Hey! It’s me! 😀

Many thanks to Tom for having me on board as the first Guest Co-host! It was a fun time and I’m looking forward to hearing the other, future guest co-hosts!

My apologies for the hiss in the background (my laptop’s crappy built-in sound card). It was either hiss, barely being able to hear my voice or weird robot voice (the result of noise filtering), so we settled on just living with the hiss.

I also apologise for my annoying laugh :p

The show is jam-packed and yet there were so many additional topics I would have loved to discuss!

I hope listeners enjoy this episode. I would love to come back again should the opportunity ever arise 🙂

Dina, we miss you. But I hope I did ok and for anyone else, definitely give it a shot. It’s a fun time!

And Clint, I’m waiting for your judgement!

Tom Baby!
Don’t you be dis’n my Kenwood amps. Prior to the 1980’s, high end Kenwood (Trio) amps matched Accuphase. I have three KA-8100’s that I use as power amps by removing the pre-out / power in pins on the rear panel. Original spec for these dual mono DC amps is 0.02% THD.

Good job Rob. Sounded pretty comfortable and the podcast was interesting.

The company that bought Circuit City is also the company that bought the CompUSA name and also runs that as a web store. I think originally they ran TigerDirect, the company notorious for not paying rebates. So it’s a winner all around.

As for the discussion on whole home media distribution, I’m running Windows Media (Windows 7 RC) and am storing ripped DVDs (and you could do the same with ripped blu-rays), music, photos, etc on a Windows Home Server box. Using either cheap HTPCs at each TV or even Xbox 360s in extender modes, most of this content is easily accessible in a very nice UI that beats the crap out of cable DVRs and even Tivos.

Additionally I’m using an ATSC networked dual tuner along with a clear QAM tuner on the 7MC HTPC for DVR functionality.

It’s the best MS product that nobody uses and MS can’t figure out how to support.

Just thought I’d add an MS plug that was relevant to the show after seeing the title. I almost wish I’d sent in an audition to explain my media distribution setup 🙂

Thanks, Andy S! I’m definitely glad the episode was interesting to at least one person :p

I wish Windows Media Centre were better supported. It’s exactly the sort of idea I’m after – having all of my media stored in one place and then, via network, streaming out the files (still encoded) and having a box at the display handle the decoding.

There are really just two big problems holding me back at this point:

1) Other than the Xbox360, extenders seem to have disappeared! Hopefully new ones will come to market or maybe Microsoft will release their own stand-alone extender, but for right now, the Xbox360 is basically it! And that just ain’t gonna fly with me because the fan noise is too loud, the Xbox360 eats way too much power and extenders really ought to be $99.

As I said in the podcast though, what I’d REALLY like to see is to just have extender capability built right into the TV! We don’t need massive processing power. We just need the ability to handle and decode a wide variety of codecs and I see no reason why that can’t be built right into the TV; freeing us from the need for any set-top-box at all!

2) Getting TV programmes onto the Media Centre box is still WAY harder than it ought to be.

It works well for over-the-air, but we have very few channels OTA up here in Canada.

There are CableCard Tuners available, but you either have to buy a pre-built system or else use a rather complicated hack. Also, again, up here in Canada, no cable providers use CableCard anyway!

My only option is to still have the Cable company’s HD box. I have to output 1080i via component video and then run it through the Hauppauge HD PVR. The HUGE problem there is that I can only record one TV show at a time that way! I need to be able to record 2 shows at once – minimum! And I’d prefer to be able to record 3 or 4 at once.

Sadly, the best solution for the time being is just to download all shows via bittorrent!

It’s all so silly. Why should I need a HD DVR from my cable company at each and every TV? And even if I were to go to that trouble and expense – imagine having to program my recordings on 3 or 4 seperate DVRs!

With a HDMI matrix splitter, I can watch the output of 1 DVR on any display, but then all displays would have to show the same TV show at the same time. I couldn’t have one show playing in the Living Room and a different show playing in the bedroom. No good!

“imagine having to program my recordings on 3 or 4 seperate DVRs”

Gasp. Rob – hey, it’s ‘separate’, not ‘seperate’. 🙂

Good job, btw…

Rob, Glad to hear you are the first guest host! I was hoping for that, based on your informative (and lengthy!) comments in this forum. Seriously. It will be a couple days before I will get to listen to the podcast, but I’m looking forward to it.

I am also running Windows Home Server on an HP Media Smart Server box. I’ve got no complaints and it was incredibly easy to set up. I still need to spend some time fooling with it to get videos and music ripped to it. I have a TiVo HD and all my HD content is encrypted, so ripping that to a central location is impossible. I’ve pondered building an HTPC with the Haupage card, but just can’t justify the cost. Especially since I don’t watch much content – I’m in this for the coolness of making it all work.

Hope Tom has you back in the future. It would be great to have you, Tom, and Dina all on at the same time, then you could correct Dina each time she misspeaks. 🙂

Jon

Good good show enjoyed all of it.

Hey man don’t you be dis’n Keenwood, I had old CRAPY stereo speakers (big, boxy, and boomy) that I used on my first 5.1 system as surrounds. They sounded like pure CRAP to my today standers. But (lol!!!) back then they sounded sweeeeeet!!!! So I guess never mind dis the Keenwood and dis it good. LOL!!!!

Hey Rob, sounded good man very cool. Would like to hear you on the podcast again. Just don’t bit the subwoofer sotry to death!! LOL!!! definitely enjoyed the podcast dough very fresh!! As Tom and hes wife kept saying on there trip to Turkey “Funky Fresh”.

Tom if you have Rob come back, you have to tell him that he cant talk more than you. LOL!!!!! Nahhh just kidding Rob, good times.

As to general acceptance of HTPCs, you could nearly say that about high end HT gear in general. How many “average” people can even get a 5.1 system to work these days, or worse, even care? Most people are perfectly happy with stuff like Netflix on the Xbox or Roku with 2 channel stereo. Heck, I’m constantly surprised by how many people have HDTVs and never even find the HD content on their cable boxes. They live in blissful ignorance down in SD low number channel land.

I think the solution for media center is coming with integration with Windows Home Server. One central box attached to modular tuners that can run cable card, Dish, or Direct TV boxes in addition to the ATSC/clear QAM stuff. I suspect WHS version 2 will support this, as this is the lack of MC integration was their biggest request from their users after release.

If MS can work with hardware partners to have a product like this available for $500 or so and put some marketing behind it, I think they could sell it in reasonable volumes. The problem is they have shown no evidence of being able to market either WHS or Media Center up to this point.

The rumors I’ve been hearing about extenders is that there is a new standard to go with Win 7. Don’t know, but I can’t blame the current makers from dropping their products after the Xbox price drop. The Xbox is just a much better extender (faster processor that allows for better animations, etc) than Logitech, Dlink, HP, etc had produced. And the newer ones aren’t near as loud as the older ones.

I’m all for having the extender built into either TVs or Blu-Ray players. The Blu-Ray players probably even already have the processing power to run the software as evidenced by all the other media stuff some models can run (Netflix, Amazon, etc).

So what’s going to be the deal with Mandatory Managed Copy on Blu-ray?

It’s been finalized (finally!) and should be appearing on discs and players in the first half of 2010. From the description given over at Video Business: http://www.videobusiness.com/article/CA6664863.html – there is some indication that we may be able to make a copy onto a Windows Media Centre server. The phrase

“Initially, managed copies can be made to recordable Blu-ray or DVD discs, as a download to a Windows Media DRM-compatible portable player or hard drive, on a memory stick, SD card or as a bound copy, such as a digital copy file on the disc, Ayers said.”

gives some hope that we may be able to put our copy onto a Windows Server hard drive!

This would be cool. I’m all for the idea of not having to physically swap out Blu-ray discs or being forced to use an expensive mega-changer.

As to Joe Blow consumer being confused by a HTPC or Media Server – that may be true for the older crowd, but we have an entire generation of young people who have never had a music collection that was NOT held entirely on a computer. The younger generation is entirely comfortable with having their media stored on a computer!

Anywho…thanks again to Andy S and to Spencer, Jon and Raul! Very nice to get some positive feedback 🙂

And Spencer – right you are! I love how Tom finds glee in the corrector being corrected 😉

I have to say though, my goal as “Grammar Police” is not to always be correct myself. My goal is simply to get people to think about language usage once in a while. If I am being corrected, that means someone is paying attention and thinking about language usage – so that makes me happy!

(takes the fun out of correcting me just a little bit, doesn’t it? HA!)

Tom,
“thank you for your support”
Correction that is:
0.03% THD at 75 watts,
0.01% THD at 1 watt.
S/N ratio = 115 db
Too bad Kenwood and Accuphase parted their ways.
Raul, schadenfreude does not exist in the English language.

Well done, Rob!!! I enjoyed listening… except to the really geeky parts.

And your grammar was flawless!

Thanks, Dina! 😀 Geek Speak is a bit like lapsing into a foreign language, isn’t it? 😉

I’m still eager to hear Clint’s judgement. Something tells me he might have been more gleeful to hear a total disaster! lol

…….schadenfreude ?

Raul, I am not sure, but I think lesser evil meant to direct his schadenfreude comment at someone other than you. Maybe me; maybe Spencer? I’m not sure.

Just in case someone is unfamiliar with the word, “schadenfreude” is a German word that describes the feeling of deriving pleasure from watching the misfortune of other people. For example, feeling happy when we see a rich person lose a lot of money, or basically the entire foundation of the tabloid industry 😉 “Schadenfreude” literally translates as “harm joy” or “damage joy”. The closest word in the English language is “sadism”, but sadism is more direct, where a person derives pleasure from actually causing harm to another person. Schadenfreude is just observing the misfortune and feeling happy.

I think it’s interesting that we don’t have an English word, but adopting words from other languages works perfectly well 🙂

Rob… you didn’t suck. 🙂

I’ve become a pretty huge fan of Windows Media Center. A couple of years ago when I first started using it, I thought it was “neat” that I could record TV shows or watch DVDs on my computer (with a remote). But the “exciting” thing is that MC is starting to get support from 3rd party sources now (not just the open source guys on The Green Button). In the past month or two, Netflix and Hulu have both come out with official plug-ins to easily interface to their content (with a remote!). No set top box to buy. No special application to buy. I’ve also started ripping my DVDs to hard drive and using My Movies (free) to manage them. My kids DESTROY DVDs, so if nothing else their new Pixar movie will work for more than a month now.

As far as setting up the HTPC… I didn’t think it was any sort of challenge. Granted, I feel I’m fairly computer-literate, but even so, other than opening the case and plugging in a tuner card, there’s not much to it. The MC interface is pretty straight forward, and it scans for channels just like your digital converter box or TV does. It has a great guide system, and I can record my shows in HD. I’m just using OTA, so I’m sure trying to get cable or satellite to work is a whole different struggle.

LOL!!!!!!!!!!! ….. Oh Yeah!!! Rob to the Rescue. Thanks man it was killing me not knowing what that word was.

I think my IQ went up 2 point after reading all that!! ..lol!!… Good times!