Mike Poulson's Thoughts on lots of stuff : Other

RedvsBlue Season 4 DVDs arrived

mpoulson — Sat, 03 Jun 2006 01:57:00 GMT

Today out of the blue I got a DHL box delivered to me that contained a few copies of redvsblue Season 4 ( http://www.redvsblue.com ). My team does some work for the redvsblue people so it was quite nice to get free copies of the shows. For those of you...(read more)

Watching Divx and WMA Pro 5.1 movies on your v1 Media Center Extender

mpoulson — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 05:01:00 GMT

So the only problem I have with my V1 media Center Extender is that my movies (DVDs that I have converted to WMV and use the WMA Pro Codec that does 5.1) will not play. Nor will the ones I have converted to Divx (before I got my MCX).

The work around I have done now is to encode my DVDs twice (once in 2 channel and once in 5.1 (so when I get my xbox360 I can watch them). Well there is a better work around for now (until the 360 shows up).

That is mceDivx360 (found at http://www.brains-n-brawn.com/default.aspx?vDir=mcedivx360). The creator did a good job with this. There are a few little change that could be made to make it a little better. The source is provided so if you want to make a change feel Free.

So now going forward I can convert my DVD directly to WMV 5.1 and when the 360 shows I will not need to worry about any of my other movies. mceDivx360 works with any video file that can be played on the console of the Media Center machine. So that included wmvs, Divx, or other AVIs.

Once I done re-writing MoviePro (DVD-> WMV app) I will post my upgrade (lots of fixes).

odds of being in a car accident vs being bit by a shark (or in a Plane crash)

mpoulson — Thu, 14 Apr 2005 22:00:00 GMT

Today my co-worker and had a talk in the hall about what Microsoft should *DO* to have more window offices (I saw a window office down that hall that had 4 people in it). I think that we should level like 4 city blocks and build 2 huge sky scrapers shaped like a big M. Then the issue of safety came into play. So then we attempted to figure out what the odds of dying in various situations was. Soon the talk turned to "are you more likely to be in a car accident then being bitten by a shark"? Well does anyone know the answer?

So things that we need to know (world wide)

how many people are in a car every day
how many people are in water that can or does hold sharks
- Do you count shark bits at aquariums (the petting the fish part)?
- Does it matter if the person that was bitten had been in a car that day?
- Does the ride to the hospital count?

userparameters attribute in AD for a user (and how it sucks)!

mpoulson — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 06:56:00 GMT

Call me a stupid person (or just an angry one)!

I am attempting to write some .net code that will allow me to uncheck (or check) the "Allow logon on Terminal Server" option for a given user account. And it is not as easy as it looks.

I don’t want to load some Active X control to do it either (which can be done).

Turns out that the userparameters attribute is a HUGE mess of data. It seems that no one knows what all components use this to store data. As it was stated elsewhere you need a secret decoder ring for each component that you want to modify setting for.

If anyone knows anything about this setting in the AD please let me know.

I hope this is something that we fix in future versions of Windows.

Well looks like there is an unmanaged API that allows you to do what I want.

After some direction from Alex. I found http://members.lycos.nl/nessyh/vsgc/Classes/Backups/cWTS4.vb

Getting your Media Center Extender to connect to a remote file server

mpoulson — Tue, 18 Jan 2005 07:15:00 GMT

So at my house we have a single Media Center 2005 PC, and 2 Media Center Extenders (MCX). We also have our file server (2TB raw) :) On this file server we store WMV versions of recorded shows and also other movies (like backed up DVDs) that are also in WMV format.

Becasue i do not wish to have a DC (to save power) all my machines are no domain members (there is also major work arounds to get Media Center to join a domain).

So the issue is is that a MCX creates its own user account on the Ehome. This account has a password that is only known to the MCX box. So how do you set up a file server to allow the MCX boxes to connect to it.

Answer: Login Scripts!

Steps:

Create a new user on the file server (remember the password)

On your file Server Setup your file shares to allow this user read access to your share(s)

On the Ehome Create a new bat file in %windir%\system32\GroupPolicy\User\Scripts\Logon called share-mapper.bat

put in the bat file "net use \\<fileservername>\ipc$ /u:<username> "<password>"

replace the items between < and > with the correct values

On the Ehome create a shortcut in c:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\My Videos that goes to your share that has the movies. (ie \\deathstar\movies\WMV)

On the ehome run gpedit.msc

Expand User Configuration -> Windows Settings -> Scripts (logon/logoff)

Select Logon scipts in the right window

Add the script that we created above

Click OK to save the logon scipt. Then restart your MCX

Done.! Now when you go to my movies you will see a share to your file server!