Chris, Internet Explorer 7 Overwriting Album Art with Black JPEGs?

I don’t know if it’s IE 7, but on my Vista box some albums have black cover art no matter how hard I try to set it to set it to something else.

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I recently received an e-mail about DVDxml.com a site for you dvdid.xml freaks.

Since the launch of Rollup 2, it is possible to enable “My DVDs” in Windows XP Media Center Edition. This feature allows you to copy, catalog and play your DVDs from your hard drive. It was also discovered by Matt Goyer that you could use a single dvdid.xml file, about 150 bytes, to have Media Center automatically download movie information and cover art. Information such as movie title, year, actors, genre, rating, length, director, description and more!

Heh. It wasn’t really ‘discovered’ by me. I was the program manager who wrote the spec in collaboration with the developers, David and Hugh. And I will say that we definitely sat around building 50 dreaming that if we created a open xml file and blogged abou tit then the community would build something like this site, we’re glad you did! We also fixed that bug with the synopsis not loading in Vista.

DVDxml.com was created so that you don’t have to make your own dvdid.xml files anymore. All you have to do is come here and download the dvdid.xml file you need. We maintain the most complete (and currently only) database of dvdid.xml files.

Good stuff!

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Chris wishes MCE a happy fourth birthday and posts this fun infographic:

Ah Media Center… We have been through a lot together :), always lots of ups and down. Unfortunately today marks a down day; I have a very recent build of MCE running at home and it’s crashing on average two times for every hour of ATSC DVR-MS playback. Not very confidence inspiring!

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Someone wants to tweak the background color of closed captioning.

Lazy web request: I’m fairly certain there are registry tweaks for the closed captioning dialogs. I no longer have access to the e-mail from the program manager who knew about this and told me how to do it (and he’s no longer with the group). But if you poke around the registry you may be able to figure it out.

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Once and for all: The Media Center team, the TV team and the Extender team (yes, it would have been a co-ordinated dev effort from all three teams) did not implement streaming of DVDs from PCs or changers for one big reason: Getting core functionality working on Vista was hard enough. And if, like me, you’re running an early build of Vista on you will understand.

And without doubt had there been extra time in the schedule there were many features of higher importance ahead of DVD streaming (DVD streaming is actually quite close to the bottom).

I know all you with changers wanted it (though I’m puzzled why you bought the changer in the first place? just get a fat NAS) but there’s not enough of you (and don’t get all chicken and egg on me. you still wouldn’t have bought a changer if we had the feature, you’d get a fat NAS).

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Chris Lanier, Here It Is: My Thoughts on Vista Media Center:

This brings me to another point which has nothing to do with Vista, but Microsoft needs more transparency with its Media Center team. Since Matt Goyer it’s been very quiet. Of course, working on Vista should be Microsoft’s top priority, but anyone from the Media Center team reading this I would like to see you start blogging. Media Center has a growing community behind it, we need transparency with some of the issues and features that we (the community) feel you should be providing.

I am torn about what to write here. As you all know I occasionally blogged about Media Center and the digital living space. I also had a few co-workers who blogged about Media Center and Media Center’s development platform. Now, I can’t speak for the others, but I blogged because I wanted to. No one asked me to. It was just something I did, but it was not something explicity supported or encouraged by eHome management. Several times I did get e-mails asking to remove something and several times I got quite upset about blogging embargos even though the features had been disclosed (CES 06). But other than that I blogged and no one really cared (except the 1000 visitors a day who visited here :) ).

If you’re a beta newsgroup participant you will also notice that Media Center has lots of newsgroups and our beta co-ordinators spend lots of time and energy encouraging you to post. But how engaged was the Media Center team in the newsgroups? About as engaged as they were with blogging. Which means to say that aside from a one or two program managers who geniuely loved posting either to newsgroups or blogs no one else contributed. (Note to CWilli: You still owe me a gift certificate :) ).

But I’ll be honest. It’s hard to keep to keep up with the community. It’s something I’m passionate about and unfortunately when you’re expected to work 45+ hours a week on a project it’s hard to find the extra 5+ hours a week to seriously engage in community transparency through blogging, the newsgroups, or enthusiast sites like the Green Button. Though on the other hand the Media Center team has 40+ program managers. Surely between that many people there are enough people passionate about blogging that they can make it one of their core objectives. All you really need is one or two good bloggers per product group to make a difference in the community.

However, when I think about the investment not being made in blogging by eHome PMs I think about the investments they make in other areas. One that comes to mind is usability. eHome invests a lot of PM time and energy in usability studies. Now the PMs don’t really setup and run the studies, because eHome has dedicated usability engineers who do that, but it’s highly encouraged for PMs to attend the usability studies for their areas. But these studies that can soak up hours and hours of time (each session is usually two hours). Now they certainly get a lot out of those studies but if they traded off attending a few usability sessions for quality community time, their time investment would be the same but they would have a larger pay off through the added gain in transparency and a much larger audience reach.

Though of course one difference is that Microsoft usability participants are heavily NDA’d while they certainly can’t require that of their blog readers. But maybe Microsoft is too secretive? I certainly had to make a switch at my new job when I was working on a design and the CEO said to just e-mail it out to a bunch of customers to see what they had to say. And in my mind I’m like ‘but how do we know they fit our target personas?’, ‘have they signed NDA’s?’, ‘how will we compensate them for time?’, etc. Needless to say I spent twenty minutes writing an e-mail and by the next day already had a good number of responses back.

Where does that leave us? It leaves me thinking that unless either senior leadership in the eHome organization decide that blogging is important or a few random team members step up out of the goodness of their heart (Aaron Stebner is a rockstar blogger for the MCE dev community), the community outreach is going to suffer. (I was going to recommend how they implement a proper blogging strategy but first we’d have to have a discussion on how they need to re-factor their release plans).

But hey, Media Center is at least 1000x more transparent than Windows Media Player :).

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Codename Nemo: Windows Live meets Media Center:

Codename Nemo is designed to be an add-on for Windows Vista (Home Premium and Vista Ultimate editions), that integrates Spaces, Messenger and Live Call into a UI designed for large monitors and TVs. Nemo essentially creates a Windows Live Media Center, and is optimized for use by Microsoft Media Center remote, as well as keyboard. Of particular note is the 3D Gallery view for browsing Windows Live Spaces, shown below, presumably built using the new Windows Presentation Foundation that will be included in Windows Vista.

See, it’s not the end of the world that we removed Messenger from Media Center on Vista :). Here’s a screenshot:

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Seattle PI, Microsoft getting on its video Soapbox:

Microsoft’s MSN division is developing its own free site where people will be able to submit and watch videos. Dubbed “Soapbox,” it’s set to be released today for testing by invited users before it’s rolled out more broadly in the coming months.

One of the reasons I left Microsoft was because too often Microsoft’s strategy is to wait for a startup/competitor to test a market. If the startup proves to be successful, Microsoft then swoops in with a lowest common denominator version for the application and goes from zero to majority market share. Personally, I found this very frustrating because I love innovation, but I of course understood why it made fiscal sense and it’s why I continue to hold a sizable portion of my investment portfolio in Microsoft stock. Now keep in mind Media Center did not follow this pattern; we defined the PCs role in the living room. However, at the beginning of the year I rolled off core Vista functionality to work on future looking Media Center realted projects and eventually grew tired of our in ability to ship even copy cat functionality.

What does this have to do with Soapbox? It’s relevant because I do not hear people asking, ‘Where’s the Media Center version of Soapbox?’ I also don’t hear people asking, ‘Will Media Center play my Zune music?’, ‘Can I purchase Zune music through Media Center?’, ‘Why does iTunes let you buy TVs and movies and Microsoft doesn’t?’, ‘Why is Microsoft’s Apple compete story competing with what Apple released three years ago?’

Where is the connected home story so often pitched by Bill Gates? Sadly, I think there is a large possibility that new comer to the living room game, Steve Jobs, is going to kick Microsoft’s ass. (Notice how he’s carefully side stepping resource and legal time sinks like CableCARD support! But our UI really is superior). Though I have to say I do not think Apple’s pay per download business model will be the business model that succeeds. Just compare iTunes TV show download numbers to the amount of streams that content providers like ABC get for their on-demand advertising supported content. And so, I think the long term business model will be one built on advertising innovations (as much as I hate ads and want to be able to pay to remove them the majority of American’s disagree with me).

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A friend at Microsoft pointed out that the Sony DVD Changer is now in the top 10 list for computer hardware on Amazon. Most likely because it’s dipped down to $300. A price now competitive with traditional CE DVD changers. The funny thing is that we originally paid $3000/each for PowerFile R200DL units to develop the software side of this changer :).

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Consistent Vista Media Center UI Please:

For whatever reason, the Now Playing UI (for My Music) doesn’t match the rest of the Media Center UI. The background is blackish and very muddy looking.

This is the correct background. The team choose a different background to distinguish between ‘the browsing’ and the ‘now playing experience’. Since in MCE 2005 many screens in music looked very similar, i.e. album details compared to the now playing experience for an album, users could get confused and we wanted to clearly distinguish between the two.

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