Zune, just one look

After lunch on a wet and miserable Sunday yesterday, the Bomber and I sat down to entertain ourselves with the remake of Clash of the Titans.

It wasn't broadcast TV or a disc however, it was streamed to the new XBOX over the net. We only stumbled across the feature, but using it was next to effortless, and the quality was fine.

Writing here every day let's me see how much of an improvement that is over four years ago.

I think perhaps my DVDs will have gone the way of my CDs in another forty eight months.

iPlayer

I managed to get on the BBCiPlayer Beta that launched at the end of July.

It works, I will say that much for it. You can download TV shows and watch them. The video quality is good with no pixellation, but apart from that it is a pretty paltry product considering that it is seeing the light of day after four years of development.

Shows are downloaded as .wmv files to the Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\My Deliveries\iplayer_live directory from where they can be played in the Windows Media Player as well as the BBC player. This makes me think that they can probably be played in the Media Center app as well, but I've not got a machine in the office I can test that on. I've tried playing files across a network, but the DRM kicks in and prevents it.

It is a Windows XP only program, but there is a trial and error how-to here, from someone who has got it working on VISTA.

Could try harder.

Odds and Ends

The Profit Burglar and I went to the launch of Dave Saxby's book in the Chapter House after work yesterday, an event which - with Gatsbyesque elan - he didn't actually attend himself.

Thence, fortified with a take away from the reliable Colliers Wood Tandoori, back to my gaff to set up a Media Center PC under the TV. The main reason for this is that Paul has finished a first pass at the program to play "backed up" DVDs that I trailed here, but it has also struck me that it will be no bad idea to have a computer in that slot domestically with the BBC due to launch its Interactive Media Player later this month.

Though we could fine tune the interface, Paul's software works a treat for navigating and viewing content. It struck me this morning as I was walking to work, that if I set up a version of it that catalogued only the New Ninja Bomber's DVDs, and moved the XBOX 360 to his room he could have pushbotton access to all his favourites with the XBOX talking to the PC via Microsoft's Media Extender technology. This will require a network upgrade of some sort. Probably best to get a gigabit hub and run a Cat 5 cable between the ground and first floor.

I also took the opportunity once we were set up to navigate the Media Center Guide to More4 at 8pm on Sunday and set it to record The West Wing, now and for the rest of the run. I missed "Ways and Means" in series 3 a couple of weeks ago to add to these omissions, but with any luck I shouldn't miss any more.

Return of the Geek

My Qosmio seems to have given up the ghost so my mind is turning to the vexed issue of digital media again. We've built an XP Media Center PC that I'm going to take home, and we've got Vista Ultimate Edition running on a 64 bit box in the office.

My Movies won't run on the 64-bit OS, so we've been digging around for a way to play backed up DVDs from the hard disk.

From the SDK, it seems that - from an HTML page registered in Media Center - the call:

window.external.MediaCenter.PlayMedia(4,strUrl);

Plays the passed strUrl as a DVD.

An strUrl encoded as, say "DVD://C:/DVD/DVD1/VIDEO_TS" will play the default opening file on DVD backed up to C:/DVD/DVD1/ on a local hard disk.

This also seems to work with UNC filenames, so using "DVD://SERVERNAME/C$/DVD/DVD1/VIDEO_TS", for example, as the strURL would enable you to play a backed up DVD over a network!

Adding a ? after the URL, enables you to pass parameters:

?2 Plays Title 2
?5/13 Play Chapter 13 of title 5
?6/2-8 Plays Chapters 2 to 8 of title 6
?7/9:05-13:23 Plays title 7, from 9 seconds 5 frames to 13 seconds 23 frames (times specified as hh:mm:ss:ff)

There doesn't seem to be any reason why this technique wouldn't work in the XBOX 360 Media Extender which suggests to me that we might well be able to knock up some code that will give me online access to all my movies via the games machine.

I've created a new label for this type of musing, even though I don't seem to have done much of it lately.

XBOX 360

The profit burglar and I spent yesterday evening playing around with the XBOX 360 trying to get our heads around its multimedia and online features.

We didn't include online game playing, but my main conclusion is that while the implementations are competent enough, they're dull.

There's nothing very interesting to see in the Live Marketplace, and while you can watch videos and recorded shows from your Media Center PC, you can't stream a DVD over the network.

In general I am too disappointed with it to feel that it is worth writing any more.

Podcasting and Broadcatching

Now that I have finally got round to plugging my Qosmio into the television and hi-fi at home I am starting to run Microsoft Media Center from the so called "ten foot interface", lounging in an armchair and waving a remote rather than pecking at a keyboard.

This has meant - inevitably I think - that I have started to collect content via podcasts. As I am already a Newsgator user, I have gravitated to FeedStation as my podcast client (note that I still gather content via the mouse and keyboard driven "two foot interface" and haven't even looked at Newsgator Media Center Edition yet).

I noticed today that Newsgator/FeedDemon gives me the opportunity to publish an RSS feed of my podcast downloads here. There is only one item in it as I write as I emptied out the folder before I realised exactly what it was, but anyone who subscribes to it will be able to follow along with my peregrinations in this new publishing paradigm.

I've also been fooling around with BitTorrent (mostly to get shows from Rev3).

BitTorrent explain themselves as follows:

The BitTorrent peer-to-peer file transfer protocol was created and introduced in 2001 by BitTorrent Inc. co-founder Bram Cohen. Bram began his mission to solve a problem experienced by the online community since the birth of the Internet. While it wasn't clear it could be done, Bram wanted to enable effective swarming distribution - - transferring massive files from server to client with the efficiency of peer-to-peer - - reliably, quickly and efficiently. By 2003, BitTorrent had sparked a global revolution in file distribution on the web. Today, we are providing millions of users worldwide with a valuable platform to publish, search and download popular digital content.

It has long been clear to anyone with half a brain that the BitTorrent protocol's elegant exploitation of network effects to provide scalability was showing the way forward for digital distribution, but it wasn't until I was actually using it in anger that I realised exactly how much of a marriage made in heaven the union of RSS enclosures and BitTorrent was.

It seems that as long ago as December 2003, Steve Gillmor coined the term podcatching for the combination - though it looks as if it might have been Scott Raymond who realised that using RSS to deliver BitTorrent rather than vice versa was the bullseye. I'm starting to think along the lines of RSS being above BitTorrent in a protocol stack, though I am aware - smartalecks of the world - that RSS is delivered over HTTP.

So what I need now is a Podcast client with a built in BitTorrent client. I've opened up port 6881 on my ADSL router at home but managing multiple ports by manually configuring it on behalf of BitTorrent would be a pain in the neck so my client also needs to implement UPnP.

Where can it be? I'm amazed that there isn't one that has taken the world by storm.

Gnarls Barkley

Perhaps the BBC headline "History made as song tops chart without selling a single CD" is a trifle hyperbolic but yesterday is likely to be remembered as the day the torch was passed (at least for the UK) from objects to bits as the standard mechanism for music distribution.

There is an Official site for Gnarls Barkley that plays the track and they are on myspace.com as well. (I must make time to look in more detail at myspace. News Corp's $580 purchase of it last year put it on my radar, but a profile I read in Vanity Fair was so inane I got discouraged.)

I'm vaguely pondering my home set up in light of the convergence of computing, communications and entertainment technology. At the moment I've just got an 802.11g wireless router ADSL modem and I am carting my Toshiba Qosmio back and for to the office.

Maybe now is the time to add some storage from the Buffalo Linkstation range. I could connect it to the router with the ethernet cable and use it to serve media all around the house via the wireless network. Possibly if I combined it with something like the SlimDevices Squeezebox3 I wouldn't need a PC at all.

It is certainly weird to be considering what is essentially a NAS device as a consumer home entertainment component.

My Movies

I've been using AnyDVD to back up DVDs to hard disk for a few weeks now and experimenting to see what you can do with them. I cannot help but conclude that the film industry will be disrupted just as profoundly as the music industry has been by consumer digital technology.

I've established, for example, I can put a movie on a drive on one computer then watch it (using WinDVD) on another over an 802.11g wireless network.

I have found a free MCE (Microsoft Media Center Edition) add-on application called My Movies that can be used to catalogue and view online DVDs that have been ripped to hard disk.

A DVD takes up about 4GB of hard drive space. You can get a 250GB portable USB 2 hard drive that can hold over 60 movies for a little over eighty quid or �1.33 per movie. Given the difficulty I often have in simply laying my hands on one of my four year old son's DVDs I would gladly pay �1.33 per movie for the convenience of access that you get with "My Movies", and that cost is bound to reduce as the market penetration of 500GB drives increases.

I can see that in the medium term I will just get into the habit of ripping any DVD I buy, just as I do with CDs, and then putting it back in the case never to be opened again.

Am I a criminal? Gia put it best on her blog a while back:

don't start calling ME a 'pirate' in the way the Film Industry does because I copy films to my harddrive for my son to watch on the train... Last time I was in Blockbusters their TV channel-thingy started talking about how "Video Pirates" were "involved in drug and human trafficking"... ????... Really? Me? Almost everyone I know who regularly copies DVDs? We are all involved in drug or human trafficking?? Piss off!

Also, look at my last post. I regularly pay top dollar - without complaint - for Folio editions of books that are out of copyright when I could download the text gratis from Project Guttenberg. What does that mean?

My best guess is that it means that if providers can package their content is a sufficiently compelling and attractive way money will gush in, but if they can't they will end up throwing the baby away with the bath water.

How to Back Up DVDs

Paul Thurrott writing in Connected Home:

A company called SlySoft makes an ingenious $39 application called AnyDVD, which resides in memory and unprotects commercial DVDs on the fly. So, when AnyDVD is running and you insert a DVD movie, it appears to the system to be unencrypted. Then, you can use the video application of your choice to copy the DVD contents into a more suitable format. Incidentally, AnyDVD is also good for other uses: It removes a DVD's region information, letting you play international DVDs, and it prevents DVDs with horrible PC-based software (such as PC-Friendly) from automatically starting on insert.

I've experimented with various video applications, but since I'll be reviewing CyberLink PowerDirector soon, I�ll walk you through the process of copying a DVD by using AnyDVD and PowerDirector. First, make sure AnyDVD is resident on your system. Then, launch PowerDirector and insert a DVD movie in your PC's DVD drive. Next, select File, Import to import either the DVD�s entire VIDEO_TS folder or the individual VOB files that make up the movie.

In PowerDirector, you can drag individual VOB files to the timeline and edit them, or you can simply drag the entire movie onto the timeline and prepare to write it to disk. PowerDirector, like any good video editor, gives you a number of options for saving the movie. You can make a Video CD or DVD, for example. Or, you can save it to the hard disk in AVI, DivX, MPEG-1, or MPEG-2 format. MPEG-2 is the native format for DVD movies, so that's probably a good choice. Let�s start with that. A 1-minute MPEG-2 video encoded in a DVD-quality 720 x 480 format takes about 60 seconds to encode and occupies about 56MB of space. Do the math, and you're looking at about 5GB for a typical 90-minute movie. And, of course, the roughly 1:1 ratio of movie length to encoding time means that the video will take about 90 minutes to write to disk.
Yikes.

DivX provides similar quality to MPEG-2 at much smaller file sizes, but the encoding process typically takes longer. That same 1-minute clip, encoded to the same resolution, will take about 1 minute and 4 seconds to encode, but the resulting file is only 17.2MB. So, a 90-minute movie would occupy just 15.5GB. That's much better, but DivX is also a slightly dodgy format, and is not as widely supported as MPEG-2.

Hint: His maths on DivX ain't so hot.

Windows Media Center Edition 2005 Resources - Phat Matt's Wiki

I have stumbled upon a pointer to a uk based Wiki of Media Center Resources that is hosted on a uk domain. This could be very handy as I get up to speed with the Qosmio. It would be handy to have something similar for the Zen Touch.