Craig's Musings

I had two of my ReplayTV 4500's fail in the past couple of months, and I can't even scare them up on eBay anymore. In a flash of insight on how to retain loyal customers, the folks at ReplayTV made the 5500 series MPEG hardware incompatible with the 4500 series MPEG hardware. So, if you have archived hundreds of shows or have a network of Replay TV's, you can't add new devices one at a time - you have to replace them all - and then you still can't play your archived shows. So given there was no upgrade path for me with ReplayTV, I was finally motivated to move to the “beta test” phase of rolling out Microsoft Windows Media Center Edition (MCE) PC's and Media Center Extenders in the Eisler Digital Media Home.

I bought 2 fairly inexpensive Dell 8400's loaded with MCE and 3 Linksys Media Center extenders. MCE is super easy to customize for controlling a settop box, and I quickly had it recording shows from my DirecTV setttop box. I wasn't too happy with the quality below best, but best looks great (albeit it takes 3-4 gigabytes for an hour). Playback from the extender was easy, but I had to uninstall and reinstall the extender software each time I added a new extender - the setup software kept saying it was already set up. In the less cool category - extender's can't play back DVDs on a harddrive, and can only be dedicated to a single Media Center PC.

I hooked the 2nd Dell up to my Samsung DLP television (via a DVI connection, so I get a sweet 1280x720 resolution). First the cool: MCE PC's can play DVDs off of a harddrive, and it even works over a network! So I pointed the 2nd Dell at my archives and bada boom, bada bing - movies on demand. Now the less cool - MCE PC's don't peer with other MCE PC's, so you can't easily navigate and play the stuff being recorded on the other media center PC. You have to get at the recorded shows through this god-awful giant boxes “My Videos” interface they give you, which shows you only the huge obscure file name and none
of the information about the show itself. There is a plugin called “Share Recorded TV” out there, but I haven't tried too hard to make it work yet. It could allegedly solve my problem getting my one Dell to talk to the other.

Things went downhill for me as I have really expanded my in home “beta test” of MCE and the extenders. It turns out networking is the bane of Windows Media Center. Not sure what those folks up in Redmond were thinking, but it is unbelievably painful to use networked storage or access networked files, and in some cases, it just doesn't work. For example, to get your media center extenders and media center PC to actually see networked storage, you have to do the following arcane steps:

1. create a directory called netlogon on your media center PC
2. share that directory as netlogon
3. use notepad to create a file called map.bat in the netlogon directory
4. add the following kind of line to map.bat:
   net use w: "\\diablo\san" /user:domain\userid password (i.e., whatever credentials you need to access the network share)
5. go to the Control Panel, select Administrative Tools
6. select Computer Management
7. select Local Users and Groups
8. select Users
9. select the user you log onto the machine with (in my case, I have a Craig account)
10. select the “Profile” tab
11. enter map.bat into the edit box labeled “Logon Script:”
12. repeat for every extender you have (they have accounts called MCX1, MCX2, etc)

Now how is that for intuitive?! But wait, there's more! After you do all this, the good news is that you can now add directories on the network that will persist, and so you can play back stuff from the network on both your MCE and your extenders. The bad news is that you can't actually get MCE to use the network for storing or viewing recorded television. You can use TweakMCE to change your recording drive and to add additional drives for where to find other recorded television, but by god, those drives better not be on another PC - after all, who on earth might have more than one PC in their home?

I gotta say, I am baffled that MSFT could boffo networking this badly. ReplayTV has had a great UI for multiple networked devices for years, heck even the Tivo folks figured it out, but MSFT kind of forgot about that whole networking thing.

Looks like the only way I am going to be able to leverage my networked storage is to write an MCE plugin, but it has been so freakin' long since I have written code you might as well ask me to flap my arms and fly to the moon. The beta test will remain a beta test for a while… I hope no more ReplayTV's fail, or that the supply on eBay improves.

Posted by Craig at 7:25 PM | Permalink

Comments