Media Center

How to do away with the Delete/Resume/Restart Page...

Ryan M. Hurst — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 00:57:13 GMT

I don't know about you but I just hate the Delete/Resume/Start page in Media Center; I would prefer that when the video is done that it just take you back to the page that invoked the play operation in the first place.

This isn't so hard to do, all you need to do is wait for MediaTransport.PropertyChanged to file and when PlayState goes into the "Stopped" state navigate back to whatever page you feel is appropriate.

A generic way to get this page out of Media Center would be to call HistoryOrientedPageSession.BackPage every time the playback goes from Playing to Stopped.

While I have not tried this myself, this appears fairly straight forward and is probably safe to do at any time (given the nature of this state transition).

How to determine what content a MCE Extender supports...

Ryan M. Hurst — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 22:12:20 GMT

So your a Media Center add-in and you want to determine if a file is a supported format for the playback device that is being used at any given time, here is what you do:

First things first you should detect if your on a Extender or not you should make sure the Capabilities.IsConsole is false.

At this point you know your on a extender, the next thing need to do is check to see that the file you are about to play is supported by the the Extender, to do that you can use DeviceInfo.ProtocolInfo (), this will either return null which means you can assume a base set of capabilities (documented on here) or return a string which can be parsed to find out what "Content Types" the Extender supports.

What is a "Content Type" you ask? its a string that gives you a basic idea of what sort of content your looking at (obvious eh?) for a mpeg file it will be "video/mpeg".

You can determine the "Content Type" for a given file extension by looking in the registry under "HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.{FileExtension}" where {FileExtension} is the extension of the file in question, the value of "Content Type" will have what you need.

Another useful thing to know is the "PercievedType" for a given file, its very similar to "Content Type" in purpose but the king thing to understand is that the Videos Library in MCE uses this to determine if a given file is a "Video" or not, as such if you were to build a Video library of sorts what you would likely want to do is:

Find all content that has a PercievedType of Video
Identity which of those files are supported by the device being used at the time by checking the ProtocolInfo method.
Either filter out or disable content that is not supported by the current playback device.

As I said this approach isn't perfect, it has a couple short comings:

You are not guaranteed that a device will return you a ProtocolInfo string so you have to special case that with the default content types called out in the ProtocolInfo documentation.
Content Type, while useful isn't enough to tell you for sure the content will play, for example bit rate and other encoding options can make content not playable.

With that being said this is a fairly reliably means for you to filter out the cruft that will cause users of your add-ins problems, and you should consider implementing it if you create a library view in your application.

Automate the mundane for sanity sake (part 4)

Ryan M. Hurst — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 23:23:26 GMT

A recent change in My Movies results in users having to have the rips be conformant with the DVD standards, specifically it now requires that the VOB, IFO, and BUP files are in a VIDEO_TS folder.

I threw together a very basic script that can take folders that are in the form of sourcedir\moviename\dvdfiles to sourcedir\moviename\video_ts\dvdfiles.

As always use this script at your own risk, I have only done limited testing, but it worked on the two folders I tried .

To use this copy the following script to foo.vbs, put it in the root of your movies folder, open a command prompt in that directory and type "cscript foo.vbs" and you should be good to go.

I recommend trying it on a small folder set before you run it on your whole collection to make sure you would be happy with the results.

Dim FileSystem, szMovieFolder
szMovieFolder = "C:\test"
Set FileSystem = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")

Dim Folder, File, Files, oMovieFolder, szFolderName, iEndOfShortFileName, szDestPath
Set oMovieFolder = FileSystem.GetFolder(szMovieFolder)

Set Folders = oMovieFolder.SubFolders

For Each Folder in Folders

szFolderName = szMovieFolder & "\" & Folder.Name

If (FileSystem.FileExists(szFolderName & "\" & "VIDEO_TS.ifo")) = True Then

  ' Looks like we have a movie name folder that directly contains a VIDEO_TS.IFO

  szDestPath = szFolderName & "\" & "VIDEO_TS"

  If (FileSystem.FolderExists(szDestPath)) = False Then

   ' Looks like it also does not yet have a VIDEO_TS folder

   FileSystem.CreateFolder(szDestPath)

   ' Now it does!

   Set Files = Folder.Files

   For Each File In Files
    bMove = False

    ' If its a VOB, BUP, or IFO move it.
    If InStr(1, LCase(File.Name), ".vob") <> 0 Then bMove = True
    If InStr(1, LCase(File.Name), ".ifo") <> 0 Then bMove = True
    If InStr(1, LCase(File.Name), ".bup") <> 0 Then bMove = True

    if bMove = True then
     ' ok lets move file
     wscript.echo "Moving '" & File.Name & "' to '" & szDestPath & "'"
     File.Move(szDestPath & "\" & File.Name)

    end if
   Next

  End If
End If
Next

Good luck.

How to use My Movies with DVD Gallery or Niveus Movies Library.

Ryan M. Hurst — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 04:18:12 GMT

If you read my blog, or talk to me about Media Center at all you have certainly heard of My Movies; in-fact according to CNET its been downloaded 354,000; that's more than any other Media Center add-on hosted by CNET by far.

That being said one of the most common complaints about My Movies is that it has not yet abandoned its Media Center 2005 roots and migrated to the Vista only user interface language called MCML it instead uses HTML as the means to generate its user interface as this is the technology that is supported by both Vista and Media Center 2005.

Brian (the author of My Movies) is working on a new version that does use this VISTA only mark-up language and I hope to see it in the near future but did you know you can use My Movies for its collection management capabilities without using its presentation layer?

My Movies has one of the most complete web services of meta-data (at least for US titles) available, that web service combined with the clients folder monitoring capability makes for a powerful combination.

So if you don't use the My Movies presentation capabilities what would you use? Well there are a few choices out there but I am going to talk about two in this post, the first of which is the Media Center native DVD gallery and the second being the newly released beta of the Niveus Movie Library.

I won't get into the relative merits of each of these options, at least not in this post, but instead focus on how you can use them with My Movies.

Both of these components have something in-common, they rely on dvdid.xml files to cache meta-data; the thing most people don't know is that My Movies generates these files for every DVD (VIDEO_TS folder with a VIDEO_TS.IFO file) so that the built in DVD Gallery (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/930526) can show the same meta data as My Movies (this meta data is substantially better than what Microsoft makes available through its relationship with AMG).

This capability in My Movies is great because even if you were satisfied with the basic meta-data offered by Microsoft for the DVD Gallery Microsoft provides no way to edit the data if its incorrect or incomplete nor do they provide a automatic way to get meta-data of movies stored on your hard disk; the thing is My Movies does.

So how do you use My Movies and not use its presentation layer? Simple just install the My Movies Server package and the 1st time you run Media Center you will be asked if you want to integrate My Movies into the Media Center Start Menu, just say no.

But what if you already integrated My Movies with the Media Center Start Menu and you have changed your mind? Just open Collection Manager and go to Configure/Media Center Interface/Interface and select the "Reset" option next to the "Current Menu Program Access" setting; once you do this open up Media Center and when prompted if you want to have My Movies integrated with the Media Center Start Menu say no.

Its that simple, now if you have My Movies monitoring the same folder locations as the DVD Gallery you will have all that great My Movies meta-data.

But what about the new Niveus Movie Library? It also utilizes those dvdid.xml files for meta data, so again all you need to do is install My Movies and not register its presentation layer with the start menu.

How to enable folder monitoring in My Movies for extenders.

Ryan M. Hurst — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 03:39:53 GMT

One of the coolest features in My Movies is its ability to monitor folders for new titles and automatically download the meta-data for those titles; it has three modes of operation, these include:

Loose - My Movies will do its best to find the meta-data for the title and will use what it thinks is the best match of the results it finds.

Strict - My Movies will do its best to find the meta-data for the title but unlike loose will only use matches where there is a exact title match.

Confirmative - My Movies will do its best to find the meta-data for the title and will present you with what it thinks is the best match to confirm if you want to use that data or not.

I personally use the Confirmative mode (the default), this lessens the chance of me getting bad data into my collection, it does not eliminate it as a possibility as the search is done based on what My Movies thinks the title of the movie is only and titles are not unique (for example there is an Italian Job from 1969 and another from 2003).

You need to know a few more things to use folder monitoring successfully, for example how My Movies determines what it thinks the title for the movie is, since My Movies monitors folder creation it doesn't really have much to go on but it makes the best of the information it has, namely the name of the folder containing the playable media, for example if your monitoring \\servername\movies and you create a folder called "The Italian Job (1969)" it will search the My Movies web service for "The Italian Job" (e.g. dropping the (, [ and anything after them).

Another thing you should know before you start using file monitoring is when the feature is working, specifically folder monitoring happens in a background add-in within Media Center so if Media Center is not running folder monitoring isn't going to happen.

From an experience standpoint what this means is that when I add a title to the "movies" share (when in Confirmative mode), for example the "Italian Job (1969)", My Movies will search the web service for "Italian Job" which will result in me being prompted if the match it found for the title was right and if I want to use the data it found.

Finally the last thing you should know is what happens when you add content when Media Center is not running, the answer to this question is easy; when Media Center starts up it starts up the My Movies background add-in which then looks for changes since the last time it ran, if it finds any, it adds them just like it would have if the title was found while Media Center is running.

Now you should be asking yourselves, that was all find and good but wasn't he going to tell us how to get this mess working on extenders? The answer to that? why yes I am :)

In my home we don't actually watch content on the Media Center PC, we use Media Center Extenders as such folder monitoring doesn't work for me without a little dance, specifically enabling it for the Media Center Extender users.

The things is My Movies supports per-user settings, these settings are tweak-able inside the My Movies Collection Manager program but they edit the interactive users settings not the extender settings that doesn't mean it doesn't work though.

So how do you enable folder monitoring for extenders (thanks to rollinghippy at mymovies.name for the bellow step-by-step)?

Configure folder monitoring for the interactive user within Collection Manager (and any other settings you would like to have cloned to the extender user)
Open the registry editor and export HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\MY MOVIES
Select the HKEY_USERS key and click "FILE - LOAD HIVE"
Open NTUSER.DAT in SYSTEMROOT:\USERS\MCX1
When asked for the Key Name enter "MCX1"
Edit the registry file you exported and do a Replace All for "HKEY_CURRENT_USER" with "HKEY_USERS\MCX1"
Import the edited registry file
Select the MCX1 key you loaded and click "FILE - UNLOAD HIVE" (You must unload the hive for the settings to be saved back in to NTUSER.DAT)

If you just followed these steps you have just set up the MCX1 user to have the exact same settings as the interactive user you configured with Collection Manager, now wash-rinse-repeat for each MCX user.

Ah, I just remembered two other things you should keep in mind with My Movies folder monitoring, it has two "control files" that you can put into the movie folder, one is called a ignore file (mymovies.ign) and the other is called a do-not-add (mymovies.dna) file.

If either of these control files exist in the movie folder folder monitoring will skip that folder, the .ign file is ephemeral in nature it will be deleted if its older than 6 hours, it exists to stop multiple instances (multiple users like in this extender case) from operating on the same movie at the same time, the .dna file is permanent (until you delete it) and it prevents My Movies from ever adding the file.

In summary with just a little bit of work extender users can also benefit from My Movies folder monitoring capability

LifeXtender and me..

Ryan M. Hurst — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 02:44:38 GMT

I think I have found an addition to my regular MCE build-outs, LifeXtender by Bobby DeRosa; this is a super easy to use front end to the favorite ComSkip.

For those not familiar with ComSkip, its a command line tool that implements heuristics to guess where commercials start and end, it then produces an output file that can be used as inputs to programs that can edit out these commercials.

Though I would like to see a few changes in the add-in like being a service vs a tray application and supporting commercial skipping through map files vs. re-authoring I have to say its one of the better add-ins out there and definitely worth running.

I have now officially added LifeXtender to my list of recommended "daily" add-ins including My Movies, Toub's Position Changer, and my own Add-In Launcher.

What does my video archive / NAS look like?

Ryan M. Hurst — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 22:00:45 GMT

Recently on the My Movies forum there was a thread added about a huge 48TB NAS that is being constructed by one of the members over there; it has a ton of great data on his project around performance, power consumption, etc.

I have been running a smaller and slightly older configuration for several years now, I have blogged about it several times but I figured I needed a post where I could continuously update its every changing configuration, so here I go hardware wise we have:

1 x AIC RMC3E2-PI2 /w Reduntant N+1 650W PSUs

1 x Tyan Thunder i7525 (S2676)

2 x Intel® Xeon® Processor 3.0 Ghz /w EMT64 and HT

12 x 750GB (3.75TB) Seagate SATA II

1 x Areca 16 Port SATA-II to PCI-X /w 1GB cache (non-ecc)

4 x 1GB (4GB) PC2-3200 DDR2 ECC Registered

1 x 100GB 2.5" SATA II Hitachi OS Drive

1 x 250GB 3.5" SATA II Maxtor Swap/Temp Drive

2 x Open Cable Receivers

1 x Pioneer DVR-K17

This machine is currently running x64 VISTA SP1, its set up with a dedicated 100GB NTFS OS partition/disk and another 250GB NTFS disk/partition for the swap file and the recorded tv/live TV buffer.

The RAID is set up in a RAID 6 coniguration which leaves me about 7.5TB of storage; this allows me to have two drives fail at the same time without concern.

I originally started this machine with 250GB drives in RAID 5, I then migrated to 500GB drives in RAID 5 and as you can see am now at 750GB drives in RAID 6; the Areca controller has been great since it supports online capacity expansion and dynamic re-build I have had 99.999% availability of the RAID partition since I put the machine together (that includes one drive failure/re-build too!).

Many have asked me why I do not run Windows Home Server (WHS) on this configuration, I would actually love to but this machine plays double duty for my home, it is both my NAS and my MCE machine (we use extenders exclusively for all video/audio content in the house) and doing so would require me to have a 2nd always on machine which I am not prepared to do at this point.

On that topic, I have considered running WHS or MCE in a virtual machines to get both configurations working on the same hardware but I frequently run at 80% CPU utilization when doing video work on the same box and without a hardware upgrade I could not do this in a hiccup free way.

Another related question I get is why RAID and not the redundancy model used by WHS, well for one I did this system in 2004/2005 timeframe and there was no WHS and two that model gets expensive when you get above a few discs, I also like that my redundancy is rooted in a enterprise grade hardware that is independent from software since I do lots of selfhosting on this machine.

If you want to see a picture of this machine, one is here.

My Netflix is dead, long live My Netflix.

Ryan M. Hurst — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 22:50:24 GMT

Back in 2004 ended up getting a cold or flu of some sort that kept me from going into work for a day or so and I used that time to throw together a Media Center add-in called My Netflix; I have done a few minor updates over the years (http://unmitigatedrisk.com/archive/2007/08/25/119.aspx) but my work has become increasingly demanding and finding the time to give the project the TLC it deserves has been difficult at best.

As a result I am now officially announcing the death of My Netflix, I will no longer fix anything no mater how minor; if you have issues I released it under the MSFT permissive license and the source is still available (http://www.unmitigatedrisk.com/mce/mynetflixsource.zip) so you can go to town if you like.

With that being said, My Netflix has also been re-born (http://www.anpark.com/index.php/2008/02/10/new-vista-media-center-plugin-mynetflix-beta/); a kind soul (Anthony Park) has done a bunch of what I wanted to see done and re-wrote the add-in as a MCML application giving it experience more consistent with MCE plus he added support for Watch It now.

I have not been a Netflix subscriber for some time (they started rate limiting me, I think this is a dishonest practice) so I switched to Blockbuster (which has its own issues but that's another post) but from the screen shots Anthony has done a great job; in fact I think I will sign up for Netflix on one of the trials and play with it.

I can't say how excited I am to see this happen :)

Thanks Anthony!

Unfairplay

Ryan M. Hurst — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 03:50:13 GMT

What a great name for a technology, Fairplay; unfortunately it should be called Unfairplay.

Recently Apple announced that they have negotiated the inclusion of "iTunes/iPod Ready" digital copies on Fox DVDs, this is great news for those iPod users that aspire to take their legally purchased content with them.

These digital copies are thoughtfully provided in both WMV and H.264 encoding, a great step forward if you ask me; I applaud Apple for their negotiation of this deal, the problem with this I have is that this content is protected with Apples "Fairplay" DRM scheme.

Now to be clear I do not have a issue with the DRM, content owners rightfully wish to prevent the unauthorized distribution of their content. my problem is that Apple refuses to license their DRM scheme that they so craft-fully named "FairPlay" (unlike Microsoft and the Plays4Sure and Designed for Windows DRM).

The irony in that is Apple has convinced Fox to take standards that are available for anyone to implement (Windows Media Video [WMV] and H.264) and wrapped them in Apples proprietary non-licensable DRM making it only compatible with their products.

I don't know who I am most dissatisfied with Apple for their exclusionary practices or Fox for buying into them.

Computer controllable energy monitors…

Ryan M. Hurst — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 21:28:28 GMT

For a while I have been considering doing a Windows Media Center add-in to monitor and graph home energy consumption (check out http://bwired.nl for my inspiration); the problem is that I have been unable to find energy monitors that are computer controllable, that is until just recently.

The Brueltech unit runs $399, while the TED runs ~~$144~~ $188; this isn’t really a apples to apples comparison though as the Brueltech unit supports Zigbee. For those not in “the know” Zigbee is a wireless mesh networking protocol (much like Z-Wave).

What this means is that instead of having to rely on a direct USB connection to the PC one can use a USB to Zigbee adapter to talk to the Brueltech unit to get the measurement updates wirelessly, very cool IMHO.

Another potential difference is quality of the components Brultech does some level of commercial monitoring and claims that (as an example) their induction measurement sensors of a higher grade/quality than most; but hey I work in software what do I know of such things .

When I tell people about my desire to do this project they normally ask me “why in the he-double-hockey-sticks would you want to do that?”; the answer to that question to some degree is because I can. After all every once in a while one must re-prove their uber geekiness; but there is more to it, studies have shown that having knowledge of electrical consumption and the associated costs alone can contribute to a reduction in electrical usage.

Then if one combines such a system with a automated home (via say Z-Wave devices) one can monitor usage in relationship to device power state to infer power consumption, with that data a intelligent system could make recommendations on changes in usage or automatically make adjustments in usage to reduce electrical use.

My plan (however half baked) started as a plan to develop a class library of sorts for home automation, a set of abstract base classes in .NET for interacting with devices independent of their protocols (X10, Z-Wave, Insteon, ZigBee, etc) the problem was that control without insight was not by itself compelling enough for me to undergo this project, the insights that these devices offer could change that equation enough to get me off my duff and do this.

Only time will tell, at $399 I will have to probably put the project on hold for a few months; maybe Brultech and/or TED will get me evaluation unit for cheap to play with.

[Update 1/11/08 2:16PM] I have had some great email exchanges with the folks at Brultech and they have been great; in this exchange I have learned more about the differences between the TED and the Brultech offering, some of which include:

The $144 price for the TED does not include software., the software is an additional $44.
~~The TED does not have the ability to download data from non-volatile memory (data logger).~~
The ECM-1220 processes the energy consumption for each panel phase individually; this is greatly convenient when it comes to analyzing which loads are operated. For instance, if the power of both phases increase simultaneously, it is safe to say that the load is a 240V load, narrowing down which load this may represent. The same applies for 120V loads. If a load cycles on phase A this eliminates the possibility of any 240V load or any phase B loads. Software can be developed to analyze the load signature of various appliances and generate an energy audit report. This would be useful in assessing various load efficiencies (appliance requiring maintenance or replacement).
The TED uses PLC (power line carrier) method of communication. This limits picking up the signal on 50% of the receptacles (on the same phase the MTU unit is wired to) without the adition of a inexpensive phase coupler. Even with this, some people have said that the signal from their TEDs will drop out occasionally.

Since in my application I plan on having a always on PC monitoring the device I am not sure there is a big value for the #2, that being said that is dependent on the reliability of the device advertising the energy usage (see #4 for a potential concern here).

#3 in particular sounds like a very important reason to consider the Brultech offering, the primary value of a project like this is analysis and not having discrete data per phase would certainly limit that ability.

More updates as I have them

[Update 2/12/08 2:16PM] I have finally heard back from the folks over at The Energy Detective, the manufacturers of the TED; they have finished their API but unfortunately the terms of the API prevent me from including support for their device in the project I have envisioned.

This is really unfortunate because it looks like a good device, and when designing an abstraction one really does need to validate that design with several implementations; oh-well.

With that being said they also corrected me on two points in the blog, I have ~~marked~~ these above; I apologize for spreading miss-information, that’s the wonderful thing about the web though, so much information you start to think you know it all .

In addition the above corrections they raised alternate perspectives on the values of the two different design properties offered by the Brultech product and their own:

Dual phase load monitoring - Knowing the load for any given circuit can be useful, but for the average user per-phase measurements is of little value.
PLC vs. ZIGBEE – PLC can be made to work across both phases through installing a very inexpensive impassive phase coupler more over in their experience the RF nature of ZigBee introduces as much or more problems than PLC.

The net of this is that I guess I will now have to start looking around for another device that I can design these classes around, again I will update you when I know more.