I’ll be able to extend my short Media Center review into something a little longer and more useful when my TV tuner arrives :)

I ordered the Hauppuage WinTV HVR 1300 MCE Kit from Overclockers (the place I got the second video card from).

HVR stands for “Hybrid Video Recorder” - it has an analogue and a digital tuner (although it can only use at once I’m assuming). This means I can watch Freeview until I get Sky plugged into it.

A few notes about buying TV tuners for MCE. First, get one that is MCE compatible - a lot aren’t. Second, decide whether you want a “kit” or not. The kit versions come with a remote, an IR receiver and an IR transmitter (to allow the computer to control a set-top box). To get the full benefit from MCE you should really get the kit versions. Finally do you want internal or external. The internal (PCI) ones tend to have more connections than the external (USB) ones. But if you just want to plug an aerial in (or you using them in a laptop), the external ones are fine (and obviously don’t require fitting).

Sky offers movies and sport content to subscribers with a service they call Sky by Broadband (clever name). The downloaded content is DRMed and you can only keep it for 28 days but it’s good quality. The interesting thing is it uses a private peer-to-peer to distribute it.

It’s a smart move by Sky since it saves them lots of bandwidth. I was worried about whether TalkTalk would limit Sky by Broadband. It all depends on their reasons. If they truly have bandwidth problems then they should since it’s quite a large consistent bandwidth hog (since even after downloading it can continue uploading). If they actually just want to limit illegal behaviour with P2P file sharing then they’ll leave it alone since it’s legit.

Well yesterday I left my computer on all day (I wanted to try Orb from work). I didn’t realise that closing the Sky program didn’t actually stop it downloading. When I came home all the movies had downloaded (my bandwidth usage was up to 5 gigabytes for the day). Not only that but my download speed had stayed consistently at about 250 kb/s. Since my router is reporting my connection as 2.2Mbits/s that’s almost full speed. In the middle of the day.

So it seems TalkTalk don’t (yet) limit Sky by Broadband traffic. Of course it would be easy to reach their 40GB a month limit doing that every day…

With my broadband connection came a wireless network. So I tried browsing with my PSP. And it is a lot better than I expected. Except when browsing my own blog :(

I figured the easiest way to make it work was to send it the XHTML Basic version. So you should now be able to browse my site with a PSP without any hassle :D

Detecting the PSP browser**

Detecting a PSP is really easy. It sends a custom HTTP header: HTTP_X_PSP_BROWSER which contains the firmware version. Just check if that header is set. In PHP you just need to do:

if (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_X_PSP_BROWSER'])) $psp = true;

Have lots of video, audio and/or a TV card? Got a good internet connection (more importantly) with a good upstream connection. Going on holiday or otherwise away from your computer but still somewhere with access to the internet? Then get Orb.

Orb is a cool utility for streaming media from your computer to the internet. Essentially it’s just a program that acts as a web server and a web interface that connects to it. With it you can stream any media on your computer (including TV tuners and web cams) over the internet. Most legal problems go away because the media can only stream to one person at once.

I have plain old ADSL internet access with 288 Kbps upstream and it works fine. So go try it :P

I said I’d write about it yesterday. Well I was so busy actually using it that I forgot :P

The first thing I should point out is that Microsoft do not officially support home users installing MCE themselves and as such I have an OEM copy. Despite that the installation was painless although it does have it’s oddities. Most notable is that the installation makes no mention of MCE, it just says “Windows XP Professional”. Also unlike other versions of Windows this comes on two disks, the second disk containing the media center stuff as well as some tablet PC stuff. One final comment about installing is the disks are labeled (system-wise) incorrectly). It will ask you to install “Windows XP Service Pack 2 disk” when it really means “Put disk 1 back in”.

Since I don’t yet have a TV card I can’t use much of the really cool functionality of media center, but I did try playing a DVD and immediately hit problems. My DVD drive came with PowerDVD which is not supported by media center. Or to be more precise PowerDVD 5, the version I have, isn’t compatible. If you plan to build an MCE PC it is vital you have a compatible MPEG 2.0 decoder (All the options I’ve seen have been software but I would assume older machines with hardware decoder cards will work). So I downloaded a trial of PowerDVD 6 (which uninstalled my OEM version 5) and everything worked. Unfortunately version 6 isn’t free.

LocationFree TV is one of Sony’s new ideas intended to revolutionise the way we watch TV. You buy a LocationFree base station, connect it to your TV and internet connection and then watch your TV on any internet device, say your PSP.

Well of course you could plug an MCE computer into the Base Station instead. But this is where it gets a little silly (but in an oh so fun way). The Base Station has an IR blaster that allows it to control other IR devices, in this case your media centre PC. Your PC is incidentally controlling your set top box with it’s own IR blaster.

Will Wright, creator of the Sims and SimCity is working on a game called Spore. Spore will not only be a god game, but will be the god game. In fact it may become the best game ever.

It sounds like a combination of Sims, SimCity, Civilisation, Populous, Humans, Command & Conquer and 3D Studio Max.

The game starts with you controlling a little micro-organism (a spore perhaps) that has to survive and eat things and not be eaten by other things. You have a nicely textured but relative simple top down view of your little creature swimming around. Survive long enough and get enough food and you can lay an egg. This is the central theme of the game - your creatures evolve. But you choose *exactly* how they evolve. Need another tail or a couple of spikes? No problem. Put what you like where you like. The game works out how your creature should move and attack. Evolve a few more times and the game switches to 3D (well it was actually in 3D before but you were limited to a fixed camera angle and movement in a single plane).

Once in 3D, the goo you were previously swimming in is revealed to be a pond of sorts. You continue evolving and getting more complex. Add legs and you can walk out of the pond. Or maybe you’d just like fins and be the best sea creature around. Or perhaps you want legs and fins and get the best of both worlds. Your choice.

And so the game continues with your creature evolving. Eventually so does their brain. You can manufacture weapons (designed with the same flexibility as the creatures) which your creatures work out how to use (even if that means holding them with their tails because you forgot to give them hands). By this stage you control a whole tribe.

Of course other tribes will spring up and they have to be dealt with. So make some tanks or something, all with an agonising amount of control.

After that it just keeps going. Control the planet, fly to other planets, control the solar system etc. The sheer scope of this game is unbelievable.

Search Google Video for quite a few clips of the most ambitious game ever conceived.

Complete review from GameSpy of their showing at the 2005 Game Developer’s Conference which is more in depth.

I’ve started a new page listing some of the story arcs from Stargate.

That is, it lists all the relevant episodes for the story arcs (useful if like me you own most of them and want tory and make sense of them without other stuff in between).

The Matrix was quite a good series of films. But without any extra interpretation left most viewers reasonably underwhelmed.

Well see what you think of this theory.

It’s specifically about the second movie, The Matrix Reloaded (there is a link to one about Revolutions too) but I think the second is where the most understanding is required.

It also has a prediction about what could happen in the third movie (it was written before it was released) and I think I like it more…

I’m getting a new computer. Well most of a new computer. And I’ve been considering whether to get Windows Media Centre Edition or not.

The first two versions of MCE were rather lacking but after reading a lot I’ve decided 2005 is actually quite cool.

What is Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005?

Good question. One I didn’t know the answer to until recently. It’s Windows XP a with range of new utilities for working with video, music and images (as well as bits of hardware associated with them) all wrapped inside one interface. The idea is to have your computer as the hub for your whole home entertainment system.

Digital Video Recording (DVR)

The most useful component is the built in DVR software (sometimes called Personal Video Recorder or PVR). Plug your TV into your TV tuner card and Windows can record stuff straight to your hard drive. But of course most TV tuners come with software to do this. Well MCE does it better to be honest. And you can also get a hardware bundle (ready built systems come with it) that includes a IR blaster. Basically it’s an infra-red transmitter you stick to the front of your set top box (Sky, cable, whatever) to allow your MCE computer to change channels.

Disk space

The lowest quality recording takes up between 1Gb and 1.5Gb per hour. Reasonable hard drives these days are about 200Gb which gives you about 100 hours of video (leaving space for other stuff). Not really suitable for storage but it does allow you to burn things to DVD. Most of the time. The software apparently supports any content restriction specified in incoming media and won’t let you copy such content of the computer that made it.

But it’s still a computer, right?

MCE is actually Windows XP Professional underneath. It took a while to confirm (most references are vague about whether it’s XP Home or XP Pro) but I did find a page on Microsoft’s website saying it’s XP Pro. This means you can do everything with it that you can normally do with a PC.

One final note… you could always install MCE on a Mac.