I’ve received a lot of feedback on Media Center not supporting serial changers. While I sympathize with those wanting serial control because they’re currently cheaper, I believe that a firewire solution is superior. Why?

• They can store any type of optical disc in the changer (music CD, data DVDs with pictures/videos/music, video game DVDs) and the software that we or third parties build can then browse the changer and play back the DVDs as appropriate.
• No input switching is required when video playback begins
• RS-232 is dead. Many PC manufacturers are dropping support for it.

That said, I hope that the current DVD changer manufacturers work at cost reducing their existing offerings and I hope that more manufacturers enter the space in order to drive cost down through competition.

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I got an email from someone who is having a problem where one of their HD channels used to work but now they get a ‘No TV Signal’ blue screen. The answer here is:

Typically the reason this happens is that a broadcaster starts broadcasting on some other frequency, and we no longer receive the signal. We use a table that we get from [our metadata provider], that they get from the FCC, to know which channels are broadcast on which frequencies. When broadcasters change frequencies (either because they switch from a test feed to a production, live feed or some other reason), we don’t know unless the FCC knows and updates their database that [our metadata provider] gets data from. We don’t actually do “scanning” the way that a TV, or other TV applications, do.

If this happens to you submit your problem to Electronic Program Guide Issue Submission Form and we’ll work to get our tables updated.

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The other day I got an email pointing me to CoverFlow, CoverFlow aims to bring that aesthetic appeal to your mp3 collection:

The person emailed wondering if we’d adopted something similar in the future. While it’s impossible to rule out that we’d never do something similar I do have a bit of experience with similar UI. For instance, take a look at the queue management UI that I worked on for a demo of an Avalon Netflix application (click through for full size):

Now if you notice the black band has a queue control. It’s hard to illustrate this in a screenshot but if you mouse over the queue covers they expand out and show you the one you’re currently over. It’s almost identical to CoverFlow in feel. Now from that control you can select a movie and get the movie details. Alternatively you can view your queue full screen:

Again you can mouse over covers and they rotate into the foreground as you mouse over them.

We nicknamed this queue control the ‘accordion’ view. While I think it’s got some good ‘wow’ factor I don’t think it’s very usable. Why?

• It doesn’t expose enough information - I want to be able to see more than one full cover art at a time. For me this is a deal breaker. I need to see an album in the context of my collection.
• It’s not scalable - I feel this UI widget works for a small amount of albums or movies, but scale it up to 1000 or 10000 items and it will be very unweldly. Our biggest fear with the Netflix accordion widget was that for the demo it looked cool for 20 movies but for any more (it would have to support the max number of movies you can have in your queue) it just wouldn’t work.

For comparison here is Media Center’s default album view in Vista:

(Disclaimer: This screenshot is from the December CTP using my personal music collection and a lot can change between now and launch in terms of what you see here).

We’re showing album covers, so it has lots of visual wow, when you scroll through the album in focus is pulled out and metadata about it is displayed below, if we don’t have cover art we embed it in the cover art tile, and lots of covers are visible on the screen enabling you to see it in the context of your larger collection.

My biggest concern with our approach is that since we no longer show the titles under the albums you need to be very familiar with your cover art in order to know where you are and find what you’re looking for. For me a more useful view is going to be our albums by artist view:

Since I think of my collection artist first and then album.

For another comparison check out an example of how movie galleries will look:

I wish I had some screenshots of how other Media Center like apps handle galleries but don’t. Though here are some two foot examples:

What are your thoughts? Which do you prefer?

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OpenPeak, Simple Remote. Supports WiFi, 320×240 screen, connects to many different devices.

Looks like a killer remote control. Might be a bit overkill though :).

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After reading Chris’s post about us ignoring small OEM and system builders and all the comments on my response I was worried that maybe we had screwed up and had not properly disclosed the information. To fully understand the situation I sat down today with the eHome program manager who represents the system builders.

What I learned confirmed that the information I provided to our team on DVD changer support in MCE 2005 UR2 was included in both the OPK documentation (page 30 of the Preinstallation Guide Addendum for UR2) and in our hardware requirements document (section 1.11.1.6 on page 21). I distinctly remember sitting in on the meeting about the hardware requirements document, spent time modifying several different versions of the OPK document, and sent off a copy of my spec (titled Multidisc Changer Support) to our editor. All three of these documents about DVD changers were released to ‘Beta Place’ for UR2 beta 2. Many different people had access to this information: OEMs, software vendors, hardware vendors and select system builders. For system builders who didn’t have access to this information it was made available through the more generic Microsoft system builder channel. Nearly everyone had equal access to this information prior to launch. And this information is still available today through the system builder site. If you, a system builder, were to make queries to the support people who run our system builder channel about DVD changers it would make it back to me. To date I have only received queries about changer support from Sony, PowerFile and Niveus. If you were to query me I would point you in PowerFile’s direction if you didn’t want to build your own hardware and write your own driver (you still might have to write your driver if you go with PowerFile).

To be clear, the documentation I provided was sparse. It is in fact less information then was included in my post. I did not write a white paper or any other similar document on DVD changer support. Large OEMs got just as much information, in fact, just as little information as a system builder, and they received it at the same time you did. Yes, I could have provided more information, but really what has been released is all you need to build your own changer. If you do a deal with PowerFile for your hardware all you need to know is that the device is plug and play. The feature is that simple!

Going forward, you can feel free to contact me directly about DVD changer support. Alternatively representatives from PowerFile have posted their information in my blog comments. Feel free to contact them for information on their hardware and their pricing.

I also heard some comments about a similar lack of information disclosure for Away Mode. What I learned is that if you have the correct mother board (as documented in the OPK doc) and you use the drivers included on the OPK disc it will work. I personally am not really excited about Away Mode and don’t know what the fuss is about.

As for CableCARD disclosure, this is something I can’t comment on, but expect more announcements from us shortly.

In conclusion, I feel we did ensure adaquate information disclosure about UR2 features. However, I understand that a lot of information is available through the system builder channel and that it may be hard to find what you’re looking for. If that’s what happened to you, I’m sorry you didn’t find the DVD changer information. Also understand that we want the system channel builder to be successful. We want to sell more copies of Windows and get PCs into more living rooms and the system builder channel is an opportunity channel for us to accomplish that through, so let’s work together to make that channel successful.

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Ars Technica, CableCARD: A Primer. Good read.

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Chris worries that we don’t support the small OEMs. His post primarily revolves around CableCard certification, but I’m not an expert in that area so I won’t comment on it, other than to say, I agree with Thomas Hawk. However, he also points to the DVD changer feature as something we aren’t doing a good job of playing with small OEMs with:

The DVD Changers with Update Rollup 2 are a great answer to ripping DVDs, however with only Sony and Niveus in the game we are locked into either having a Sony XL1 or a Niveus Media Center. Powerfile, the marker of both the Niveus and Sony Changers don’t a version retail that will work with Media Center. Then there is that price tag, Niveus sells their Niveus Disc Changer (Ice Vault 200) for $2500 and Sony only sells theirs with a XL1 Digital Living System for $2300.

I’d disagree. While we did closely collaborate with Sony on the development of the XL1 changer what we built can be leveraged by anyone.

For instance here is the information you need to build your own DVD changer and get it to work with Media Center 2005 Update Rollup 2:

• Changer must either be supported by an in-box Windows driver or by an OEM provided driver which implements the Media Changer device class.
• Must expose the drive(s) as standard Windows optical drives.
• The device/drive combination must support the following IOCTLs:
  • IOCTL_CHANGER_GET_ELEMENT_STATUS
  • IOCTL_CHANGER_GET_PARAMETERS
  • IOCTL_CHANGER_GET_PRODUCT_DATA
  • IOCTL_CHANGER_GET_STATUS
  • IOCTL_CHANGER_INITIALIZE_ELEMENT_STATUS
  • IOCTL_CHANGER_MOVE_MEDIUM
  • IOCTL_CHANGER_QUERY_VOLUME_TAGS
• The results from IOCTL_CHANGER_GET_PARAMETERS must indicate the following
  feature flags:

  Features

  • CHANGER_STATUS_NON_VOLATILE
  • CHANGER_POSITION_TO_ELEMENT
  • CHANGER_STORAGE_DRIVE
  • CHANGER_VOLUME_IDENTIFICATION
  • CHANGER_VOLUME_REPLACE

  MoveFromSlot

  • CHANGER_TO_IEPORT
  • CHANGER_TO_DRIVE

  MoveFromIePort

  • CHANGER_TO_SLOT

  MoveFromDrive

  • CHANGER_TO_SLOT

  PositionCapabilities

  • CHANGER_TO_SLOT
  • CHANGER_TO_IEPORT
  • CHANGER_TO_DRIVE

  Also if you want to build applications like Sony’s music CD ripping app you can do so by taking advantage of the changes we made to our SDK with Update Rollup 2. For instance check out MediaChanger Object which enables HTML applications to control the disc changer.

  Properties:

  • DriveDiscData - Gets information about the discs in the drives.
  • IsLocked - Indicates whether the media changer is currently locked by any application.
  • SlotDiscData - Gets information about the discs in slots

  Methods:

  • LoadDisc - Loads the disk in the specified slot into the specified drive.
  • RescanDisc - Causes Media Center to rescan the disc in the specified drive.
  • UnloadDisc - Unloads the disc in the specified drive.

If you have any questions I’d be more than happy to answer them.

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Blueado m5e MCE: The Blueado mini is 4.2 inches tall, just over 7 inches long and 12 inches in depth it’s a perfect addition to your livingroom.

Cute! But a little pricey at $1500. I’m going to wait for that $500 Averatec Media Center announced during the BillG keynote at CES (I’m surprised Averatec doesn’t have any info about this PC on their site).

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Green Button reg hack, have live TV start when MCE loads. I’ll have to add this to TweakMCE 3.0.

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