I think my car (2006 Mustang) was probably one of the last models ever not to feature some form of auxiliary input on the radio/cd player. (Four years after the iPod explosion and Ford still weren’t offering an easy in-car solution – hard to imagine why they’re having financial problems..).

For listening to iPods the only option I have are the “FM” tuner devices that broadcast a local FM signal for your radio, and for an iPhone only the types of these devices that are shielded to avoid interference.

With the closure of LA’s Indie 103, and my rapidly growing podcast backlog, I decided to pick up the Griffin RoadTrip FM for iPhone so I’d be able to listen to something other than the junky commercial stations that decorate the LA airwaves. My only requirements were for something that supported the iPhone and had a cradle/charge stand, which were both covered by the Roadtrip.

The retail price of this device in stores like BestBuy is $99, but Amazon have it for $60 – which is a good thing because for $100 I’d have returned it. At $60 I like it enough to keep it though.

The build quality of the device is good. The rubber arm is flexible and the perfect length for my car with it’s mid-level power socket. It comes with a selection of cradle attachments for different iPods, none of which seem designed for the curved body of the 3G iPhone but several of which work anyway. When attached my iPhone fits just right – snuggly enough that it’s not going to fall out but easy to disconnect with one hand.

The radio signal is ok – it’s strong enough to overcome weak FM signals but stronger ones will require you to switch channel. There’s a secret “Euro” mode that opens up some frequencies supposedly unused in the US, but I still received interference and the sounds of Mexican music in the background.

The RoadTrip allows you to “save” three FM channels so if you begin to receive interference on one you can easily switch to another. You program these presets yourself by finding and “saving” unused channels, you can then add the same presets to your FM radio, or (as I do) switch between three such as 102.5,102.7,102.9 by using up/down.

And that brings me to the biggest issue with this device – ironically one that’s marketed as a big selling point: The “SmartScan” functionality is badly designed and works extremely poorly.

The SmartScan feature is designed for when you find interference on one of your presets. It purports to scan and find channels that are unused in your current area. There are three big problems with its implementation;

• Much of the time one or more of these channels are infact used.
• These channels are spread throughout the radio spectrum, so if the first is unused it’s difficult and dangerous to switch to the next while driving.
• The “SmartScan” completely wipes out your presets and replaces them with it’s faulty picks.

I’m not really sure what the intent of SmartScan is. If I have presets that generally work for me, but one day find interference, what I want is a “find me a channel I can use now” option. Something that I can press as many times as it takes to find one that works. I don’t want all of my carefully selected presets, that I may have programmed into my FM radio, wiped.

With the SmartScan problems (which IMO render the feature useless) $99 is excessive for this product and as mentioned I’d have returned it. At $60 I’m happy with it and it definitely makes my daily commute a little more enjoyable.

Recently I moved our Windows Media Center into a nice cool cupboard in the office, with the Xbox 360 in the living room taking over as an extender for TV/Media duties. For the most part this works very well but had one problem – our wireless network wasn’t fast enough to reliably stream HDTV.

We have a wireless bridge (two routers connected wirelessly with physical clients) between the office and living room. While Wireless-N clients can expect speeds of 70-80mbps a bridge will only see half of that. This is fine for streaming photos/music/videos/SDTV but borderline for HDTV and any interference or other wireless activity would cause the picture to breakup. Laying Ethernet isn’t an option so instead I decided to give Powerline Adapters a try.

There’s a variety of options on the market and I decided on the Netgear HDXB111 Kit for a couple of reasons. They’re based on the fast 200Mbps UPA standard, have status lights that display the current speed, and feature pass-through sockets which is handy. My second choice would have been the Netgear XAVB101 Kit which is based on a just-as-fast-but-different standard (HomePlug) but is bulkier and without the pass-through option.

The kit comes with two adapters and setting them up is about as easy as it gets. You just plug them in and they’ll magically find each other, then you hold down on the security buttons and they’ll pair for data encryption. There’s a CD with some software to configure QoS but I didn’t bother with this.

So how’s performance? Pretty outstanding as it happens.

After plugging in the adapters and receiving the green (80-100mbps) status light I ran some benchmarks and found the average speed was around 94mbps which is just shy of the 100mbps maximum. Fantastic! At times the status light will turn orange (50-80mbps) which I assume is due to interference from something, but even here the speed stays around the 65mbps range which is way better than a wireless bridge and more than enough for HDTV.

A+

This will be the post I wish I could have found when I began using Fusion

• Get as much RAM as possible. You should have at least 1GB of RAM assigned to your VM and possibly more depending on how many programs you’re running.
• Even if you have a dual-core machine, don’t use the dual-virtual-cpu option.
• If you have the option, use a 64-bit operating system (XP 64-bit, Vista 64-bit, Windows 7 64-bit). For 64-bit VM’s Fusion will use Intel’s VT hardware extensions for virtualization which perform better for call-heavy workloads. See this post.
• Virtual SCSI drives perform better than virtual IDE drives. Note that XP discs do not come with SCSI support so you should use the “Easy Install” option in VMware which will slipstream them.
• Running a file-based Virtual Machine is much faster than a boot-camp partition. The reason seems to be that accessing to data on the NTFS boot-camp partition is slower than the HFS+ partition.
• Windows XP is faster than Vista.
• Windows 7 is faster than Vista.
• If you have the option, put your VM on an external or secondary disk. The more you can minimize access to your system disk the better.
• Some forums claim that static pre-allocated disks are faster than dynamically disks that grow as needed.. This doesn’t make much sense, other than when your dynamic disk must be resized every 2GB or so.

For reference; With VMware Fusion 2 on my 2.4GHz MacBook with 4GB RAM and running Windows 7 with no programs, Activity Monitor shows around 5-6% of CPU time being used.

When I tried to set it up with my HP MediaSmart Server though the HP installer would constantly generate a Windows error, before displaying an error message with “RegOpenKeyExW” and then exiting.

Trying the vanilla installer from a system-builder install of Windows Home Server lead to more helpful information, and a series of steps that will resolve this problem;

For anyone encountering the “RegOpenKeyExW” with the HP MediaSmart Server/Windows Home Server, and Windows 7 try the following steps;

1. Click Start button and type “Command”. When  “Command Prompt” appears in the list, right-click on it and choose “Run as Administrator”
2. Enter the following: reg delete HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\SQMClient\Windows\DisabledSessions /va /f
3. Press enter. If you receive an error you are probably not running as an administrator.
4. Close the command prompt. The Windows Home Server connector software should now install successfully.

Currently you’re Windows 7 machine will be listed as “Windows Vista”, but that’s a known issue!

1. Compress recorded shows older than 30 days in WMV to save space.
2. Moved older shows (compressed or not) to a network share to save space.
3. Virtualizing Media Center under Windows Home Server

The results? Complete failure on the first two, and some success on the third but that was ultimately dependent on getting #2 working.

This one of those experiences with Media Center when I start to look at the price of a Season 3 TiVo + lifetime pass. My Media Center’s over three years old now I’ve basically been holding off till a nice (e.g. small) CableCard system becomes available, and/or I know it’ll still work with protected content after upgrading to Windows 7.

I’m happy to trade the out-of-the-box convenience of TiVo for the increased flexibility of Media Center, but at times Media Center seems to have difficulty with scenarios that are clearly popular and this gets frustrating. I love Media Center, but it does seem to have an identity problem.

Anyhow, here are my experiences;

Compress older shows to WMV

Using MCEBuddy I had the compression step working in almost no time at all. MCEBuddy is a really nice program that’s well done - simple to use and setup. I chose the WMV compression option since it would cover all of my devices (Windows Media Center, Extenders and the XBox) and set it to convert a few really old 50+ day programs.

After it’d completed I noticed that the shows were no longer visible in the “Recorded TV” section, despite being in the same location with the same filename. After much puzzling and Googling, it turns out that Media Center will only show DVR-MS in the “Recorded TV” section.

Yeah, there are meta-data aspects to consider but this limitation is a bit annoying. Being limited to using the “Video” section, whose interface is poor and needs careful categorization to be useful, makes this rapidly lose its appeal. It’s a shame because this (background WMV encoding) could be a killer feature for Media Center.

Move old shows to a network share

Accessing a network share and moving old files here is super-easy, but getting Media Center to display those shows is complex and something I just couldn’t get working.

There’s a large number of “how to” guides that cover the the numerous steps and registry and/or policy editor tweaks needed on the both machines, but for whatever reason it would just never work. I added the watched locations correctly and could see/open the files in Explorer, but to Media Center they just did not exist and would not appear in the Recorded TV section.

In the past I’ve found Media Center’s support for network-shared media is poor, and this seems to be another example. For a digital home product I have trouble understanding why this is the case, though at least this does seem to be changed in Windows 7

• I don’t think the high CPU percentages were related to disk access. One of my early concerns was disk performance which I tested with Disk Throughput Tester (Disk TT) and I didn’t notice any CPU problems
• I think it’s more likely the CPU usage is just a case of VM performance not being that good with the setup of VMware/Motherboard/CPU. I’m not familiar with the intricacies, but I know my other PC has an option for hardware virtualization in the BIOS that isn’t present on the box I was testing with.
• The reference to "somewhat successfully" running Home Server under VM was a mistake, for some reason I recalled the post I linked to making mention of connector and performance problems which isn’t the case. I would still be extremely leery of this setup though, if the Media Center drive fails then any recovery is going to be painful.
• I definitely think this setup has potential, but only if you’re willing to invest in better hardware (high-end Core 2 Duo / Quad Core) with better virtualization support. That requires a bigger box and my aim was to try and get both systems running in the you-have-to-see-it-to-appreciate-it Media Smart Server box.

At this point I’m going to explore plan B - an ultra-small Windows Media Center computer that uses Windows Home Server shares for storage.

I’m thinking of a Dell Studio Hybrid, perhaps a Mac Mini, or even a self-build machine based around an Atom processor. As it’ll be used in conjunction with external storage, tuners, and extenders, it doesn’t need to roar - just to be very very small

A few people have (somewhat) successfully virtualized Windows Home Server on their Windows Media Center box but while I admire their cunning there’s potentially a rather ugly problem. If the OS drive for WMC should ever fail you have a chicken-and-egg situation. No WMC = No WHS = No restore from backup.

I think a better scenario then is to have Windows Media Center running as a service on the Home Server box with all output being through one or more extenders. With a few constraints I couldn’t think of any reason why this wouldn’t work so I decided to give it a go

Note the following were required;

1. A VM package that supports USB devices and can be run as a service.
2. USB Tuners
3. Acceptance of being limited to extenders, and not being able to record protected digital content (for the same reasons you can’t record digital content with a custom-built box).

Virtual Machine package

I initially started with the free version of VMware Server 2.0 which worked but had two drawbacks; The most awful web based administration imaginable and a limit of two USB devices. The first I could live with since post-install I’d use Remote Desktop for admin tasks, but the second’s a deal breaker for Media Center duties with USB tuners.

When I discovered this post-install I switched to VMware Player which is free but restricts virtual machines to being run, not created or edited. As I’d already created my VM in VMware Server this wasn’t a problem.

VMware Player doesn’t run as a service but can easily be configured to do so, even featuring a “No GUI” option for this purpose. It also supports USB 2.0 devices and will automatically reconnect them upon startup.

One other important detail is your VM package must support “Bridged” networking. This is where both VM and the host share the same network connection but have different IP addresses. The alternative is NAT where your VM is on a different IP range and invisible to devices such as extenders.

USB Tuners

Because Media Center is running in a virtual machine it’s unable to access physical hardware, with the exception of hard-disks and USB devices which can be bridged from the host.

For this experiment I picked up a used Adaptec 3610 USB Analog Tuner from eBay for about $35. As well as dual-tuners it has a built in eHome IR blaster for controlling STB’s which is super-handy. If a virtual Media Center proves not to be an option I’ll likely be switching my Media Center to a smaller machine anyhow so it won’t be going to waste.

For an ATSC HD tuner I currently use a VBox PCI card, but would switch to the HD HomeRun. It’s pricey ($170+) but has dual hybrid ATSC/QAM inputs and is Ethernet based.

Acceptance

As noted there’s two obvious caveats to a VM Media Center – Firstly that all Media must be played back via an Extender, and secondly CableCard support will not be an option.

The first is ok with me. As crazy as it sounds I’d prefer NOT to have a PC next to the TV The second is the same limitation as custom building a machine – sucky but what can you do. While I’d like CableCard I can live without it. Most of the shows I watch are on local network channels and ATSC works fine here, arguably even better infact.

(On a side note: why are the only OEM PC’s that support CableCard so big, ugly, and non-Media-ish?)

The results

I ran this experiment on the Windows Home Server I built last year, which since buying a MediaSmart Server has been relegated to a development role. The specs (Athlon X2 2.0 Ghz, 2GB RAM) are higher than the stock MSS but around the spec that it can be upgraded to with hardware/bios mods.

Aside from the horrible web interface, installation under VMware server was painless.

The first thing I did was setup an extender to test that it could connect and stream the provided sample videos. There should be absolutely no difference, but for reference I went with the Xbox 360 for these tests. It was in the living room and I think it’s a better implementation.

The Extender connected first time without any problems and I could immediately select and view all of the sample media without a problem. This was my “wow” moment when I realized that this could actually all work.

Next up it was time to configure the tuners and, aside from having to switch to VMware Player, this is when I experienced my first hitch – TV setup cannot be performed via an Extender and must be done on the Media Center PC itself.

Because the virtual display drivers do not support hardware video you cannot see anything while configuring TV. This leads to a “TV Signal” screen that looks similar-but-not-quite-the-same as when there’s no signal detected.

As well as spotting this you need to use a process of elimination to determine which box maps to which tuner (luckily the Adaptec labels its external ports which makes it trivial) and whether the IR blaster is really changing channel or not.

So with everything setup it was on to some performance tests. First I watched and recorded “The Daily Show” and everything was great – CPU usage on the server was less than 30% and the picture was free of stutters, including while skipping back/forward.

After this I recorded “The Colbert Report” and started to rewatch the Daily Show. This is where things took a down-turn. The picture was generally ok but would occasionally stutter. Looking at Task Manager on the VM, CPU usage would spike from 50-100%, and on the server it would hover between 40-50%.

At this point I realized that VMware was maxing out one core on the server while the other went unused. I tried several things to get VMware to use both CPUs without any success – although VMware player is free it has no options so you’re restricted to editing config files using info gleamed on the web.

As I was already seeing problems with two simultaneous streams I was also concerned how it would handle a third show, or HD being thrown into the mix, or multiple extenders. All of these are things that are common in our house and if there’s one Mission Critical WAF item it’s TV

At this point I decided to call time on my experiment for the time being. As well as resolving the VMware problem with multiple cores I would need to purchase some USB ATSC hardware before I could satisfactorily judge performance.

My feeling is this setup is absolutely workable, and could work very well, but the spec of the host machine is likely to require more than the MediaSmart Server hardware can support.

Since my whole purpose was minimizing the footprint of both machines instead of switching back to a large form-factor server I’m more likely to purchase a dedicated machine such as a Dell Studio Hybrid or Mac Mini for Media Center purposes, then have it record to a network share. These are avenues I’ll probably explore in the new year.

It was fun tho

It looked neat and kind of trippy so I thought I’d post. Everything is fairly responsive too which is nice.

And yes, there is a reason for this hall-of-mirrors type madness. More later

The kudos of being selected gets your app a place in the “Staff Favorites” on iTunes, and the “What’s Hot” section of the iPhone App Store. This is prime billing, and almost as good as being in the top 10 list.

But what effect does this have on sales? Well so far it seems like a 2x effect

Notes:

• Stats supplied by the most excellent Pinch Media service
• Retail price has remained $2.99 since launch
• The last orange entry is a partial day and incomplete
• Better Christmas List is #1 on the staff favorite and What’s Hot list
• After being featured Better Christmas List is now #61 in the top paid apps list

I’ve omitted actual sales figures from the above because I don’t feel it’s relevant, but suffice to say that before being featured daily sales were several hundred.

Since being released in early November I saw a steady day over day increase in daily sales (before being featured). This is in contrast to most apps that experience a boom and then a decline, but is likely to be a result of being a festive app and Christmas approaching. I expect sales to fall off a cliff in the next week or so

Along with the honor of being chosen comes a small slot on both the front page of the iTunes App store and the iPhone. And since the iTunes store currently features a “Holiday Apps” link which includes Better Christmas List at the top, I have a double mention!

Now if only I could get on the top 10 list for a hat-trick…