October 2005 - Posts

Visual Studio 2005 Shipping on my Birthday
31 October 05 10:14 PM | Peter Rosser | 1 Comments   

You know I'm a geek when something like that gives me even a little bit of a thrill. November 7th... not just an election day or my birthday, but also the VS2005 public ship day. ^_^. I'm installing it now on my primary and backup dev boxes at work now... Read More...

Filed under: Coding, Musing, Tools

Tell us about your Rollup 2 (and KB908250) problems
28 October 05 02:09 PM | Peter Rosser | 2 Comments   

Are you an MCE user experiencing problems since you installed Rollup 2 and/or KB908250? I want to hear about them. Comments will be moderated to reduce redundancy (and preserve anonymity), but I'd like to hear about any troubles you might be having. Read the full article for more information on submitting feedback. Read More...

Filed under: Media Center

IEEE 1394 vs. UDCP
26 October 05 11:34 PM | Peter Rosser | 7 Comments   

I have been exchanging a couple of emails with Ray Maker, a fellow 'Softie, regarding whether IEEE 1394 recording is an "enthusiast" feature or more mainstream. I am of the opinion that it stands a good chance of being mainstream, and Ray thinks it more Read More...

Filed under: Media Center, Musing

Recording over 1394 (Firewire) in Media Center
25 October 05 11:26 PM | Peter Rosser | 17 Comments   

There has been some recent effort to pry open the 1394 interface in various STBs (set-top boxes), most notably that of timmmoore's STB package that goes to extraordinary lengths to hook into Media Center's experience. The state of the world today, at Read More...

Filed under: Media Center, Musing

The procedure entry point GetRequestedRuntimeVersion could not be located in the dynamic link library mscoree.dll
24 October 05 09:08 PM | Peter Rosser | 1 Comments   

Symptoms Aaron Stebner blogged this a few days ago, but some folks are still running into it, so I'll speak to it a bit. If you get an error dialog with the message " The procedure entry point GetRequestedRuntimeVersion could not be located in the dynamic Read More...

Filed under: Media Center

MceRepair 0.2
21 October 05 10:20 PM | Peter Rosser | 21 Comments   

I've posted an update to MceRepair at http://www.pegasi.com/MceRepair_0.2.zip , which adds additional error logging in case of problems. If you tried 0.1 and it failed, 0.2 may work for you. If not, at least you will have more complete information with Read More...

Filed under: Media Center, Tools

DRM Business Rules in Rollup 2
21 October 05 03:47 PM | Peter Rosser | 15 Comments   

To clarify the somewhat vague statement I made about "business rules" for DRM changing in Emerald (Rollup 2), the changes were to include the new COPP (Certified Output Protection Protocol) support in the release and to support the new version of the Read More...

Filed under: Media Center

Anonymous comments enabled
21 October 05 03:45 PM | Peter Rosser | 1 Comments   

I guess no matter how many hours I stare at a monitor every day, in some things I'm still a noob. I was *wondering* why no one was commenting on my posts! ^_^ Read More...

Tool to set your EPG download time
20 October 05 11:37 PM | Peter Rosser | 4 Comments   

After all that about QWORDs in the registry from managed code, I went ahead and just finished a small application that allows you to edit the time that MCE goes out to download guide updates. You can get from http://www.pegasi.com/MceDlTimeEditor_0.1.zi Read More...

Getting a QWORD from the registry using C# and P/Invoke
20 October 05 09:43 PM | Peter Rosser | 0 Comments   

From time to time you need to use really, really big numbers, like when describing, say, the time of day you need to download a certain set of data from remote servers. Well, you probably don't need that much granularity in the time, but that's what MCE Read More...

Filed under: Coding

DRM in MCE Rollup 2
20 October 05 07:33 PM | Peter Rosser | 40 Comments   

I was posting to TheGreenButton.com and thought I'd save myself typing the same thing again, since it's good info, even if I am restating/repackaging existing opinion. The following is a response to people who thought for some reason that Rollup 2 was Read More...

Filed under: Media Center, Musing

PC Video Outputs
20 October 05 10:38 AM | Peter Rosser | 3 Comments   

I am seeing a pattern of confusion regarding S-Video and video resolutions with a lot of users in the community, so this posting is for those of you asking things like "why can't I get HD over S-Video" or similar questions. If you want anything above Read More...

Filed under: Musing

MceRepair 0.1 (alpha)
20 October 05 12:51 AM | Peter Rosser | 25 Comments   

Having gotten a little fed up with manually re-registering MCE files when MedCtrRO.exe fails, I have created a new command-line utility to automate the task. MceRepair.exe will: Repair the ACLs to get COM+ Services working again ( see KB909444 ) Repair Read More...

Filed under: Media Center, Tools

Dealing with the COM+ Patch
18 October 05 03:39 PM | Peter Rosser | 0 Comments   

Last week the COM+ folks released a critical update that has some unfortunate side-effects for people who have tinkered with the ACLs (security permissions) on their drives. Since Microsoft has been beating the security drum for several years now, the Read More...

Filed under: Media Center

Update Rollup KB908250 for Update Rollup 2 for Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005
18 October 05 11:26 AM | Peter Rosser | 1 Comments   

We finally shipped the Rollup QFE, which fixes some ugly issues with Rollup 2, especially in countries with DVB-T service. If you're using DVB-T and Media Center, you really want this update . If you have DVB-T service and got the "scrambled guide" bug Read More...

Filed under: Media Center