CNET, New FCC report advocates a la carte TV pricing:
Martin told the forum that the FCC will soon release a report that concludes that offering TV programming a la carte is economically feasible and in the best interest of consumers.
Until we get true Internet TV downloads it would be great if we could get a la carte TV pricing. Why pay for channels I don’t want to watch? It just doesn’t make any sense.
Since some of you were interested to find out I owned movies and DVD. I should disclose the other features I own.
So I am the program manager for the following features in Media Center:
(There are one or two other areas that should be on that list but I don’t want to get your hopes up for Vista.)
Each of those features has a feature team made up of a developer, a tester, a designer, a usability engineer, a product planner, a user assistance person, and finally a program manager. As the program manager for those feature teams I drive the vision around the feature and we work together to pitch ideas to the larger team, get them approved, then get them built, tested and finally shipped.
One of my Media Centers at home is an HP z555 and I recently was forwarded this article by David Powell, Making the switch: Tivo to Media Center and he’s got lots of tips for optimizing things such as the video card, Extender and the z555’s airflow:
One last thing on cooling: a friend reversed the two fans (CPU fan and the side fan) inside the z555 and it now runs much, much cooler.
Since my z555 is in a fairly open space I don’t have heat problems, but I imagine many of you might if your z555 is in a cabinet, so if you’re the intrepid type you might want to try reversing your fans.
FYI, someone I know ran into issues with DVDIdle Pro and My DVDs:
Having DVDIdle Pro installed when you insert discs in to the changer causes the unique ID that�s generated to somehow be different than what is generated without the software installed/active. Because of this, none of the discs show up with metadata (beyond the volume ID). Disabling the software and �watching� the disc will cause a new ID to be generated (and xml file created) but it never shows up in My DVDs. The only way to have it show up is to eject the disc and re-insert it.
Off to Whistler for the weekend. See you all on Monday.
Ian Dixon has launched The Media Center Show Awards 2005 with lots of interesting categories, including ‘Best Microsoft Employee Media Center Blog’, go vote :).
It’s really great to see how far the community has come in the last year. It wasn’t too long ago that I could read every blog post that mentioned MCE, every article, every plugin, every forum. But now there’s so much going on that I can only dip in every once and a while and see what’s going on. The community has definitely taken off. Keep up the good work folks!
I’m off to Springs Lodge in Leavenworth, Washington for a corporate retreat for hot shot new college hires for the rest of the week. Should be a grand old geeky time. And yes, I will try very hard to resist the koolaid. (Though I will be bringing a bottle of something to spike it with.)
They tell us there’s no Internet, so see yeah.
(I’m bringing my new iPod video and will report back on how watching the first episode of Lost on the bus ride works out.)
I’m the program manager for DVDs and Movies so if you have questions, send them my way.
Two I got recently are…
Q: Is it possible for Media Center to remember the ‘resume’ position of multiple DVDs?
A: No, Media Center only remembers where you left off of your most recent disc. Yes, it would have been great if we could have improved this functionality when we introduced My DVDs so that Media Center would remember the position of any disc you stopped watching, but we had a tight schedule and limited resources and had to focus our attention elsewhere.
Q: Will My DVDs be available on the XBox 360?
A: No. We did not implement the ability to remotely play back a DVD from a MCE to an XBox 360 Extender so it did not make sense to make My DVDs available. I certainly understand how cool it would be if you could put your MCE and full loaded DVD changer in a closest and use XBox 360’s to watch your DVD collection from any room wirelessly but this is something that’s going to have to wait until a future release.
Strange case form factor of the day for your next home built Media Center, FIC’s Piston (via mailing list at work).
It’s a computer boom box!
I received an email the other day asking about the PowerFile C200 and whether or not it works with My DVDs. In short, I’m fairly certain it doesn’t.
Why? While powerfil.sys, the inbox driver which provides support for PowerFile changers, supports the C200, we never tested the C200 with either powerfil.sys or with My DVDs. Instead, we built the My DVDs feature using custom PowerFile R200DL units. These units had only one drive and by the time we were done development changes had been made to the firmware of not just the changer but also the drive. We in fact had to swap out the drives of the units with different ones. I also don’t know if the final firmware we were testing against has ever been publicly released by PowerFile, so if you have a R200DL, it likely will not work with My DVDs. But back to the drive issue, it’s because we only built and tested against single drive units that it is a known issue that we do not have code that can reliably determine which drive to use in a two drive unit.
It’s also worth pointing out that PowerFile’s software uses a custom driver, and not powerfil.sys, which we use. Which is why the C200 and R200 may appear to work identically when tested against PowerFile’s software, but differ when tested against ours.
For the best My DVDs experience I really recommend purchasing a Sony XL1 system. It has the changer that has the latest firmware for both the changer and drive, and has been thoroughly tested by both Sony and Microsoft.
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