Eric Anderson's Blog : Windows Vista

I meant… “Extenders for Windows Media Center” Me

errand — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 18:40:00 GMT

I joined the Media Center Extender team right at the tail end of development, and I’ve been nothing but impressed with the new Extenders. We are starting to see some press roll out as well: http://www.engadget.com/2007/09/06/microsoft-debuts-extenders-for-windows-media-center-adds-divx-a/. Hm… divx support… pretty sweet - who knew? J

What I’d really like to see now is DVD managed copy + remoting and WMV bookmarking… I was happily surprised to see the latter supported with the last Xbox dash update when streaming over WMC. No reason we couldn’t add that to MCE/MCX…

Anyone agree/disagree? Any other ideas?

Vista performance & tying up WMP loose ends

errand — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 19:48:00 GMT

I just read on Steve Rowe's blog about a performance update coming for file copy in Vista. This is great news - copying files has been pretty frustrating for me on Vista, and hopefully this makes it better.

Also, wrapping up some loose ends, the WMP OCX Firefox Plug-in documentation was posted a while back, but I never "officially" stated that it had been. The direct link to the docs is here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb614515.aspx.

Geeking out with file sharing on Extender

errand — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 19:27:00 GMT

Normally I just have my main Media Center PC in the office that I use to keep all of my media content and I use my Extender to view it all in the living room on the TV. Since I’ve been testing the new Extenders at home though, and I don’t want to put test/beta bits on my main system (the wife-acceptance factor is pretty crucial here), I’ve had to setup a second PC.

I don’t want to have to copy over all of my media content from my main system to my secondary that the new Extender connects to, so I tried sharing out and using the folders off my main system. Normally this works pretty simply but just enabling the Guest account on the primary system. In most cases that will enable the second PC (and the Extender) to view the media content off of the primary. Unfortunately that didn’t work for me since I had already shared out my media folders with specific ACLs, which locks them down more tightly than they otherwise would be.

The next method I used to try and get this working was to follow the steps here: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/932306/en-us. I did manage to get it working fine, but I didn’t feel comfortable with that solution since it made me disable password-protected file sharing. I’m not very keen on that idea…

So here is the final method I used and stuck with (for proper attribution - I got this courtesy of Chad Boles).

Here are the steps:

1. Create batch file called mcx.bat

a. This file should do “net use s: \\server\share passwd /user:user /persistent:no” to map the server share with appropriate credentials.

2. Share the directory holding the batch file out with the name “NETLOGON” with read privileges for everyone. Worth noting here is that you should not share this out under the Users directory of the hard disk – Vista will create a different share name for these. When I first tried this, I put the folder in Documents, which created the share path as \\server\Users\eric\Documents\NETLOGON instead of just \\server\NETLOGON. You can ACL the file and/or folder as well to keep your user account and password information protected.

3. Set the logon script for the MCXn user to “mcx.bat”

I’m guessing this isn’t a core scenario for most MCE users today, but with Windows Home Server coming around the corner, this will start becoming more commonplace. We’ll definitely have to look at making this more consistent and simple in the future… in the meantime, hope this helps.

Windows Media Player on Firefox

errand — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 01:09:00 GMT

Alright, you can all breathe a collective sigh of relief as I am actually posting a blog entry. The delayed posting I think is worth it: today we are releasing a new Firefox plug-in for WMP! We’ve been tracking the issues in the forums about WMP showing some odd aspect ratio issues, as well as other bugs under Firefox, and we decided to tackle the problem and write a new plug-in to get this working again. Apologies to all for how long it took and the relative quietness we’ve had on this front – we’ve been heads-down getting Vista shipped and then directly afterwards we started working on this plug-in.

There is an existing Netscape plug-in out there, but we recommend that people use our new plug-in when developing web sites that use the WMP OCX. In a nutshell, here’s what we did with the new one:

New robust design that addresses all of the known issues with the old plug-in
WMP will now work in Firefox in Windows Vista
Support for the WMP OCX scripting interfaces

The plug-in has been scoped to support a subset of the 6.4 design time parameters, so existing sites that want to use the new plug-in may need to update some of their HTML tags. If you use the plug-ins new MIME type though, you can take advantage of fuller design time parameter support, based on 9.0 interfaces. We will have the MSDN documentation updated to reflect the supported tags/elements in the near future. In the meantime, if you want to start using the new plug-in, you can force your sites to use it by using the new application/x-ms-wmp MIME type.

Feel free to leave any feedback on the plug-in here, or contact me with further questions.

Video card anyone?

errand — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 22:04:00 GMT

The million dollar question these days seems to be what video card people should buy to watch high-definition video on Windows Vista. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve answered this question… well you get the point. So I’m just going to post this info and start pointing people here.

Laptops don’t allow you to upgrade your video card, so there’s not much point talking about mobile parts unless you are looking to buy a new laptop. Laptop video cards are integrated with the mainboard, and how well it will perform is generally a factor with how it was implemented. For instance, an ATI x200 Mobility graphics adapter can do pretty well if it is paired with the right memory – and I don’t just mean the amount of memory, but the bandwidth as well. That card with a good chunk of dual-data channel memory can perform pretty good – pair that same card with single-channel memory and you may not have the best experience. For that reason, you can’t just make a blanket statement about the performance a particular mobile graphics chip – it’s all about the system it ships in. But back to the people who can upgrade their desktop graphics cards…

There are two big players in the discrete graphics market, and if you ask any of your friends what graphics card they’re using at your next LAN party (I’ve only been to one of these but the wife’s ridicule has lived with me ever since), and it will either be ATI or Nvidia. So, that being the case those are the two graphics manufacturers we’ll look at.

Nvidia and ATI took slightly different approaches with their hardware design – Nvidia has dedicated video processor chips on their cards, while ATI has dedicated logic units in their GPUs to handle video processing. Both of these are reasonable implementations, although in theory it seems that there may be some slight advantage in having a dedicated video process unit with Windows Vista. This would allow the GPU to spend more of its time crunching on the 3D-heavy DWM (painting the desktop) while concurrently processing the video stream. In reality, most of the current cards are beefy enough to handle small limitations.

If you go with Nvidia, then minimally I would recommend a 6600GT (note the GT on the end) card for HD content to be watchable. The amount of VRAM and the memory bandwidth are two key HW requirements for getting HD to play properly. The 6600GT has enough of both to work pretty well – I have a 6600GT w/ 128MB VRAM on my main desktop running multi-mon at pretty high res’s and it still works solidly for me on Vista. If you want to pay more money for a card in hopes it will last longer, then I’d recommend a 7600GT or greater.

If you go with ATI, then minimally I would recommend an x800 card for HD content to be watchable. I have an x800 XL card that’s been running Windows Vista x64 for the last year, and it has been working very well – and I keep the TV going through Media Center perpetually on this box. If you are willing to shell out more money and get one of ATI’s newer cards, then I’d recommend an x1600 or greater.