Helmers Blog

Nerd Stuff Like a real Microsoft-fan/nerd I own an XBOX 360, a (Windows 7) Media Center and a Windows Home Server to satisfy my Multimedia and gaming needs. In this blog post I will tell you about my setup and why I choose the products I mentioned. There is also space for some criticism, because hey..it’s Microsoft stuff! Just kidding…I love the products, but I am missing some features. Some of the missing features have something to do with the country I live in. I love pictures, don’t you? That’s why I first show you a picture of my network, so you can’t imagine how everything is connected. If you have a question, don’t hesitate just drop me a line. How? Check my About page for my contact info. Just click the Read More link to read the whole story!

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Sharing Media With more PCs in your household you also get more physical places where music, pictures and video are stored. The new media sharing experience makes it easy to set up media streaming. If you have already set up a HomeGroup, your music, pictures, and videos are immediately available on the other PCs and devices in your HomeGroup. And when you add new PC’s (or other media devices) to your HomeGroup, you can instantly share media with them, no additional steps are needed! You can (of course) always restrict access to the media you don’t wish to share

Media ‘Play-To’ Windows 7 supports the DLNA v1.5 standard, so you can stream digital media directly to your Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) v1.5 compliant digital media renderer (or another PC running Windows 7) accross your home network. If a device is DNLA v1.5 compliant, you can use your Windows 7 PC to stream media to that device, play back media streamed from that device, or browse and play media on Windows PCs or third-party devices.

How does it work? If you want to listen to the music, but don’t want to hear it coming out of your (terrible) laptop speakers. Just open Windows Media Player, right-click on what you want to hear, select Play To and you’ll see a list of other devices that can play the music. If your media player doesn’t support the file format of the media you’d like to play, Windows Media Player automatically detects that and transcodes the file into a format your media receiver can play.

Media Center in Windows 7 Internet TV When you’re watching a TV show you’ve recorded, you’ll see that the program information including thumbnails for other online episodes and links to related information, such as Internet movie trailers or related shows. Broader Support for TV Standards Media Center in Windows 7 supports a wider range of TV standards. Digital TV works in more than 20 global markets, including European DVB TV standards (DVB-T, DVB-S), United States ATSC  and QAM cable standard, Japan’s ISDB standards (ISDB-T and ISDB-S) and Pay TV standards. Sharing TV in the home PC’s in a HomeGroup running Media Center can access TV Libraries on those different PCs (of course they can also access music, photos and videos).

Earlier this evening I posted about a new update for Windows Vista Media Center. I was very astonished when I tried (just for fun) the Live TV function of my Media Center after I applied the Update…wauw..I could record two channels at once again. I know my last post about this working on my configuration doesn’t mean it works for everybody!

The thing I can tell is that it’s not working 100% correctly (it stutters a bit), but it’s a good start!

Check out the screenshot (just to proof it to you). On the screenshot you see a two channel recording and the MultiMeter Gadget to show you I have 4GB RAM and a 64bit Vista Owh..and I have installed SP1 installed. Wanna know how you can install SP1? Check my post.

Some of the problems I had with my Windows Vista Media Center are solved!! The reason this message is in English is because I want to share this info not only with the Dutch

If you have the problems described in the following messages you should install the updates mentioned below :

• Message on the English Hauppauge Forum
• Message on the Dutch forum Gathering of Tweakers

First I tried to install Windows Vista SP1, but that won’t work on my Dutch Vista Ultimate. Just a few hours after the post about the problem about installing SP1 (and using Live TV on Media Center) a former collegue told me some new Vista updates came out. I downloaded the updates and YESssssss Live TV is working right now. The only problem I still have is that I can’t record and watch TV (through the second tuner). Let’s hope this will also be fixed in a furure update.

So if you have any problems using Live TV on your Windows Vista x64 system, try to install the updates mentioned below (reboot) and I’m almost sure that, if you have the same problems as me, Live TV is working again…

Vista: -KB941229 (x86) (x64)     : This update addresses issues with Media Center for Microsoft Vista. -KB941651 (x86) (x64)     : This is a reliability update. Install this update to improve the reliability of Windows Media Player 11 for Windows Vista in certain scenarios. -KB941600 (x86) (x64)     : This update resolves some reliability issues in the USB core components on the Windows Vista operating system. -KB941649 (x86) (x64) : This update resolves some compatibility and reliability issues in Windows Vista. By applying this update, you can achieve better reliability and hardware compatibility in various scenarios.

I also posted the updates in my former post, but that post was mostly in Dutch so I post them again for my English friends.

UPDATE : Right now I do have one more problem : Only one tuner is working, so you still can’t watch one channel and record another, but it ‘s a start. Please let me know if you have both tuners working correctly so I can publish the how-to on my blog!

Vanaf het einde van het jaar moeten, in ieder geval in de VS, een aantal nieuwe modellen van HP, Linksys en D-Link op de markt gaan komen. Vanaf komend weekend begint Microsoft met een beta van Windows Media Center Internet TV. Hiermee wordt het mogelijk om via een Media Extender (XBox 360 of een van bovenstaande apparaten) of een Media Center PC Live tv te kijken zonder dat hiervoor een TV kaart nodig is.

De streaming content is geheel gratis en zal wel voorzien worden van commercials. De volgende content zal gelijk bij de lancering al beschikbaar zijn (ongeveer 100 uur) : “full episodes of TV shows such as ‘Arrested Development,’ full-length music concerts by artists such as Chris Cornell, Snoop Dogg, Elton John, Pink, John Mayer and the Pussycat Dolls, movie trailers, news segments from MSNBC, and sports clips from FOX Sports.”