then copy all the data that is stored on that disk somewhere else, and you can safely unplug it.

You can also specify certain shares you wish to make redundant.  This means that Home Server will always ensure that the files you specify are stored simultaneously on two separate disks, thereby protecting those files from single disk failure.  This is a very important feature, and for anyone who has taken a lot of photos, an absolute necessity.  Redundancy can be specified on a share level, so you can specify that all photos are redundant, but videos and music are not.  One problem I have noticed with this (at beta 2) is that you can’t make the system drive redundant.  This means that should your system drive decide it’s had enough, you lose everything.  Some data may still be stored on other drives, and I believe it’s possible to connect it to another system and recover the data, but I have yet to test that.  If you just rebuild your Home Server on a new drive, and then want to get the data off the older drives, you’ll struggle because Home Server will wipe the disk before it will make it available to be accessed.  I hope they fix this before the final version comes out, because having all the redundancy is kind of pointless if there is still such a glaring single point of failure.

Home Server also comes with a full web based front end.  You can connect to your server from anywhere in the world (provided you set up your router to allow this) and download files from it, upload files to it, check network condition etc.  Really nice if you are away from home and need to access files or photos.  You can also use this method to share photos etc with people who live a long way away by simply creating a user account for them to come in and get whatever they may need.  The web interface is still a little rough around the edges, but this is purely cosmetic and will be sorted out by final release.  Another nice touch is that if you need to download multiple files, you can select them, and when you click download, Home Server will create a ZIP file for you containing all the files you selected, meaning you only have to worry about downloading one file, and you can get some extra compression depending on the file, and save bandwidth.

The hardware requirements for Windows Home Server are fairly modest, and can easily be installed on an older PC you may have lying around.  It requires a Pentium 3 processor and 512MB of memory.  It will not install if you have less than 512Mb of RAM.  They also recommend you use your biggest disk you have available as your system drive.  It also requires a wired connection, and will not work if you only have a WIFI card in the system.  This is to ensure good network performance, since file sharing is this machines primary task.  Otherwise, installation is really simple and once it’s up and running, you connect via a PC on your network, install the Management Console, create a user or two, and that’s it.

I hope they price this product well when it comes out.  If it’s too expensive, I don’t think it’ll do well.  People like my father are ideal candidates for this sort of product since he has more than 1 PC at home and never backs anything up, but would be devastated if he lost everything.  However, he won’t pay a small fortune for this, and will have to be seriously convinced of its usefulness before he’ll part with any cash.  Everything is going digital and a central place in the home to store everything safely is a huge step forward for most people.  I’m very excited about this product, and look forward to seeing the final version.  I will be using it extensively over the next few months, and will add any other comments and discoveries to this article.

The drive unit itself is about the size of a medium sized hardcover book, and follows the Xbox 360′s “exhale” design.  Sitting on top the console, it is the same length as the 360, and looks good.  Included in the box is a power supply (which is disappointing, but the USB interface obviously couldn’t handle the power requirements), a Xbox 360 Media Remote, some manuals etc, a USB 2.0 cable, a disk you must insert in the console BEFORE connecting the drive, and a copy of the King Kong HD-DVD.

Inserting this disk in the console seems to install some software to enable HDDVD playback.  Not sure why they couldn’t do this over Live with a dashboard update, as it seems pretty small, only taking a second or two to complete its process.  One possible reason is that they couldn’t assume all consoles using this peripheral would be connected to Live.  There was an update available over Live, which I got prompted for the first time I used it though.

The drive connects to the rear of the console (or the front, but it looks better in the back), which uses up your USB port back there.  If you happen to have the Xbox 360 Wireless adapter currently running off that port, fret not, as the HD-DVD drive includes 2 USB ports on the rear of the unit, and the necessary clips for attaching your wireless adapter, so you lose nothing.  In fact, you gain a USB port, so you can still connect your Live Vision Camera (review to follow soon) to the rear of the unit, and keep cables out of the way.

My 360 is connected to my Dell 2405FPW 24″ LCD screen via the Microsoft Xbox 360 VGA cable.  This screen has a native resolution of 1920 x 1200, and I have it set not to scale, therefore I have small blck bars at the top and bottom of the screen in order to keep the proper 16:9 aspect ratio.  My console is outputting 1920×1080. 

I eagerly inserted the King Kong HD-DVD disk.  As a quick aside, let me say that I really like the smaller cases HD-DVDs come in.  They do make any DVD racks you may have obsolete, but they are much nice and way smaller.  Anyway, back to King Kong………

I sit here struggling to think of how exactly to portray in mere words how good this movie looks in HDDVD at 1080p.  The jungle scenes are absolutely incredible.  King Kong himself is too good for words.  Every hair on his body seems to be moving individually, and the detail you can see on his face is down right scary.  I sat through the entire three and a bit hours in absolute awe, like I was watching my first ever moving picture.  I was literally, blown away.  The best analogy I can come up with is this:  DVD is like watching moving photograph taken with your average camera phone, and HD-DVD (in 1080p) is like watching a moving photograph taken with a good quality 5 megapixel digital camera.  It is mind-blowing!  The only downside to this kind of spectacular clarity is that there were some scenes you could clearly see had been green-screened.  The focus just looked ever so slightly wrong, something I very much doubt anybody would have seen in the movie theatre or on standard DVD.

After being stunned by King Kong, I quickly threw in Superman Returns.  Superman Returns is a hybrid disk, with one side HD-DVD, and the other side standard DVD, which can be played in any DVD player.  As mentioned in my HD-DVD vs Bluray article, this is one of the major benefits of the HD-DVD format, enabling people to purchase movies like this, and be able to use it as a standard DVD until they upgrade to HD-DVD.  One of the main differences between DVD and HD-DVD is that the movie starts straight away, without going to a menu.  The menu is available with a press of the Menu button, but comes up as an overlay while the movie continues to play.  From this menu, you can pause the movie, so you don’t miss any while you’re fiddling around, change the sound settings, see extras etc.  You can also activate the IME (In-Movie Experience).  This is basically the next generation of director’s commentary.  It brings up little picture in picture windows while the movie is playing to show special extras such as how they did the scene you’re currently watching, actor or director interviews etc.  It’s pretty cool, and not nearly as boring as director commentary!

I looked at Superman Returns playing for a minute or two, then ejected the disk to make sure it wasn’t playing the standard DVD side by mistake.  It wasn’t.  I put the disk back in the drive, and skipped to the scene of the airplane / space shuttle accident, where Superman saves people for the first time in the movie.  The picture was good, but not great.  People’s skin looked plastic and a little fake, there was a lot of noise (speckles) on the picture, especially in darker scenes.  Don’t get me wrong, it still looks MUCH better than DVD, but if I hadn’t just finished watching King Kong, I wouldn’t have been nearly as impressed with this whole HD-DVD thing.  I removed Superman, and put in Batman Begins.  Now this looked MUCH better.  There is no noise in the scenes, you can see the pores on peoples faces, making them look a lot less like plastic mannequins, and the sharpness in the scenes of Gotham City is excellent.  This not so super Superman made me do some thinking.  The director of Superman obviously wanted a softer look to all the scenes, and it probably does look great in the movie theatre, but on HD-DVD, it’s disappointing not to be able to see every pore on the actors skin.  Maybe it’s just me, and I am looking at the picture rather than watching the movie, but again I say, after King Kong, it looks rubbish.  As for the noise on the picture, I assume that came in during transfer from film to digital.  Not all transfers are equal, but Superman Returns looks quite bad.  Or, maybe King Kong was just particularly good, which is why it is included with the Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive as a showcase?  I don’t know, but I’ve seen what’s possible, so I now expect it everywhere!

I can’t comment on the sound of the movies.  HD-DVD includes Dolby Tru-HD sound, which is essentially a lossless compression algorithm.  This should allow much more detail in the sound track, especially in the bass, highs and little detail sounds you often hear happening behind you.  Unfortunately, only very high-end home theatre decoders support this right now, and only via HDMI, so the Xbox 360, since it doesn’t have HDMI for now, has to down mix the soundtrack to standard Dolby Digital 5.1.  It’s ok, but just ok.  I also had to crank up the volume of my speakers, as the sound output of HD-DVD is quite soft for some reason. 

In conclusion, I would like a new pair of eyes, as I think they’ll soon be the weakest link in my home theatre.  Once decent sized 1080p screens start to cost less than small countries, and Tru-HD decoders are mainstream, the cinema is going to become quite obsolete.  With HD-DVD, I get all the benefits of the movie house, and none of the sticky floors, people taking, blind projectionists who can’t focus the picture, cell phones going off etc etc.  And, I can pause whenever I want.  I LOVE the HD era.

The fact of the matter is that DRM hurts the honest consumer more than anyone else. Pirates who want to crack something will do it, eventually. Honest consumers who purchase a song from iTunes and are then restricted horribly to only playing it on a certain device, in a certain way, and sometimes only for a certain time just plain sucks. Putting these ridiculous kinds of usage limits on music when I can go and buy the CD and rip it myself DRM free is dumb. I wager that removing DRM entirely will benefit the market, so long as costs are also kept in check. There will always be pirates, just like there will always be thieves, but stop punishing the legitamate users, please!!! All this does is force people like myself, who for example, did purchase a High Definition copy of Terminator 2 only to find I was locked out of it by the draconian limitations placed on the content by the owners, to look for “other” less restrictive means of obtaining content.

Down with DRM. Get rid of it for good!!! It can only be a good thing!!

It’s not too bad, I suppose.  Once I got my head around being forced to keep two copies of all my music, and got the album are sorted out, I’m quite happy.  The multiple copies thing is ok, since I don’t put all my music on my iPod, therefore I only need to keep what I actually want to have available in iTunes. 

So anyway, I’m admitting I may have been just a tiny bit wrong with my earlier comments.

I’m really excited for LongHorn server, because this is an awesome tool to show server reliability or uptime to management types who like to see pretty pictures representing system stability.

Design: The design of the actual device is breath-taking.  The UI is brilliant, and it just looks and feels right, nay, better than right!  Downright awesome!

Quality: This is a quality piece of kit.  The feel of the actual device, as well as the quality of the sound are phenominal.

Peripheral Support: Being the No.1 player (excuse the pun!) in any market means massive support with regard to accessories from both first and third party vendors.  Some of the complimentary products to the iPod are excellent.

BUT, (and there’s always a but), iTunes Sucks!!!  Why, oh why can’t it just support WMA and MP3 and sync with Media Player 11 (which as an aside ROCKS the socks off any other media player ever!)??  Why???  If this VERY small little software change was done, it would be the perfect device.  Seriously, it would be absolutely insane how cool this thing would be.  With iTunes, I have to have 2 copies of all my music, firstly in my nicely arranged WMA library for Media Center and Pocket PC, and then another copy in M4A, whatever that is.  Also, after spending hours (seriously!) on getting all my album art correct, iTunes just ignores it.  Then, iTunes tells me that in order to get album art, I need a iTunes Store account, oh, and it isn’t supported in South Africa yet.  What makes me even more upset is that stupid iTunes forces me to install Quicktime.  Yuk!

Another case in point:  Xbox360.  Another brilliant device.  BRILLIANT!!  I absolutly love it, mainly for the games (COD3 baby!!!), but can’t make it the king of my digital media space since it is crippled by not supporting DivX.  Hopefully, one day, MS will fix that, but they also may not.  I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

Another amazing feature of this software is that you can export and import the layer to another machine, which means the application you installed in this layer can run on another PC even though you didn’t actually install it there. Very cool idea.

Download SVS here.

Citrix are working on a similar application streaming solution which works in much the same way as I have described above, but it keeps these layers on a central file server, and they can then be deployed to various workstations on your netwrk in seconds. Citrix’s solution however, will cost a small fortune.

Sony’s Betamax format was eventually abandoned entirely, as the market decided which format would win.  I have read articles that say there is room in the world for two HD formats, but I’m not so sure.  I dread the day when I walk into my local video store and have to go to the Blu-ray or HD-DVD shelves and make sure I get the correct format.  It will be much worse for my mother or someone not as in-the-know about this technology who will get home with the wrong disc format, and will feel very frustrated.  I think one will emerge as dominant, but which one?

Here in South Africa, there is no issue as yet, since neither format is available, and very few people even have displays capable of true high definition, so we may be spared the initial fighting and eventually only have one format available locally.  I hope we don’t have to wait that long though, since the HD content I have seen so far, is awesome.

I’m not a big Sony fan, but I do admit that they do make good quality products.  I think that years of great success have gone to their heads, and now they think they can dictate standards and push consumers (most who know no better) in directions that aren’t in the consumers’ best interest.  This article ISN’T a Sony bash, so please don’t think it is.  Sony is the chief driving force behind the Blu-Ray format at the moment, but they are not the only ones responsible for it, and it is a great technology.  It has huge promise, but I don’t believe it will work in the film delivery market, which is where they are currently fighting.  Sony (and the rest of the Blu-Ray consortium) has made some strange decisions with regard to Blu-Ray, many of which I cannot fathom.  I will go into more detail on this a bit later.

I’m going to start with the technical specs of the actual disc format.  From a purely technical standpoint, I believe Blu-Ray is the better technology for the following reasons:

Capacity:

The capacity of the BD discs will be greater than that of HD-DVD.  BD supports 25GB per layer whereas HD-DVD only supports 15GB per layer.  Blu-Ray still has some technical difficulty getting reliable dual-layer discs, and none have been released yet.  The single layer discs seem to be working well though, although they only have 25GB versus HD-DVD’s 30GB dual layer format which is available now.  I’m sure they’ll sort these issues out soon though.

Speed:

Read speed (and I would assume write speed) of a 1x BD drive is faster than 1x HD-DVD drive.  It is fairly marginal, but with capacities of over 30GB, every extra MB/sec helps.

For the two reasons stated above, I believe BD is an excellent high volume data distribution medium.  Once 50GB per disc is available, and is reliable, there will be no cheaper and easier way to ship such large volumes.

The current controversy is not, however, about data distribution.  It’s about Movie and entertainment distribution.  In this arena, I firmly believe HD-DVD is the better option, by far.  I will explain why below:

Reliability:

Blu-Ray has the data layers of the disc much closer to the outer layer than is the case with HD-DVD.  This makes is very susceptible to scratching and being rendered unusable by careless handling.  Early BD discs were shipped in a cartridge, which nobody likes, but at least they were better protected. Herewith comes up the first of Sony’s unfathomable decisions.  Why oh why, put a Blu-Ray drive in the PS3 and insist that all PS3 games be distributed only on BD discs.  Kids are going to annihilate these fragile discs.  They better have a very good disc replacement policy when PS3 launches.  HD-DVD on the other hand, is about as fragile as a standard DVD today, since it is manufactured in much the same way.  Still not very hardy, but way more resilient than BD.  TDK developed a polymer coating called Durabis, which they claim toughens the discs substantially.  I’m sceptical; we’ll have to see how well this works.

Cost:

Blue-Ray is a completely different technology to current generation DVD.  While I fully support leaving legacy behind to pursue better solutions, I also can’t ignore that new technology is expensive.  HD-DVD is more of an evolution of DVD than a completely new technology.  DVD manufacturing plants can be upgraded to support HD-DVD production, which is relatively cheap, compared to the complete change of process and systems Blu-Ray is going to require.  This cost will have to be recovered somehow, and unfortunately for BD, it will be recovered from the individual disc cost.  Unfathomable decision number two.  Why increase the cost of PS3 games by putting them on much expensive media?  If any game coming out in the next 3 to 4 years needs more than 8GB of storage, then maybe the programmers should go on a “How to avoid Bloatware” course.  The only reason I can see is if they have actual filmed HD cut scenes that last an hour or two.

The other major cost factor is the devices that will read these discs.  In the USA, you can walk into a store and pick up an HD-DVD player for $500.  A similar Blue-ray device will cost $1000.  Whoa!  That is a lot.  Unfathomable question number three.  Why push the price of the PS3 way up by including a component very few people will actually use?  I bet most people buying a PS3 will do so so their children can play games.  Why force them to spend a lot of extra money on such a high end (and unproven) technology.  I personally think this is unfair of Sony.  It should be an optional extra.  Sony has admitted that the PS3 has been delayed due to Blu-ray problems.  Duh.  Drop it and give the Playstation fans a new console that just works and won’t cost the earth!

Backward Compatibility:

HD-DVD players can all read standard DVD’s as well.  As far as I know, Blu-ray isn’t compatible with standard DVD, but this may change as players get better.  However, HD-DVD has one more trump card up its sleeve.  Hybrid Discs.  Hybrid discs are dual sided HD-DVDs that have a standard DVD on one side, and HD-DVD on the other.  This is brilliant!  Now movies can be released and sold and consumers who have yet to take the HD plunge can know that these discs are 100% future proof.  This is brilliant, and a solution I am very impressed with.

MPEG-2 Encoding:

Both BD and HD-DVD players support 3 types of compression.  Uncompressed HD content at 1080p comes in at around 1 Gb/sec, which is a lot.  Advanced compression is obviously needed to fit this onto a 30GB disk.  Microsoft has developed the VC-1 encoding system, which is a brand new and highly advanced compression system which gives awesome quality with very high compression ratios.  HD-DVD content can also be compressed in H.264/AVC or the old familiar MPEG-2. HD-DVD uses VC-1 almost exclusively since it gives the best picture quality by far.  Blu-Ray, although the players must support all three codecs, went ahead and chose to use the 10 year old MPEG-2 codec.  Unfathomable question number four.  Why?  VC-1 is roughly twice (sometimes more) efficient than MPEG-2.

Perception:

Everybody knows about DVD.  It is a household word which nobody is confused about.  “HD-DVD is just like DVD but better right?  Never heard of Blu-ray.”  I predict this will be Joe Public’s standard thought pattern when faced with a format choice.  Things may work out differently, but I suspect the DVD name will hold a lot of weight with consumers.

iHD vs. Java:

This is more a personal dislike of all things Java based on my own experiences.  The interactive components of HD-DVD are based on a set of technologies called iHD.  Blu-Ray uses a Java based system called BD-J, meaning a Java VM is included in each Blu-Ray player.  I’m no fan of Java, but as I said, this is more personal than anything else.

I think the basic answer to all the unfathomable questions I posed above is money.  Sony wants Blu-Ray to succeed badly.  Very badly.  After losing the Betamax battle, maybe they are still a bit bruised.  By including Blu-Ray with the PS3 they are taking a big gamble that could push customers away due to the high price, but at the same time, they are guaranteeing good market penetration, which could be the blow BD needs to win.

The MPEG-2 question is also easily answered with money.  Since Microsoft own the patents for VC-1, they are getting licensing fees for every disc produced.  Similarly, Sony own over 170 patents on MPEG-2, effectively negating the effect of royalties.  BD will need the extra capacity to ensure competitive picture quality with MPEG-2 over VC-1, although early releases using only a single layer will be worse than the equivalent HD-DVD.

I have not seen HD-DVD or Blu-Ray movies on a true 1080p HD screen as yet, so these comments are based on my own research on this topic and personal opinions.  I would be very interested to hear any opinions and comments on this.

Read the Engadget Article here.

I do have loads to post, and will be doing it shortly. It’s mostly Xbox 360 related, but darn interesting, well, I think it is. I have done some posting and some reviews on the South African Media Center community site, so go check it out.

As soon as I can pry myself away from Project Gotham 3, Kameo and GRAW, I’ll be posting.

Finding any good info on The Green Button is almost impossible these days, mainly because the site is so slow, but also because all the good info is buried under piles of dumb posts from people seemingly just trying to get their number of posts up instead of actually contributing anything useful.

Head on over to Chris’ site and leave a comment supporting this initiative. Also leave any bright ideas for the URL.

Besides this little (actually big) glitch, the WebCam Fusion is a great little camera, and it works very well with Skype 2.0 and MSN Messenger.

**UPDATE**:

I installed the latest Creative Audigy 2 Drivers (dated Jan 2006) and with eager anticipation, enabled the Fusion mic.  Alas, no surround speakers!  I then logged a call with Logitech who suggested I try disabling AEC.  I did try this before, but I did it again, and now everything is working!!!  Must be the new drivers and this AEC thing.

I do have to use SocksCAP to get BitComet to work with the proxy, but that is no problem at all. Works really well. I am getting sustained download rates of 15kb/s as opposed to the 2-4kb/s I was getting before. Of course, remember torrents ALWAYS depend on the number of Seeds and Peers you have on that particular torrent.

-EDIT- I forgot to mention that this usage DOES still count towards your monthly cap. It just ‘unshapes’ it.

-EDIT 2 – I am now getting a fairly solid 40 – 60kb/s, which is AWESOME!

The page just lists the whole process I went through to get my Car Media Center working 100%. I am planning on making a small video of it in action and a tour of the setup soon.

Using the low latency VPN serive, I log in straight away, and can connect to games usually on the first try, which is great. My ping time is still average (yellow) but the game play is MUCH better.

It is still not perfect, but is a great start to decent international gaming from South Africa. I got a newsletter from them today saying they are working on increasing the service to Europe somewhat. You only get 500MB of traffic which must be used over 60 days. There are other packages available, but this was about the best for me. I played AoE3 yesterday for about 2 hours, and I had used about 5MB of traffic, so it should last a while.

I predict this annoying trend of Digital Rights Management, in which the makers of the content decide how and when and where you play the disk you bought for a lot of money is going to get worse and worse. I posted previously about my annoyance and boycot of Sony due to their practice of CD protecting. Turns out they used a rootkit to do this, and are being sued for violation of privacy. Good! To make matters worse, there is a virus out that makes use of this piece of un-removable software. Way to go Sony! They have recalled the CD’s and appologised for this indescretion. I think they have also released a special removal tool. Or maybe that was Mark Russinovich. Not sure.

I will continue to fight the power of corporations who are determined to force me into their stupid rules.

EDIT:  I have had a lot of queries abou the proxy that works for this.  The first one I found has since stopped working, but I found the following one which works at the moment:

65.100.114.147 : 8080

I use it along with AnyDVD and it enables me to rent movies from the video store and watch them at my leasure, because in South Africa, we have to take movies back the next day, which is stupid, and unheard of anymore in most other countries. I am not condoning piracy, and once I watch them, I delete them (which can also easily be done in the MyMovies interface via remote).

Anyway, all you do is insert the DVD, and along with the usual “Play DVD” option which pops up in MCE, is a “Copy to Disk” option. It does a internet lookup to find the name, actors, genre etc, and puts the movie in the MyMovies database, which works a lot like the MCE Music interface with album art etc. It then copies the VOB and IFO files to a folder, either on your MCE box or a network share.

Playing the movie is even easier. Just select it by the picture (like album art) and press play. It uses the MCE DVD player interface, in full quality with surround sound. Awesome. A highly recommended download!

Get it at www.mymovies.name.

allAfrica.com: South Africa: SA is Still On the Sidelines of Triple Play

I suppose their reasoning for taking so long is that there are a limited number of HDTV capable receivers in South African homes right now.  Maybe, if import duties weren’t so ridiculous, they’d be cheaper, and more people would have them??  Anyway, enough ranting for now.  South Africa is the best country in the world, by far, but we have some issues, but who doesn’t?

See the article here: allAfrica.com: South Africa: New Hi-Tech Decoder Hits Market

DTS, Dolby Digital and DVD: A History

I successfully managed to rip a CD in 192k WMA that was protected though. AnyDVD seems to get through whatever they are using, and you can rip to any format, and play on any device.

I have now seen that Sony has indeed ditched the CopyControl system, after December 2004. Here in South Africa, we may be stuck with it for a while, as I’m sure the stock of CD’s will have to all be sold first. I’m not buying any CD’s I can’t play on my Media Center at home and in my car.

Please leave me any comments on this. I would like to hear other people’s opinions.

Also, sorry for the lack of posts recently. Been chaos at work.

I recently got the latest version of NVDVD. I installled it, and my picture quality is better than ever. I shared this pearl of wisdom with a fellow Mediacenter enthusiast, who disputed my claims for a while until he rebuilt his and just installed NVDVD without WINDVD. He is now singing the same song as me.

Anyone who is having picture quality issues on their Mediacenter, please go and download NVDVD and give it a try. I have only tested it with NVidia cards, so I don’t know if it works as well on ATI. If someones tests it, please let me know.

Along the same lines, WINDVD 7.0 is out. I’ll be installing it on my Mediacenter shortly.

What really puzzles me is that XBOX Live works without a hitch. I thought I’d have a lot more problems with that since it isn’t even available here, but it works wonders.

If anyone has any ideas, please let me know. If anyone knows of any Empire Earth servers in South Africa, please let me know too. Thanks.

The quality is brilliant, and I highly recommend them. Go check out their South African site at www.dualphone.co.za.

My wife’s parents live in the USA, and this alone has saved me a lot of money.

If anyone wants instructions on how to set up a Telkom ADSL router to do this, let me know.

What this allows me to do now is schedule and manage all my Media Center recordings from anywhere in the world, or from my I-Mate phone. Awesome!

I really wanted a motorised screen, because they are just plain cool, but it was R4000 more than a manual one, and that is just ridiculous!

I will document my new setup shortly.

“You might have heard that the next rendition of Windows XP Media Center Edition (XP MCE) is code-named Emerald and will ship later this year. I recently obtained some exclusive information about the future of Media Center, however: First, Emerald is set for an August 2005 launch and will be available in DVD format, not on multiple CD-ROMs, as earlier versions were. Emerald will ship to 19 new locales, giving more of the world a chance to experience XP MCE, and will natively support Intel’s dual-core technologies. After Emerald, Microsoft will ship a Media Center release code-named Diamond that will include, among other things, a native x64 version for you 64-bit PC fans. After that, the Longhorn version of Media Center will ship in a version for every locale that the overall Longhorn project will support, in about 150 language-specific versions of the product. Nifty.

As for specific Emerald and Diamond features, we’ll see. The eHome folks responsible for Media Center are maintaining their usual veil of secrecy around upcoming products, which I think is a mistake, especially when XP MCE 2006–as Emerald will likely be called–is a simple upgrade of the current version. Revelations about Emerald probably won’t do much to halt XP MCE 2005 sales, which by all accounts are off to a torrid start, at least compared with earlier versions.”

I’ve heard that she isn’t good live, but I thought she did ok. It did sound like her voice was straining quite a lot on some songs, but it was good fun. She did play drums to Song 2 by Blur, and that was very good.

Thanks to my dad for pointing out I spelled her surname wrong…

My next big project is my Digital Home in my new place. It has an upstairs room where I intend to set up my home theatre. This leaves me with some interesting posabilities for distributed media availability. I will document this process as I do it.

I am currently running MS XP Media Center at home, and I honestly don’t know how I lived without it! It has changed the lives of both me and my wife, (who works in the medical field and tolerates more than enjoys my constant quest to improve our lives!?!?).

Getting Media Center to work in South Africa was a challenge. I have American family, so I was able to get a remote and a PVR-250MCE card and got it to work. A mate of mine at work here is also equally passionate about this stuff, although does think I go overboard on some ideas. We together tried to get the TV guide for our SA channels into MCE for weeks, with no luck. He eventually found a site in SA that scrapes the entire DSTV (our statelite TV service) guide from their website, and enables us to download it in XML format. With some help from Reinhard on the GreenButton.com who wrote an EXCELLENT program called Smartguide we managed to get everything working, and it ROCKS!!!

My next plan is to put Media Center in my car. It makes no sense to me to have all your CD’s stored digitally in your house, when the place you listen to music most often (in your car) still requires you to use old CDs. I will keep this site up do date on my work in this area.

I’ll also write my humble opinions of the current 2005 Formula 1 season (if anyones interested!)