Media Centre IV - The Finale

I've finally sorted the Win7 Media Centre, and it's now working "correctly". After the last post, the machine rebooted, and started again it's "Updating You Library" malarky. After 3 days, it was still going. Previously, I had turned off the "Automatically update your music with information from the internet" option inside WMP12, but HADN'T turned off the same option within Media Centre. It was still trying to download coverart and other such info every time you were to go into the music library in MCE.

Turned that option off, and voila - fixed. Now, whenever you go into the music library, it's pretty much straight up. Scrolling through the library is now considerably faster too - it must have been trying to update the music as you scrolled.

So - if it's all working well, why the inverted commas around the word "Correctly" in the first sentence? Because it's not actually working correctly, but I believe it's working as well as it can. Problems continue to exist, but I can't lay the entire blame at the foot of MCE. For instance:

• When playing an album, the audio output will occasionally (IE, once or maybe twice per song) skip a bit. It'll pause for half a sec while the machine does something more important, then resume. Hard to blame MCE for this when the underlying hardware is so old.

• When playing a DVD, occasionally the sound will drop out for 3-4 seconds. The video keeps going, but the sound stops. The sound comes back, and it's in-sync again (which is good), but it's still annoying. Again, might be a hardware thing, but it's still annoying.
  

• Random reboots whilst playing a DVD. We discovered this one when playing Dora yesterday for the kids. Dunno?

• Random screen blanking. Every now and then MCE will get itself in a knot, and the screen will go black and blank. The system is still responding - plug a mouse in and you get the USB-plugged-in boo-boop! noise, and the cursor move fluidly. But even ctrl-alt-del to bring up task manager takes about 3 mins at this stage, so you're better off just rebooting the machine - it usually needs it even after you've managed to end-task on MCE.

• Random "Windows Cannot Start Media Centre" dialog boxes pop up. Oddly, they pop up when MCE is running, and working faultlessly. Leaving them there doesn't introduce any problems, but why?

• I've not uninstalled MediaPortal yet. Every now and then you'll flick over to the MCE machine on the TV, but instead of MCE on top, it's actually started MediaPortal, and it's on top? There must be a button on the remote that's being mapped through to media portal still? Very odd.

• MCE still has trouble with keeping it's window on top of everything else. It's disturbingly common to switch to the MCE machine and have an AV dialog (or some other warning message) on top, with no way to get back to MCE without plugging in a mouse and dismissing the dialog box. Annoyingly, the remote's OK button won't work for this, despite the "OK" button on the dialog having the focus. Sometimes you switch across and the Start menu/taskbar has the focus, with no way to get back to MCE other than attempt to start a second instance, which then doesn't play well with the running instance.

These currently are my main gripes with the system. The first few are easily blamed on the old hardware - I readily admit that I'm probably under the minimum suggested specs, and would be prepared to upgrade the hardware if it meant a better experience.

However, it's the last few items above which have me worried. In all the years that I ran MediaPortal (even through it's beta builds), I could count on one hand how many time I needed to plug in the mouse, and I'd still have fingers left over. So it's currently not looking so bright for MCE, I'm afraid.

I do, however, love:

• The "Now Playing" screen for music, with the coverart scrolling down behind it.

• Playing a DVD or ripped DVD is simple, and no need to muck about with selecting the right video decoder, or so forth - it all just works. Love that.

• The GUI design of MCE. At first, I wasn't sold, but I like it now - very easy to get around.

• The screensaver - uses your photos from your photo library - nice touch!

Bootnote
I dropped Jeff Alexander from Microsoft Oz an email about the issues I was experiencing, and asked for his suggestions, since he posted a few weeks prior about how much he loved MCE under Win7. He got back to me a few days later, and basically confirmed my suspicions. Running on 7-8yr old hardware that's well under the minimum specs just isn't going to give a good experience, no matter which way you slice it. 4Gb of RAM and a dual-core CPU seem to be the absolute minimum needed, and a quad-core CPU yields even better results. So it looks like I'll need to invest some money into the box to get it to perform how I want it to.

The other thing that Jeff suggested that hadn't even crossed my mind was to upgrade the wired network with a gigabit switch, instead of the hundred-meg switch integrated into my router. This will be a "quick-win", as it's certainly cheaper than the ~$1100 to upgrade the MCE machine, and should make indexing the shares a lot quicker. Also, it should take all the MCE/main computer traffic away from the router, so I might even pick up an increase in my VoIP call quality.

The good thing from this is that it looks like the main big issues I was having above are probably all related to the underlying hardware being unable to cope. Since I've uninstalled MediaPortal, I no longer have issues surrounding it "taking over" the session in front of MCE, but still experience random error messages popping up on screen, closing MCE and taking the focus. Library population is now much quicker than it was, but still takes too long to be usable, especially the music library. Scrolling through takes ~10 seconds per single right-button-press to move one album at a time. Again, a combination of increased bandwidth on the LAN, coupled with more CPU horsepower should see issues like this disappear, with any luck.

The items from the "Things I love" list above have really grown on me more now though - it really is a slick system. I just hope I can get it running right, and then will be able to really enjoy it.

Media Centre III - The Reckoning

Well, we've made some headway with my Media Centre trial! After the PC spent a week "Updating Media Library...", it's finished! And it works! I didn't change anything - I jsut left both machines on for a week, and left them alone. Even if I change some ID3 tags, or move some mp3's around on the source PC, it only takes a 5 mins to update the library on the media centre machine, and then it's right again! I had feared that it would require another week to sync up, but it seems to be smarter than that. I had turned off the "Retrieve additional information from the Internet" option on the media centre machine, but I'm not sure if it actually made a difference. I'm planning on turning it back on, and seeing if it needs to re-index the share.

So why did it take a week to do it's initial sync? No idea! Am I happy that it's finished? Yes!

The hardware is starting to show through a bit now - scrolling through the media library is slow, and occasionally the music playback will pause for a second as the PC needs to do something more important. But overall, I think it's acquitted itself very well, given the very old and basic hardware that it's being run on. It certainly is running better than I expected, and better than it has any right to. I might try upgrading the RAM to more than the 1Gb that it's currently got, but I suspect it's still mainly CPU bound.

Media Centre, however, has past the acceptance test. Jess was using it over the weekend, and was easily able to find the album she wanted to play and get it going. I particularly like the "now playing" screen with the album art scrolling down in the background - very visually effective, and good for our plasma TV, since the screen image is constantly changing.

The next step will be to budget for an upgrade to the main PC, which will allow us to shuffle it's current insides down to the media centre machine, and give it a fair upgrade in the power stakes. I'm reasonably confident that that will see Media Centre start to really hum along. In the meantime though, even with the slight performance issues, it's sold on me.

Telstra HTC Touch Diamond ROM Update Available

Just a quick note regarding the new HTC Touch Diamond update available for Telstra TD's. You can download the update from the HTC AU site here : HTC Touch Diamond ROM Upgrade (for Telstra Network Customers). It's dated 6/5/2009, and upgrades the ROM to version 2.07.841.2. You've got to enter in your serial number (under the battery) before you can download the ROM, as the website checks that the SN matches their list of official Telstra TD's. IE, if you don't have a Telstra-bought TD, the website won't give you the download.

I do, however, have a Telstra-branded-and-supplied TD, so have downloaded the files and updated my TD this morning. Happy to say that everything went very well. The download is 100Mb, so be ready for that, but otherwise it's very straightforward. The re-flash will completely erase anything on the main memory of the phone, but it leave the integrated 4Gb "Internal Memory" partition alone. So backup any CAB files or ring tones to that (or to your PC) before you start. The flash process takes about 10 mins.

Also, note that the update also removes any pre-existing ActiveSync partnerships, emails, anything - it's just like formatting your PC and starting from scratch. For me, that's not so much of an issue, since I just re-created the partnership with my Exchange server account via Windows Mobile Device Manager on my laptop after the update, and it automatically synced all my contacts, calendar and email back onto the phone. Love that. However, I've only just realised that all my SMS's are now gone though, which kinda sucks. Didn't even think about that. Bugger.

First impressions, however, are very positive. It's certainly much quicker to use, and that's with basically standard settings. Previously I had used both Advanced Config and TD3D Config to implement a number of hacks to boost performance and battery life. The new ROM is easily faster than it was, and I've not yet done any performance tuning to it. I plan to use it as-is for a couple of weeks, then get stuck in under the hood, and see if I can wrangle any additional performance and battery life out of it. I've been particularly un-impressed with the battery life over late, so we'll see if the new ROM addresses that at all.

The standout change, however, seems to be with the media player. The HTC media player in TouchFlow 3D always had problems picking up the Album Art associated with mp3's that were synced to the device. There was a hack to get around it, but it was an ugly, filthy hack that took a lot of time. it worked, but it wasn't nice. Since flashing the new ROM though, my existing mp3's (on the internal memory card) all picked up their album art, and everything looks pretty! So big kudos to HTC for fixing that - it was one thing that really took a lot of the polish off TF3D. Now that it's fixed, it's perfect.


It's also been a good chance to go over my list of "essential apps" for the phone. What I've re-installed this morning:

• Advanced Config Tool 3.3 - Very handy customising tool - heaps of options to tinker with WinMo and TF3D. You will need the DotNet Compact Framework 3.5 to make this work. It's a PC download that you install to your PC with the mobile connected. It'll install the CF to the PC, then also push an install out to the attached mobile.
  
• Black Carbon theme with dialer - Just a theme, but it's well done, a bit different from standard, and very easy to install
• Diamond TF3D Config - Like Advanced Config, but with more TF3D-specific functions. Ability to re-oder the tabs along the TF3D ribbon, which is great as I use the weather tab a lot, and like to be able to move it so it's easy to get to from the main Home screen
  
• Diamond Slide-To-Answer patch - Brings the Touch HD's fabulous slide-to-answer function to the Diamond. Once you've used this, you'll wonder how you ever did without it. NOTE - On a tip-off from Scotty (who has the same phone, and upgraded his last week), I've discovered that you don't need this - the new ROM includes it as standard! Awesome!
  
• Google Maps - Can use the phone's integrated GPS hardware - very handy! Saved our bacon when we were in Japan ealier this year!
  
• Microsoft Recite - Very tricky. You can record voice notes, and then search then by simply saying a key word. Works brilliantly. Haven't used it enough to make it as essential part of my day yet, but I feel it could get that way.
• OneNote Mobile - Because I've got OneNote on my laptop, it automatically installs the mobile client onto the phone (and is the only way to get the client, BTW). I've not really used it yet, but have been using OneNote on the laptop more and more, and have been finding it really very useful. The shared notebooks in particular are awesome. So I'm looking forward to trying out the Mobile client as well.
  
• PHM Regedit - Like it says - it's a registry editor for WinMo. Very handy for tinkering. This is my favourite regeditor - very easy to use and very powerful.
  
• TD Cam Silencer (AU) (With the accompanying sdkcerts.cab) - Telstra have, in their infinite wisdom, locked their ROM so that you can't change the standard camera focussing and snapshot sound. It's an obnoxious noise, and it belts out at max volume. I guess they're wanting to cut down on people taking photos without others knowledge. However, for me, it's just terrible and renders the camera unusable. None of my other cameras do this, so I don't see why my phone should either. Thankfully a helpful soul on the XDA-Developers forum came to my rescue with a CAB install to remove the sound. Works a treat, and is easily the first thing I install now. You'll need to sign up to XDA Devs be able to download the files, but once you're there, you'll find a lot of other indispensable stuff anyway.
• Disable SMS Conversation Mode - Windows mobile 6.1 devices default to a SMS Chat mode when reading and replying to SMS messages. I find it terribly annoying and hard to use. Luckily, there's a quick and easy way to disable it and set it back to how SMS messages should work! It's one little reg hack, so you will have needed to install the reg editor beforehand.
  

And that's about it! I've moved my standard ringtone back in and set that up, so I'll recognise that it's my phone ringing. I've had a couple of quick hacks in Advanced Config, but nothing major or that will affect performance or battery life yet. As mentioned earlier, I'm going to run the phone just like this for a coupel of weeks, and see how the new ROM stands up. But so far, I'm mightily impressed!

Media Centre redux

So after the weekend's problems with MediaCentre on Windows7, I spent some more time to straighten things out. So far, I've done the following:

• Uninstalled MediaCentre in an effort to get MediaPortal recognising all the remote control's buttons. I thought maybe MediaCentre had some form of resident program such that whenever you pressed the Home/Start key on the remote, it would intercept the call and fire up MCE. After MCE was uninstalled though, the remote still wouldnt' function properly in Media Portal. I reset the configuration, and did everything short of rebuilding the machine. From what I can tell, Windows itself is intercepting the calls, and not passing them through to Media Portal. Which sucks, as currently it renders Media Portal on Windows 7 useless.
• Uninstalled Media Portal, and re-installed MediaCentre.
• Experienced the same problems as before.
• Fired up Windows Media Player. Found that it needs to be run once to do all it's configuration. Is it possible that MCE is mucking about because WMP hasn't been configured? Ran through the WMP configuraiton, including adding in the libraries for the network shares.
• WMP took a long time to rebuild the music library from the PC over the network, but it did get there. It ran all night an most of the day, but slow and steady won that race. It picked up all the ID3 tags (which are now correct, thanks Tag&Rename and AudioShell!!!), and sorted everything correctly into their right albums and artists.
• However, as soon as WMP finished inxeding the library, it started again. And again. And again. All the time, eating up 100% CPU to do so.

So - it's NOT a MediaCentre issue after all - it's a WMP issue (which MCE heavily uses and relies upon). Some googling found this thread about people experiencing the same problem (and only that thread at this time. Strange...). Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a resolution at the moment, other than "don't use WMP". I really hope Microsoft fix this, as it's rendered MediaCentre useless for me. I can't browse the music library, becasue the machine is too busy "Updating My Library" for me. I can't play a song, because all the CPU is going to updating the library. I click on Play, and nothing happens for 5 mins. Then, when I'm in brushing my teeth, the music starts. It plays for a second or two, then stops. 3 minutes pass. then another 3 seconds of music. Then golden silence. And so on. I've not even *tried* playing a DVD yet! Frustrating!

All that said, I've become quite attached to MediaCentre. It's interface is a lot cleaner than Media Portal's, which can be a bit fussy in areas. And it's installation and setup is much more straightforward and easy. When you can stop WMP from eating all the CPU, MCE is really quite snappy, even on this old hardware. I'm just intrigued as to what's causing this WMP behaviour - apparently it wasn't behaving this way in the Beta build. I really hope that someone in MS is alerted to the fact it's doing this, and is able to fix it up before it goes RTM. Personally, I hope they fix it before then, actually, since this is currently the only major roadblock for me to actually pay for the new OS when it's released. I'd like that re-assurance that it's working properly before needing to part with my hard-earned.

((hmm - really should get some photos up on this blog - it's looking very bare and sterile so far!))

Windows 7 Rocks, Media Centre Doesn't

Last week I downloaded the Windows 7 Release Candidate. I had briefly used the Beta earlier in the year, and was mightily impressed with it. On a 6 yr old laptop it installed perfectly, without needing any drivers. And it ran considerably quicker than the previous XP install ever had. So I had pretty high hopes for the RC and the subsequent released product.

One of my main drivers for downloading the RC was to install it on my home theatre machine. It's currently running XP Home with MediaPortal installed to take care of the UI and remote control functions. It works really well, and allows me to have all my mp3s, DVDs and other media stored on my main PC, and watch/listen to them all in the lounge. However, it's not without it's issues. Chief amongst them is it's very inconsistent DVD playback ability, and the fact that it takes a long time to load the (rather large, but not as large as some) mp3 folder across the network. And not to mention the grumpy old audio drivers that every time I rebuild it take me a couple of hours to get it to use the coax SPDIF output in any meaningful sense.

I've been thinking of upgrading both machines to Vista, and using the Vista Media Centre on the HTPC box. My concern with this plan was that the HTPC machine wouldn't have anywhere near enough grunt to run Vista acceptably. It's an old Athlon2400+, with 1Gb of DDR Ram, and a Nvidia 7600GS graphics card. The graphics card isn't very old, but the rest of the machine is around a 7yr vintage. Certainly not cutting edge. One option was to upgrade my main PC to a new Core i7 setup and move it's Core2Duo brains into the HTPC machine, but that was an $1100 option, and hence not very attractive. By using the Windows 7 RC install though, I had the chance to see how it would run on the old hardware, as well as try out the Media Centre functionality, all for free.

The Windows 7 install was a mixed bag. It took a VERY long time, but keep in mind this is on older hardware that it's really designed for. First time through the install failed when the machine rebooted to continue the install in Windows. An error about corrupted files had me doubting whether the download or subsequent burned DVD install media were corrupt. Restarting the install from scratch though saw it install perfectly fine, which was pleasing. I still don't know what caused the problems first time through - I certainly didn't do anything differently the second time.

The biggest surprise, and what impressed me the most, was that Win7 detected ALL the hardware in the old clunker. The weird old onboard sound with it's coax output - 100%. As soon as the machine booted, I had system noises coming out the big speakers via the Sony receiver. The 7600GS AGP graphics card - 100%. All features enabled, all ready to go, and the res set to the maximum that the plasma TV can handle on it's VGA input (1280x1024). The XP Media Centre remote and IR receiver - 100%. Including all buttons mapping through the main shell, so you can navigate around in Windows with the remote if you wanted to.

So very impressed with Windows 7 itself. It takes a good while to boot on the old machine, but once up and running, things happen quite quickly. You wouldn't want to use it as your every day machine, but for it's intended role, it's perfect.

However, this is where we start going downhill. I fired up Media Centre, and set it up. Music and Movie folders were pointed at the network shares on the main PC (which Vista had automatically discovered and knew about - much nicer than XP!). However, the following issues soon raised their heads:

• My mp3's are sorted into a standard folder structure - \\music\artist\album\files. As such, I've never payed much attention to ID3 tags, since I've always just navigated the folder structure that way, and played an album by playing all files in a folder. MC doesn't work like this. There's no way to make it view the files as they present on the disk. Everything is sorted by ID3 tags, which are either not present, or wrong. So there's a lot of fixing up needed there. But that's not really MCE's fault.
  

• Either due to the low spec of the HTPC machine, or the speed of the 100Mbps wired ethernet network, when you go into the Music Library in MC, the display will freeze up. It'll show the first page of albums, then freeze. Button presses on the remote control will eventually be processed, but after 5-6 mins. Basically, MC just locks up and goes non-responsive for an amount of time. No matter how long you leave it, it doesn't get better. I thought that MC worked off a local database that indexed and referenced the file shares, in the same way that Media Player on a PC does? Apparently not. Whilst MediaPortal would take a couple of minutes, then eventually read all the remote files, Media Centre just seems to get itself in a knot, and locks up completely.

• There's no way to play netradio in Media Centre? There's a Radio option, but it tells me I need an FM tuner to listen to radio. This is a big one for me, as I like listening to international netradio on a Saturday morning whilst doing chores around the house.

• Media Centre doesn't seem to be able to stay on top. Often, after resuming from an overzealous screensaver, Media Centre had dropped from the foreground app, which left the remote control operating on the Win7 Start Menu and seemingly unable to get back down to the task bar. Thinking it would be smart enough to pick up the running instance, I had no choice but to click on the Media Centre icon on the Start Menu. Unfortunately it wasn't that smart, and so then I had two instances of Media Centre running on the one PC, which only a reboot could straighten out.

They're the main issues. Nothing wrong with Windows 7 at this point - it's just Media Centre that's playing up. I don't know whether it's the old hardware that's at fault, or if it's the network playing up. But at this point in time, Media Centre looks to be a bit of a bust. It's too inconsistent, it's too flakey in it's operation, and it just plain doesn't work with my mp3s across the network.

In it's defence, I did like :

• DVD playback. Playing back a DVD that had been ripped to the main PC across the network was bliss. No need to muck around with installing DVD decoders, no need to change the decoder to a special one that came with the DVD drive's software to avoid stuttering, anything like that. Point it at the DVD, and it plays. no mess, no fuss. Love that.
• Coverart. Media Centre seems to play much nicer with the coverart for CDs that have been ripped to mp3s. It just works, which is nice.
• Music - playing a CD. When you can manage to get it working with a folder of mp3's ripped from a CD, I love how you simply "click" on the album with the remote, and the list of tracks opens up in a new window, with a handy "play all" button. And the new "Now Playing" screen with the coverart in the background is beautiful.
• TV integration. This is not something I've played with yet, but I want to invest in a dual digital tuner card at some stage in the near future, and record TV that I'd like to watch. Even though I couldn't actually try it out, Media Centre impressed me with it's deep integration of TV services, EPGs, burn to disc or convert to iPod/PMP formats. I suspect that this alone might bring me back to Media Centre in the future.
  

For now though, I'm experimenting with a hybrid setup. I wanted music to play in the background for the mother's day brunch we had at our place, and MC wasn't working. So I quickly installed Media Portal on Win7, and that worked fine. I've not tried playing a DVD or anything, but at least I can see my mp3 folders, and can play an album, and it all works. I've still got some bugs to iron out, such as clicking the "Home" button on the remote inside MediaPortal actually launches a new running copy of Media Centre, instead of taking me back to the MediaPortal home screen. And the Back key on the remote doesn't work. And the music vis doesn't work anymore, by the looks of things.

So it's still a bit of a dogs breakfast, so to speak. I'm going to try to sort it out this week by removing Media Centre from the installation, and seeing if I can get MediaPortal playing nicely on the Win7 RC base. I hope so, because the device integration and support of Win7 is excellent. Whilst it takes longer to boot than the previous XP install, I feel it's snappier once loaded, and the networking seems rock solid. So I want to persevere with Win7, if at all possible. Hopefully once MC is uninstalled, MediaPortal will take full control of the remote, and assign all it's keys back to itself, and we'll be rocking and rolling.

There's still some things about MediaPortal I don't like - it's still slow to open up the Music share across the network, for instance. However, I think it's probably the best of a bad bunch for my needs. I did consider using XBMC, but it has no support for recording TV, which is a definite contender in the near future. MediaPortal has quite robust TV support, but I suspect it's not as slick or as polished and integrated as Media Centre is.

So we shall see. In the meantime though, the score is firmly planted at :

Windows 7 : 1
Windows XP : 0

and
Windows Media Centre : 0
MediaPortal : 1 (just 'cause it, you know, actually kinda works)

(Bootnote - after having this blog set up for ages, and not actually using it for work purposes [despite having half a dozen half-finished articles written in draft], I've decided to use this as my technology-specific blog. It'll be my nerd corner, as opposed to a strictly work-related blog. So expect to see articles such as this, which is clearly home-based, intermingled with interesting tid bits taken from my day to day wranglings with technology in a SME environment. Hope it's interesting!)