Now that I have the Media Extender in place, I am puzzled. The extender essentially only synchs up with the Media Center on my PC, giving me "remote control" over the content that’s been harvested on my Media Center. That’s kind of cool.
What is does not do is allow me to stream other content on my PC that lives outside the Media Center. That’s not so cool. With my $90 RCA Lyra, I can stream audio of ANY kind from my PC to my home stereo. With the Media Center, I cannot stream Rhapsody, Capital FM from London or one of those short videos from Amazon or some funky videoblog. Again, not cool. This is not to say there aren’t some interesting features to Media Center that I can view on my TV—the raw feeds from Reuters are amazing. It just seems like a very narrow view of the world.
That leads me to another step in this process—I am going to need to get a more "vanilla" audio/video streaming device (like the one from Linksys) to allow me to stream ALL content from PC to TV. Sadly, I will not be able to hook it up to my big home entertainment center; I will have to use my auxiliary home media set-up in the bedroom. I might also have to spring for a new TV—that one is more than 15 years old.
In the course of a few hours, the dynamics of my test system (and home entertainment center) have changed. My new High-Def DVR box is installed as is my Media Center Extender Box (thanks to the folks at HP!). The box was surprisingly easy to set up. Having a wireless network in my home allowed the extender to hunt for the connection and hop on. I tested viewing a TV program from my Media Center and it looks good on my Plasma TV.
One concern: it seems that the media extender box only plays media from the media center portion of the PC. I don’t know how I can get it to stream a Videoblog, for example, or a Brazilian TV station I find on the Web. I’m on the case.
In what seems to be another lifetime, I was skilled at making movies. I learned movie-making skills in graduate school and had to make a film as part of a class project. We’re talking Super 8 here (circa 1976), but nonetheless, most people showed a great deal of creativity. Everything was done by hand with hand cutters, splicing tape, etc…
So, here I am 28 years later and the tools for making movies are easier. Easier? They are brain-dead simple. Since one of my stated goals of this project is to do videoblogging, I decided to monkey around with the baked-in movie making program in Windows, aptly called Windows Movie Maker.
The good news—it is simple to use. The bad news is that it only saves your project to some oddball Windows Movie Project file. That means you cannot play it back in Windows Media Player (are those guys in Redmond masochists?) or email it to anyone. You can save it to a CD, but you cannot intuitively save it for use in any common file format. I cannot even find a decoder/ripper that converts the file.
Using Yahoo!'s new beta video search, I strung together clips from Seinfeld and Sopranos with a title and some transitions. It’s not François Truffaut, but it’s a start. Creatively, I see no limits (other than copyright issues which Mike and I will address in our next report), but unless I can convert the files, I will have to find another editing suite.
My DVD burner issue seems to be temporarily resolved. After wasting three discs and placing calls to both the software provider (Sonic) as well as to HP, it was determined that the drive was working. So, instead of setting up the burner using the keyboard and on-screen guide, I used the remote (which has an "I" button for info) to set up the DVD burner. It worked. Maybe it was just a fluke.
I am having trouble with Orb for some reason. It will not find my local TV channels. I think it could be an issue that came about from my Norton Personal Firewall (since nuked). So, this raises an issue moving forward. Can there be a level of security offered that does not interfere with every download? That’s an issue for Symantec to resolve.
My DVD burner doesn’t seem to work. I have tried burning some Seinfeld episodes and at the end of the lengthy procedure, I get an error message that there is a problem writing to the disc. When I first burned CDs, years ago, I would get this issue with the first-generation Sony Supressa ® (external) burner. Each time I try to burn a DVD, I get the same error message, and each time I am wasting a DVD. That adds to some numbers I am compiling about the economics of personal media; I am figuring cost per movie and cost per TV episode per media (DVD vs. digital download vs. DVR). Recordable DVDs are not yet dirt cheap although coming down in price. I paid something like 70 cents per DVD that stores 120 minutes.
I was reading Walter Mossberg’s review of the media center in the WSJ last week. He noted the continual annoyance of the Norton Personal Firewall. I just removed mine (control panel/remove) because it popped up every few seconds when I was trying to download ORB, a new "TV anywhere" product.
I am having my media center "extender" box installed tomorrow. That leads to some thoughts—what will I initially stream from my media center to my TV? My TV has a DVR box, so streaming TV programs seems redundant. Burning DVDs (if I could) and then playing them on my DVD player seems redundant. These two media foraging centers (DVRs and media centers) seem to be in conflict until new and original programming appears via the Web. It’s why I think IPTV must contain some new and original programming or just be a competitive force to an already entrenched delivery channel.
I have been gone for a few days and have not been working on my project. I did write down some ideas with which to experiment, and those will begin shortly.
I have come across a new tool called Netomat that I am going to play with (after I returnf rom vacation) to create some content channels. I spent some time this morning talking with the company founders. The mind percolates with ideas using this platform.
The only course of action that would work is now in place—I moved my new WMPC to my home office where it can happily live attached to a wired Ethernet cable. My daughter’s PC is now in the guest bedroom across the room from my wife’s wireless laptop.
All is well.
My first task is to create an audio mash-up which I have figured out. If I can pull it off, it will be cool.
Maybe this is how they felt in the early days of TV with tubes and transistors.
Good news: I figured out to burn more than one show on a blank DVD. I burned three "Seinfeld" episodes (including the one about Festivus, which is called "The Strike."). It’s a simple function.
Bad news: I cannot get the wireless, USB-connected adapter to work. My Media Center PC does not like it. The PC freezes once I put the adapter in the USB slot. Then, I realized that perhaps the driver install didn’t work, and it didn’t. Now, for some reason, the PC will not read the Linxys install disc no matter what drive it’s in (E or F). Without Internet access, this exercise is relatively moot.
Some options:
Call HP again and/or Linxys. The HP CSA told me that the machine does not like USB peripherals. That’s not good news.
Move this PC to my home office where I can give it hard-wired Internet access. But then, I’d have to kick my daughter out and move her to the spot where the Media Center PC lives. I could put the new adapter on her PC (assuming it takes), but I don’t like her having Internet access in an unsupervised location. I could drop some SW on her machine to track where she’s going, but that’s an invasion of privacy.
String a 500-foot Ethernet cable from my home office to the location of the Media Center PC. That will look like crap.
Buy a second cable modem and pay Cox another $30 a month. I don’t think so!
Kudos to the customer care people at HP. Seems my new baby didn’t like the USB-connected wireless media adapter. Good news, it’s easily fixed; bad news is that each and every time I boot up, I have to disconnect and then re-connect the wireless adapter. I’ll live.
I struggled figuring out how to burn the TV programs to the DVD recorder. I looked in the documentation and went to all the logical places but could not find it. One call to my colleague Van Baker, and I was good to go. Van is the ultimate gadget guru and our group’s expert in consumer electronics. I think Santa Claus visits Van on a regular basis will all sorts of electronic goodies.
Now working on figuring out which camcorder to buy to start making short video clips using Media Center to put on my blog. I am also wondering if my Coolpix 990 digital camera can make short clips. I am looking into MPEG4 editing software and creating video-mashups to put on this blog. In the meantime, I have figured out how to make an audio mashup, so I may start there. Wonder what songs I can put together….
I have hit a snafu—cannot get the new WM machine to boot as it’s currently sitting there like a beautiful paperweight. Well, I am noodling on how to wake that baby up so I can get to my advanced video tasks, I am reflecting on the state of modern TV. If you look back to the ‘50s, in the days of the blacklists, any actor, writer or producer who even knew how to spell the word communist was kicked to the curb. The fear was triggered by advertisers who didn’t want their products associated with these pinko-Commies.
One of today’s most original shows is MTV’s "Pimp my Ride." We are huge fans and I know my wife would like nothing more than to pimp my ’92 Honda accord. Last night, we watched as XtotheZ helped a cool young man, who teaches inner-city youth, pimp his Accura. The end result was sheer magnificence.
One of the keys to the show is how X keeps his personality in tact (street cred, that is) yet somehow is accessible to the public at large. It’s sheer marketing genius on his part, MTV’s part, etc… In contrast, I was just listening to "Weapons of Mass Destruction," the unedited version of Xzibit’s new "album." Whoa. The rather provocative opening in which he takes a Bush speech and edits it to the point where The President says he’s turning weapons of mass destruction on the American people, is quite mind-blowing.
This is not a comment on the merits of X’s work. He’s talented and truly has something to say. This is to show how we’ve changed as a culture. X is the commercial pitchman for Right Guard or some similar deodorant. Obviously, the sponsor either doesn’t know of or care about X’s political bent. That's to be admired.
I recommend the film, "The Front," starring Woody Allen, for more insight into the blacklisting of the ‘50s. I guess 50 years is a LONG time
The pieces are here and they are in place. Those nice folks from HP have loaned me a Windows Media PC and Monitor PLUS a 3100 Ipaq. There was no wireless network card installed, so we zipped over to Best Buy and bought one.
It’s now set up to receive TV from the cable system. So far, it’s just basic cable, but I will be adding a cable box in short order. I will be trying all sorts of basic things over the next few days so I can imagine the possibilities. From there I have three goals:
Back in 1982, ABC launched a new show called ‘It Takes Two" with Ms. Duke and Richard Crenna as a married couple (doctor and lawyer) who try and juggle careers and family. The show was of little consequence except for a few items: it co-starred Helen Hunt (what was she, like 10) and Anthony Edwards (of Top Gun and ER fame, not to mention "Revenge of the Nerds").
Also notable was that ABC went to the expense of sending the two leads on a national tour to promote the show. At their Seattle stop, I had the pleasure of meeting Ms. Duke and Crenna at a fancy lunch or dinner, or something. Crenna was a wonderfully warm man who loved to talk about his days in "Our Miss Brooks" and "The Real McCoy" as well as a new film about to be released (at the time) which he said was tentatively titled, "Sweet Ginger Brown." It later was released as "The Flamingo Kid."
As for Ms. Duke, she was an absolute gem and a real highlight from my career as a TV critic. She is about 5-foot 1 in heels and just funnier than all get out. I sat next to her and the meal and got to the comfort level of singing the theme from "The Patty Duke Show." ("Here’s Cathy who’s been most everywhere, from Zanzibar to Barclay Square…") She howled.
Since then, I have been a huge fan. I wish her a VERY happy birthday.
My new media center PC loaner arrived from HP, but alas no monitor. My fault—I never told the generous people at HP that I needed one for this project. A new flat-panel monitor is winging its way here as we speak. In the meantime, I’ll have time to plot out where I want to set up my network base and to which TV I’ll be beaming my programs. Lots more to come.
I have written extensively on my other blogs about my family travails with owning dogs. At this point, it’s my desire to love dogs from afar, and what could be more afar than to watch "Dogs with Jobs" on the National Geographic Channel. Our DVR hiccuped, so we have only 18 minutes of the first one, but it’s enough to note it’s a four-bone winner!
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Barring other unforeseen DVR accidents, we’ll be watching all sorts of bowsers do all sorts of magical things. We’re partial to dogs that help the blind, handicapped and emotionally traumatized. Once, on "Airplane," a once-good but now lame show on A&E, about days in the life of Southwest Airlines, some kook couldn’t get on the plane without his emotional guide dog. The dog’s job was the keep the man calm and out of trouble. Alrighty, now.
Maybe I’m a stickler for continuity, but flagrant re-use of the same actor in a series (albeit years apart) is a 15-yard penalty and loss of a down. Case in point: Wednesday’s prime time episode (as opposed to Prime Time in the Daytime from TNT) of Law & Order warranted a flag for bringing back David Groh. First item around, he was a judge who killed the child of one of his secret lovers. A few nights ago, Groh was a wife abuser/child molester/murderer (all around good guy, in short) who was killed by his shrink when she ran him over in a crosswalk (after his release).
Groh did a nice turn as a very unsympathetic character, but, hey…there are plenty of good actors out there who need work. Note to Dick Wolf & Co—do a batter scan of the SAG roster.
For the record, Groh broke on the scene as Rhoda’s husband Joe in the show of the same name. He later had a brief role in Get Shorty. Lots of Get Shorty references today.
Here’s a big whoopie doo—my cable provider, Cox, just made some truly amazing lineup charges. Added is the National Geographic Channel (excellent), Fuel (unclear as to its format), some regional sports networks (I can hardly wait to watch Northern Delaware and Wisconsin State play basketball) and on the HD side (yes, I have HD), something called Universal HD. That net has shows from NBC (which owns Universal) such as Law & Order—SVU and shows produced by Universal, such as a family favorite, Monk. So far, it appears to be about four programs looped to the point of absurdity, although I caught a glimpse of The District, and it’s not bad. It stars Craig T Nelson and one of the guys from Barbershop, but it could be the HD "spell." I think nearly anything looks good in HD…that is except Star Trek.
From 1980 through 1987, I was the TV writer (critic/columnist) for The Everett Herald, a mid-sized suburban newspaper a few dozen miles north of Seattle. I never truly appreciated the job, perhaps because I was young and immature. Maybe things happened too quickly for me in my newspaper career, but that’s the past.
Anyway, the job involved writing program reviews, interviewing celebs that were passing through town and the occasional overarching industry viewpoint. My bigger claim to fame was a Sunday sports column that looked at the week ahead, highlighting the games to watch and the ones to avoid. I used the column as a front for making all sorts of funny and caustic remarks at local and nation sports heroes.
I spent lots of time at the three local network affiliates (KOMO, KING and KIRO), screening programs and eating way too much junk food. One station used to feed me Mint Milano ® cookies and I was not shy about eating more than my share. I got to know most of the local news anchors, news directors, radio personalities, etc… probably because they were generally light on good guests, I was a frequent voice on many local radio stations
I have stories, but this new blog is more about TV today and TV in the future. I am in the beginning stages of building a home brewed TV network. I will use Microsoft’s new media center as the foundation and a number of new SW elements to stream content throughout my house and to a select group of friends. As of now, the network has no name. I could call it the No Name Network, like the (once great) Boston restaurant with the same name, but that’s too trite.
As a sidebar, I’ll comment on the shows I watch and make recommendations (if anyone cares). My opinion is certainly as good as my former college roommate who used to yellow highlight a TV Guide each week to make sure he didn’t miss any of his faves (which mostly were Star Trek episodes). BTW, I have never seen Star Trek in any form. Does that make me a bad or close-mined (former) TV critic? Maybe that’s why I’m not in the business any more.
