Michael Creasy's blog : Digital Media

iPod your BMW

mcreasy — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 21:03:00 GMT

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

mcreasy — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 14:35:00 GMT

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.

Improving "My Pictures"

mcreasy — Fri, 31 Dec 2004 17:59:00 GMT

eHomeUpgrade talks about how to improve the My Pictures experience in Media Center.

There's some good ideas there. Some that I've thought of before and would like to see and some that I haven't. They noticed that a slideshow always starts with the same photo which annoys me as well, but I've learnt to live with it. They mention meta-data on photos, which is a good idea, but I already keep my photos organised by folder which does most of what they suggest.

There's a suggestion of a My Art feature - I think this is what Gallery Player is targeted at. It's now in Online Spotlight.

I've been thinking of doing some work on my personal website to make it display photos differently when viewed from Media Center. Maybe I'll work on that this weekend. The pages are written in ASP.NET so I can easily customise it to do something different for Media Center.

Who has some great ideas about how My Pictures could be improved?

Photo iPod

mcreasy — Tue, 26 Oct 2004 18:36:00 GMT

Photo iPod

Colour screen and everything. Hmm, tempting.

Doesn't seem like there's anything else new other than the ability to display photos on it and on a TV by the looks of things. Still I can't say I'm not tempted with it. The 40Gb model would be a nice upgrade from my 20Gb 3G model as I don't think I'd need the space that the 60Gb model offers.

It'll display album art, but it sounds like the music has to come iTMS for that to work. Seeing as I only buy CDs and rip them myself that's not a selling feature for me. might be for some people though.

There doesn't appear to be any built in support for directly getting photos from a camera. Shame that could be really handy, even with a 4Gb Microdrive in my camera it would be nice to have a backup on my iPod. I know there are third party accessories to do it, but I'd rather have an integrated solution.

Battery life is up to 15 hours or 5 hours if there's a coninuous slideshow to music.

Portable Media Centers available, WMP 10 available and MSN Music Store

mcreasy — Fri, 03 Sep 2004 17:44:00 GMT

Well what a week it's been. First off let me apologise for not updating for a while. I'm sure many of you will have guessed that I've been pretty busy for the last few weeks and you'll here more about that soon...

Portable Media Centers finally hit retail this week, first from Creative and shortly Samsung. iRiver also have a model on the way that PC Magazine took at look at a couple of days ago. I've had the chance to play with the Creative model a little bit and I quite like it. I watched a bit of TV on it and listened to some music and it seemed easy to use and the video quality looked good.

Windows Media Player 10 has been released as well. I haven't actually spent much time using it as Media Center handles all my music at home and my iPod handles my music the rest of the time.

A little digression as I mention that I'm in the process of re-ripping all my music. Last week one of my hard drives in my Media Center died dramatically. I was sitting watching an episode of The Simpsons when all of sudden I saw a flash of blue on the TV and the PC rebooted and would no longer boot into Windows again. I ran some diagnostics on the drive and discovered the drive was unreadable. The diagnostic tools reported catastrophic read errors on every sector on the drive, so it appears the read head may have failed. The drive was 1 year and five days old. Thankfully there was a three year warranty on the drive and Western Digital shipped me a replacement drive straight away. Thankfully all I really lost was a few TV shows, my ripped music and copies of my photos - I'm very glad I had copies of the photos stored on another PC! Re-ripping all the music though is going to take a long time. I'm ripping everything into WMA9 Lossless and I'll be keeping backup copies this time!

OK, back to the main subject. The MSN Music Store also went live this week. I've browsed through the store and there seems to be a good selection - I've found things that I've had trouble finding in local stores which is good to see. I'll probably stick to CDs for now though. I like having a physical copy of what I'm buying.