I've had lots of questions recently and no time to really get answers and post them up here.  If I haven't answered you question it's because I don't know the answer and haven't had enough time to get to the bottom of it yet.

First of all I had a couple of questions on MSAS which I don't know that much about.

Can I tell which tuner is being used when a recording takes place using MSAS? No, you can not.  What you can do, which may or may not help is use OnTVRecordStateChange from a background add-in which will give you a GUID and you could track which was in use - this won't help if a tuner is being used for live TV though.  Here's a code snippet on how to use OnTVRecordStateChange:

void IAddInEntryPoint.Launch(AddInHost host)
{

host.Television.OnTVRecordStateChange += new Microsoft.MediaCenter.AddIn.TVRecordStateChangeDelegate(TvRecordStateChangedHandler);

...

}

public void TvRecordStateChangedHandler(object obj, Microsoft.MediaCenter.AddIn.TVRecordStateChangeArgs TVArgs) {

if (TVArgs.Started)

mcHost.HostControl.Dialog("Recording started on tuner " + TVArgs.Tuner, "TV Recording",1,10,false);

else if (TVArgs.Stopped)

mcHost.HostControl.Dialog("Recording stopped on tuner " + TVArgs.Tuner, "TV Recording",1,10,false);

}

Can I use remote desktop to connect to a Media Center PC? Yes.  You can even use Media Center, but it won't play video over a RDP connection

Can I use animated backgrounds in an HTML page? Not really a media center question, but I don't see why not, use an animated gif.

Could I create an add-in that played a selection of WAV files with a gap between them? Yes, using Playmedia and Playrate you could contstruct an addin to do this - waiting until the playrate was stopped, then wating however long you want before playing the next file.  You could also use More With This  to make this work with any folder of audio files.

Can I use ASP.NET for development?  Yes.  You can use any web technology that outputs HTML.

Can I use WinForms for development?  Yes, but if you're running as a .exe you won't have access to Media Center APIs.  If you're running as a .NET applet in a webpage you'll have access to the Media Center APIs from the HTML page and will have to communicate between the page and the .NET applet to use the Media Center APIs - non-trivial to do, but not hard.

How are HTML apps and add-ins associated with each other? (Can HTML apps trigger add-ins to be launched?) HTML and add-ins can both be part of the same application, that is each is a different entrypoint of the application. The association takes place at registration time, when both would be registered as one application. An HTML page can start an add-in (on-demand only, not background) by using the NavigateToPage function with the guid for ExtensibilityEntryPoint as the first parameter.

Is there a way for HTML apps and add-ins to exchange information (parameters) and trigger events? (Is it possible for an add-in to be registered as a listener to an event that is fired within an HTML application?) No, there’s no built in way for add-ins and HTML pages to communicate.< Communication between a background add-in and an HTML page could be achieved with an ActiveX/.NET control on the HTML page and then .NET Remoting between the two components.

How do I register a .exe file so it runs from More Programs? The same way you register an add-in, except instead of using the “addin” property on the entrypoint tag, use “run” with the path to the .exe

Betanews reports that Gateway/eMachines will be offering a new Media Center PC for $599!  The specs are pretty impressive for such a cheap computer:

• AMD Athlon 64 3400+
• 1GB DDR SDRAM
• 200GB hard drive
• ATI Radeon Xpress 200
• 8 in 1 media reader
• Rewritable dual-layer DVD drive
• CD-ROM drive

Wow.  No mention of a TV Tuner, monitor or remote though... 

I've never bought an eMachines computer before, but that seems like a great deal for a pretty powerful system.

I've decided to take all the questions I get by email and answer them on Fridays in one post, so do please continue to email me any questions you have.  That said, here's this weeks questions:

How can I keep the Media Center window on top so I can work on other things?  In Media Center go to Settings\General\Startup and Window Behavior and select "Media Center window always on top".

How can I associate an HTML application with an add-in?  Register both the add-in and the HTML page together.  Instead of registering the HTML app and the add-in you need to register them both as a single application with multiple entrypoints - one entrypoint for the add-in and one for the HTML page.  This will make them both part of the same application and so from a background add-in a call to ApplicationInfo.IsForeground will return "true" when the HTML page is currently being displayed.

Jason over at Digital Media Thoughts sent me an email about his new article on The Powers and Perils of a Platform.  Jason talks about the trouble he had when a Media Center "plugin" went bad and couldn't be uninstalled.  It's not clear if it was an HTML application or a managed code add-in, but based on the description I'm assuming it's the latter.  He ran into problems when trying to manually uninstall the application so I thought I should post something on what to do when an add-in goes bad...

In Media Center 2005 add-ins can do pretty much what they want to do without restriction, if one starts to misbehave the best thing you can do is to disable it:

1. Start Media Center
2. Click on Settings
3. Click on General
4. Click More Programs Options
5. Click Edit More Programs
6. Deslect the app to disable and click Save

This will disable the app from starting and hide anything entrypoint it's registered throughout Media Center.  It won't uninstall the app, but it will prevent it from running.

David Burnett talks to the New York Times on what cameras he uses and why he mainly shoots digital now - he's another Canon 20D user.  The article is interesting, but the audio slideshow is much more interesting.  He explains that he uses a number of different cameras depending on the type of photo he's going for and on the slideshow there's a few examples.

I love my 20D, but it's not a camera that I can use all the time, it's just too big, so I also have a Canon SD500 which I've mentioned before.  I'll get different types of photos from each camera; I can't do the same things with the SD500 that I can do with the 20D, but I can take it places a 20D just isn't appropriate.  It's hard to be inconspicuous with a large SLR camera and buy the time I've tweaked the settings the moment is lost.  The SD500 I use for more spontaneous photos, I don't mess with the settings, just accept the defaults and let the camera deal with the situation and most of the time it does a great job, probably better than I could have done manually.  Take this as an example - that was shot at dawn directly into the rising sun with the SD500 and captured the scene exactly as I wanted it.  The 20D on the otherhand lets me get photos like this, which the SD500 wasn't able to manage (subjects lit entirely by candle light on a moving boat).  The SD500 also shoots video, a feature I never thought I'd use as I've always prefered still shots, but I found a few instances when video captured a scene much better than a still image could.  The 20D as you'd expect from an SLR doesn't capture video.  Different tools for different jobs.

The New York Times also has some tips on digital photography, nothing really new to me there, but it might be off interested to any just getting into digital.

I've had a couple of questions by email that I should answer (note I've paraphrased some of these):

What fonts should I use for my HTML Media Center application and can I use Flash?  The SDK is where to go for design guidelines for HTML applications (the short answer is to use a sans serif font).  Yes, Flash can be used in HTML Media Center applications - Napster and MSN Music both use Flash.

How can I add an application to the Start Menu?  You can't.  Well OK, you can, but we recommend that only OEMs use this functionality as there is a limit to how many applications can appear on the start menu and adding a new app will stomp on existing applications.  If you intend to distribute your application you shouldn't do this, but if you really want to know, the details are in the SDK here.

I've seen the Media Center software for sale online is it OK to buy it?  I'm no lawyer so I'm not going to comment on this.  Media Center is an OEM product and only available with new PCs is the official answer though.

Sorry I haven't had much (anything) to say for a while.  I've been terribly busy on a number of things that it won't take a genius to guess about.

So what's been going on?  Well, I'm very excited about the XBox 360 and it's built in Media Center Extender.  There will definitely be one of those next to my TV later this year.  With the XBox 360 there I might just move the Media Center PC away from the TV and hide it out of the way somewhere.  That will simplify the connections around the TV and reduce my ambient nosie level a bit.  Although I only actually notice that PC when it's on and I'm not watching TV which isn't that often as it's normally asleep.  Ideally I'd like to place an XBox 360 in bedroom along with a nice big thin flat display but a bunch of money is going to have to appear from somewhere for that to happen, I've already blown most of my disposable income on a new PC and display (I got one of the new Dell 24" displays and it's a beautiful thing) and that's ignoring my expensive hobbies of photography and world travel.

I spent almost a month away from work travelling the world which was great fun.  I first went to Amsterdam for a day where I got to spend the day with my Mum (with me living in Seattle and her in England we don't see eachother that often).  Then I flew to Delhi where I joined Intrepid Travel's Delhi to Kathmandu trip.  I've traveled with Intrepid before and I continue to recommend them to anyway looking for a trip that's a bit different.  I like that when I travel with them there's a set itinerary but there's plenty of time to do what I want to.  I could talk about my travel philosophy for hours so I won't get started here, but it's something I'm very passionate about.  This trip was really great.  I got to see the Taj Mahal for a start and to really experience India.  It wasn't without it's low points though, I did at one point end up in a hospital in Nepal suffering from food poisoning and dehydration.  That wasn't a lot of fun and wasn't made any better by being in a bus crash the next day.  Thankfully nobody was injured and it didn't really cause us any problems.  That's what makes travelling fun though.  The experiences and the unexpected.  The trip came to and end in Kathmandu and I stayed on in the city for a few days before flying to Bangkok and Taipei alone.  I could write pages (and perhaps I will one day) on the whole trip, but for now I'll leave you with the photos.

Just after getting back from that trip I flew to Chicago for the weekend.  Chicago is too close for an overnight flight to be good.  I don't function that well on three hours of sleep.  I did have a great time in the city though, it was the first time I'd gone there and left the airport.  My dad flew in from England for the weekend as well and showed me around as he's been there before.  I went to the U2 concert while I was there which was incredible.  They put on an awesome show.  My dad didn't come to the show with me so I made it up to him by taking him to see a Cubs game at Wrigley field.  He knew we were going but thought we had terrible seats, that was something I'd lead him to believe as in reality our seats were in the third row behind home plate and I wanted to surprise him - there a stitch of the view from our seats here.

OK, back to work...

All the keyboard shortcuts for Media Center for those times when you just don't want to use a remote control are documented here.

Update: If the page doesn't display, try again later, it's propagating around servers or something like that I'm told

The ability to install an iPod in a BMW has been around for a few months now and I hadn't given it much attention or thought until now.  Mainly because I now have a car that the technology supports.  So here's a mini review...

Installation: No idea if it's hard or easy, but it didn't take long for the dealer to do the work.  When it's complete there's a normal looking iPod cable in the glove box that disappears deep inside the car.  Other than that there's no indication that it's been installed. Once connected the iPod also gets charged, so after driving for a while you can take your iPod out fully charged.

The system is limited to playing five playlists on the iPod with a sixth option of playing everything.  You need to setup the playlists ahead of time and give them names that start with BMW1, BMW2 etc...  Easy enough to do, I created smart playlists to find all content that matched a certain genre, artist or was created in the last 60 days.  With those set up all I had to do to get everything to work was plug in the iPod.  The car believes the iPod is a CD changer and so changing to the right mode on the stereo starts the iPod playing.

Control: The iPod is controlled from the stereo controls in just the same way as that the radio and CD player work.  The preset buttons move between the playlists with just a brief pause for the iPod to find the right playlist.  Once it's playing it can be fully controlled from the controls on the steering wheel.

There are some limitations though.   Being limited to playlists is not a major problem, but if you want to listen to a specific album or song it could be difficult to get to it.  None of the details of the song are displayed either on the iPod or on the stereo when it's playing which may be a problem for some people.  For me, I almost never look at my iPod when it's playing anyway, so not being able to see the track info isn't a problem - it's a nice to have feature, but not a deal breaker.  A limitation introduced by BMW is that shuffle or random mode isn't remembered when changing playlists or when changing modes.  This appears to be a "feature" of the stereo system as a whole and isn't unique to the iPod.  Lastly I've noticed a slight background hiss, but I've yet to determine if that's from the files on the iPod itself (192kbs transcoded from lossless WMA9) or part of the system.  I can only hear it when changing tracks or during quiet parts of a track, but it needs more investigation before I know where the problem is.

Ultimately though, I really like it.  Having all my music available in the car is great compared to the six CDs I was used to that I rarely changed around.

MSN Video Download  apparently went live today with a choice of two membership types  Premium and Basic.  Premium is $19.95 a year and has more content than the free Basic membership.  Not wanting to commit myself to a membership yet I signed up for the Basic membership, thinking I could load some videos on to the miniSD card in my smartphone....

Sign up was easy, I used my passport account, agreed to the terms and installed the download software.  The download status page showed content was downloading from Fox Sports.  In order to sync content to my phone I needed a smart playlist so I followed the instructions to download one.  This was the first problem, the instructions used Windows Media Player 9 and I'm using Windows Media Player 10, a little strange, but not a huge problem.  With the smart playlist in place I thought I'd be good to go...

That wasn't going to be the case though.  I started by trying to play a video in Media Player directly and got prompted for a username and password which was being requested by "admin.theplatform.com" not "msnvideodownloads.com".  I tried my Passport email address and password which might not have been a great idea, but it didn't work anyway.  Meanwhile I could see that Activesync had been trying to sync the content to my phone so I checked the Sync page in WMP.  Nothing had been synced, instead  there was an error message "Windows Media Player can not synchronize the protected file.  Protected files can not be converted to the required quality level or format".

Now I have almost half a gigabyte of content (and it's still getting downloaded) and I can't watch any of it.  If anyone gets this working I'd love to know how.

I've always owned Canon cameras and was looking around for a new small digital camera and decided on the Canon SD500.  I haven't had a small camera for a few years - the last being a Canon S100 (the original digital Elph/Ixus) which I enjoyed using.  My goal with this camera is to be a companion to my digital SLR mainly for use when carrying the SLR isn't practical, so this is more of a backup camera.

First, the basics.  The SD500 is small.  It's about the size of a deck of cards.  Small doesn't mean featureless though, it has a resolution of 7.1 megapixels and a 3x optical zoom.  Storage is via an SD card.

What's in the box?  Just the basics that you would expect, a USB cable, battery and an A/V cable.  There isn't an included cases which is a shame as the camera looks like it could get scratched easily and it would be nice to have something to protect the large LCD on the back of the camera.  Canon do sell an accessory kit though which is highly recommended as it includes a case and a battery which can often be purchased for less than the cost of the battery.

Canon include a 32 megabyte SD card with the camera which will store just 9 photos at the highest resolution and quality. A 1 gigabyte card will hold about 360 images.

The camera is pretty easy to use with an intuitive menu system operated with the buttons on the back of the camera.  When turning the camera on you'll be greeted with an irritating noise from the internal speaker, thankfully this can easily be disabled in the customization menus, which also allow you to change the noise made when a photo is taken (a shutter sound is just fine thank you) and the background picture displayed when turning the camera on - not a feature I'd ever care about.  Startup time is good, the camera is ready to be used almost straight away, which wasn't the case for earlier models.  The LCD displays is large and bright and gives a good impression of the final output of a photo.

The camera has a 3x optical zoom and a digital zoom which much to my surprise was disabled by default on the camera.  I've never been a fan of digital zoom and it's nice to see Canon encouraging people not to use it by disabling it by default.  It's far better to zoom and crop on a computer than it is on the camera.

Picture quality is impressive so far.  I haven't taken many pictures yet, but I have no complaints with the output.  The camera supports USB2.0 so transfers to a computer are nice and fast - just as well with the size of the files produced.

There are a few features I want to also mention:

Stitch assist mode.  This is a great feature.  When activated the camera gives you the option of taking photos from left to right or right to left; after the first photo is taken the result is shown on the LCD display, but shrunk so you can frame your next shot against the previous shot. The camera does not attempt to stitch the photos together for you, but guides you so that you can see what you've taken so far and don't miss part of the panorama you are shooting. 

Scene assist mode.  There are a number of presets pre-programmed with general styles of photo such as "night" "portrait" etc.  The camera adjusts the settings automatically to be the best for that style of shot.  Useful for quick photos that you don't have time to manual configure settings.

That's it for my first thoughts; I'll post some more once I've used it a bit more. 

MSN Remote Record is live and out of beta.  In simplest terms it's a way of browsing the same TV guide as your Media Center PC uses and then remotely instructing your Media Center PC to record something.  Pretty clever stuff.  There's a small download for your Media Center PC and then it looks pretty easy to use.

Try it and let me know what you think.