My Media Center Solution...finally.

I know I'm going nuts with the blogging today, but it has been a long time since I put pen to paper so to speak and so a lot of things have happened or have been mulling around in my head for the past little while. Things have been very busy so I just didn't have the desire or the energy to blog about anything.

One of the things that I finally managed to accomplish was the wiring of my house with about 500ft of cable so that my office could have more connections and each of my TV's would have a couple of data connections behind it. I've been procrastinating over this for about four years now, in between trying to figure out the best approach for a media center solution. There are so many way to provide a media center solution, but when you start wanting PVR for live TV as well as the ability to distribute this amongst multiple TV's in the home, you choices narrow down quite quickly. The other limiting factor that many solutions present are the video formats they support. After humming and harring I ended up on the Windows media center and Xbox Media Center extended solution. It is certainly costly between getting a copy of Vista Home Premium or Ultimate, a Tuner Card and a couple of Xbox's, but it definitely works, albeit with a few quirks that I find a little bothersome.

The biggest stumbling block has been trying to figure out why some TV channels aren't de-interlacing properly during the encoding process. I called Hauppauge about my HVR2250 tuner card, and they pointed me to MS's DECCHECK as a way to change to a new codec; the one that comes with PowerDVD for example. The app allowed me to change it, however, that hasn't really seemed to work. Supposedly VMCD is one that is designed for Vista, so I'll have to try that instead when I get a spare moment.

Another bone of contention I have with Windows Media Center is the interface. They've made the classic mistake of compromising usability in preference for a prettier interface. There is no easier way to select a choice from a group than in lists that can be grouped in different ways. The crucial error they made was in limiting the view to just a thumbnails view. Not only does it require resources to view the small pictures, but it adds absolutely no functionality, slows down the listing process and takes away from the productivity. Why is there no option to view it as a simple list? I'm sure there is a plugin I can find that will do the trick. Which of course is one of the bonuses of this product. There is a large number of plugins for the software. Strike that last statement, I just had a student say that you can change the listing view. I honestly haven't had the time to play too much with it, so I'll have to investigate.

The wrinkle in the whole affair is that you Media Center Extenders can't play Xvid/Divx. Oh I can play it locally on the Xbox from the Media Blade, but Media Center won't transcode the Divx or Xvid to the Extender! I find this a little negligent on MS's part, but I've got to think there has been some political pressure from somewhere to have prevented that. Either that or they are planning to kill the media extender idea and focus more on making the xbox a native HTPC device. This  certainly looks plausible based on some of the peaks I've had of the new XBE coming on Nov 19th.

Special Guests

Through a personal 6 degrees of separation thing I ended up hearing about a gentleman, Kevin Ripa, who was coming into town and who had an extensive background in computer forensics. After some introductions and a few e-mails I arranged for him to come in and give a presentation to my first and second years. The presentation was extremely well received and everyone raved about just how much they learned in that brief period of time. He provided some excellent insights as to how many IT people need to get that chip off their shoulder and be honest about what they don't know, or as he put it, "You need to know what you don't know!" He said he couldn't begin to count the number of times he has had to deal with situations where the IT staff, either in their pride, ignorance or both, made his job very difficult or damn near impossible. It was a great lesson for the students. One of the interesting points I took away from the presentation was how hard drives store Adaptives about their individual pattern for reading the platters and tracks as well the negative cylinders or sectors used by the drive to store this information and information from the HD ROM. He also mentioned that the software the hard drives use varies substantially from manufacturer to manufacturer and that some of the bigger companies will have a person who specializes on data recovery for each manufacturer. Considering how often these drives change, I have a feeling this field could have a disastrous affect on one's personal quality of life!

As a result of this talk, and the fact that we discovered the new machines in the computer labs no longer have serial ports, I changed the lab from studying about serial port communication to analyzing the Master Boot Record, Boot Sector and MFT in NTFS. Although I think there are still some essential skills and transferable knowledge to be gained from playing with serial communication, I may finally have to put this technology to bed on a practical side.

Be careful what you wish for...

I'm surprised I even remember how to blog it's been so long. This term has been one of the busiest since my first year although I think I'm over the hump now that the midterms have come, gone and been marked. Fortunately I don't have too many students in my second year class and I made a small change that has eased my stress considerably. About a three weeks ago I was giving them a lecture and noticed than almost none of them were listening. When you have a small class it becomes especially apparent when a few have phased out. All my classes are contained in labs with computers, which, along with their laptops, provide a limitless opportunity for distraction. I considered going hard core, making them switch off their machines and forcing them to pay attention to what I had to say, but opted to give them what they wished for; a self directed approach to the lectures. The course is laid out such that moving it into more of a blended distance learning paradigm wouldn't be that difficult, so I thought what the heck. I gave them all the choice of my either lecturing or leaving them to do the reading, assessments and questions and coming to me when they have questions. I said I would commit to being in the classroom and online for the lecture and lab times, and available to answer any questions they might have or for doing a whiteboard session. They chose this route unanimously.

So now I don't have to actually give a traditional lecture to my second years. I'm not too sure how I feel about it all as I really only get a couple of them coming to me for questions. However I don't think that under the circumstances that is unreasonable since only half of them ever paid any attention anyway.  In the past I might have taken offense to this, but having been teaching this group for the past couple of years now, I know it is just the way they are. Nothing I do now will help them become auditory learners or increase their attention span. However this has eased my workload considerably and probably my frustration as well. It's incredibly deflating when you've spent a bunch of time preparing a lecture, demo and slides only to have half the class pay attention. To put it in perspective, some of this group aren't even able to follow along when going over the solutions to a midterm they  bombed. Nevertheless, they are all good natured and like to have fun, so I'm just here for them when they want it.

The interesting aspect to this little experiment is watching to see if they have the discipline to keep up the work without my whipping their behinds into it. I've established a fairly rigorous & structure schedule for them, so the framework is certainly there for them. I'm also looking to see how introducing this hands-off approach  will affect will affect my reviews and their ability to stay on track. Do they have the discipline to keep this up? I thought long and hard about it, but think that in the end it will probably be much easier for them since they now have the lecture time to focus on the coursework that is due. As it is I keep hearing about the ridiculous number of projects they have due in the next couple of weeks and how they are not sure if they are going to be able to do any of my coursework! What I find really sad about that statement is that my course is the one with the most relevance to their field and career.

As they say, "You can bring a horse to water........."