Samsung Flatpanel LED TV

We got ourselves a new TV. Because we had to re-paint the living room.

Anyway: The deal was that I had to get rid of the Media Center PC. I did a thorough analysis of the most used features and concluded that what I initially thought (back in the day): that it would be cool to have PC-access in the living room on the big screen, really wasn't cool at all. What with emergence of the iPad and notebook PCs and all. What we did use, though, was the guide, and especially the ability to record TV and occasionally watching a movie - this almost solely by streaming from various Internet services.

So I started hunting: and ended up with a 40" Samsung LED TV. The picture is crystal clear, it can record TV (although it only has one tuner so we can't really record something and watch something else), it can stream movies, which was exactly what we wanted. The sound does not match up to the external speakers we had on the Media Center PC, but no one expected it to.

It does a host of other things, too. Facebook, Google Maps, Twitter(?) - you name it. And the thing is this: it doesn't do it real good. I don't know why they bother - do people really want to spend 5 minutes waiting for the TV to connect to Facebook - I can walk to the kitchen, grab the iPad, check my mail, Facebook, make myself a cup of coffee and get back in front of the TV before it's ready. Sheesh. And then there's the dialogues - I don't know where they teach developers that you need to confirm that a file was deleted (after being presented with a very nice progress bar). I can only confirm that I noticed the file was deleted. Hmm.

Apart from these small glitches I do believe that we've got what we need - and the user experience is probably better than I expected (feared?).

Now I'm just waiting for the Microsoft Surface to come around; now that will be a treat and make Apple think.

Media Center - no more :-(

In Denmark we have now officially dumped analog TV broadcasts. Even though this has been pretty thoroughly announced (so much so, that even my father in law who has no interest in these things what-so-ever, knew what was going to happen), it escaped Microsoft. Or rather they've chosen to ignore this and hope I will upgrade the by now old Windows XP MCE machine to Windows 7 so that I would be able to receive the new channels (oh! and the old ones too which seems to have disappeared). Well - no such luck for the guys in Seattle.

I've gone Team MediaPortal which is an open source project. It works (for the wife and the kids) pretty much the same way as MCE did. However, it did require a few long nights from my part fiddling with codecs and other strange stuff. But now we can get all the new Danish Channels (even HD), and we've got back subtitling as well (something we've had to go without in MCE). But user friendly setting up? Nah! Could have been a lot worse though, and I'm deeply thankful that a lot of people all over the world are spending time coding Team MediaPortal.

The Green Button - New QuickGuide Beta

The Green Button - New QuickGuide Beta: OK - here's the deal. After installing a new TV-tuner that should enable us to watch digital tv I've been fiddling around with a number of different small utilities to make our Electronic Programme Guide (EPG) in Media Center actually show listings for the various TV channels that we can receive.

After installing the TV tuner we got all the channels I hoped for. However for some reason Microsoft has decided that we can only receive 3 digital channels (only Danish). We have an additional 6 Swedish channels to chose from as well. Media Center, being as user friendly as it really is, does not give me the option to chose where I want to download EPG data from (this would probably confuse some users), and for some bizarre reason also applies its own format to the data instead of following the standard XMLTV format (but then again that's Microsoft for you). This is a know issue (especially for us living outside the U.S) and there are numerous post in various forums about this.

I've now tried various grabbers to get the data down and they all work fairly seamlessly. Another issue entirely is to actually get data from the XML file into Media Center. Enter QuickGuide. I found that this works rather well (although file tweaking, batch file writing, and XML editing was involved). But following the instructions given in the link in the title made it work. And now I have all the EPG data I wished for.

Now only one (or maybe a couple) question(s) remains: Why can't Microsoft make it so that normal users (like me until 2 weeks ago) can just set it up as it is now, but leave it to the "pros" to decide for themselves (hide the option well in the back of the Settings menu)? And why don't they use standard XMLTV? And why don't they just use the EPG data actually transmitted with the digital TV signal (during my nights searching for a solutions for this I found that they plan on this sometime in 2007 - I hope that is so!).

A little bit about Microsoft...

I just went to a 2 day seminar. Microsoft were there and they had quite a lot of PC's running Vista and Office 2007. Man! - That is just really cool. I tried it out some and did not see too many new features - but old ones wrapped in new skin. It's amazing, really, what it did; it just felt like a whole new (and better) experience. I'm looking forward to running this on a regular basis.

On another Microsoft note: Last night I updated my Media Center PC with the newest Rollup 2 update and another patch as well. After this my Live TV was blurry (to say the least); all of a sudden I had this feeling that I had been drinking heavily before turning on the TV. Not very pleasant - especially since I did not get to enjoy the drinking part. I used Microsoft's Update feature (where you're directed to a website and your PC is checked) - a very nice and userfriendly feature. Kudos to the guys from Redmond. I can even see what it has installed (nice long list) - BUT: why don't I get the option of uninstalling (which I really needed after the blurry TV images)? I had to go into the control panel and choose remove programs and then after some looking I found the option to tick of so I could actually see the updates and not only the programs. I somehow have some difficulty seeing my old mom doing this. Actually I know that her local tech-support (me) would get a call. This could have been easily remedied if I had the option of removing the stuff from the Windows Update page (I'm not sure what this involves in programming, though!).

More on Media Center - or rather having a PC in the living room ..

Well - Media Center PC is up and running and everything works as a dream. There are, however, other user experience related observations that I'd like to share. The PC is of course online and is therefore also used for general surfin' - and this is interesting; I've always been aware that usability also to some degree is a matter of accessibility - but it has been a theoretical knowledge. Now I know.

Sitting in the sofa some 3 to 4 meters (9 to 12 feet) from the screen (even though it is 26") makes almost everything hard to read. I had to tweak both Windows to use larger fonts and set the browser to overrule fonts specified on websites - something I never had to do. And everything looks crummy. More surprising, though is the fact that you very quickly become accustomed to the crummy look and it doesn't even distract you (except if the design is so ill thought out that it becomes impossible to use it).

Even though I've always checked designs for how they handle this it was always on a normal computer screen and I had no problems viewing the design in it's intended lay out - therefore it was more of an academic test than anything else. This experience has really thought me something about accessibility - that it is necessary, and that you get used to a lot as long as it doesn't obstruct your goals.

Media Center Follow up

All righty - I guess it's about time that I do a small update on my home entertainment system. I ended up outsourcing the task of defining hardware and software to an intern at my job. All I did was specify my requirements (should fit in bookcase and look cool - be able to record tv, play DVD's and CD's).

I now have it up and running (we assembled the pc together and it wasn't that hard). Connecting the various parts were no problem as the different wires can only go one place - only the sound system uses the same kind of small jack plug for all the connections but they've done a good job color-coding the so you can't mix them up.

Microsofts Windows Media Center is a dream usability-wise. It can be operated using a special remote control and you navigate through menus which are intuitive and easy to use. Setting it up was also a breeze (it's been quite some time since I had to install a pc from scratch). The only issues were some hassles with drivers for the motherboard but that was solved fairly easily, as was seting up the wireless network.

All in all not to scary an experience.

All we need now is that my wife actually will venture into the brave new world of media on a computer - can't be long: today I even got the radio to work ... ;-)