Recently in MCE Category

Flippo pointed me to an interesting Vista-only solution, Lifextender, to remove commercials from your TV recordings.  We've been spoiled for a while by ReplayTV which automatically skips commercials for you.  Occasionally, it does skip the actual programming so it's probably better in my opinion to not remove the commercials, but skip over them.

Even though Lifextender is Vista only, there are XP solutions as well.  DVRMSToolbox, and a setup guide...  DVRMSToolbox has a lot more capabilities and isn't as easy to use as Lifextender, but it does allow you to skip your commercials.

Pretty sweet, thanks Darin!

Very novel idea from Microsoft, I was expecting their keyboard to be a full-size wireless keyboard that I'd have to find a place to hide in the living room.  Fortunately, they've designed a killer backlit-keyboard attachment to use with their upcoming instant messaging support. 

I also hope that it will work within the Media Extender to search for shows or go to a particular channel since it's very cumbersome to use the current remote control for that.

Here is a image of it and a link to engadget's article describing it in more detail:

So I kept on having performance issues with MCE 2005 and my Xbox 360 with a gigbit ethernet wired home.  Crazy, crazy, stuff.  It worked fine for a little bit after my last fix and has recently gone bad again without any new software installed.  I decided to take the plunge and install Vista on my server.  Wow, Media Center looks really nice Microsoft, good job!  However, the network performance was still sub par.  Completely dejected now, I went to Fry's to get a network cable tester to make sure all my wiring was alright.  Turns out everything was fine with my cables in use so I went searching the web again for any clues when I stumbled upon a couple of links:

• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/932345
• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929707/

From the second link, I tried method two and wham, the network performance tuner was pegged out and had all the bandwidth it needed for HDTV and beyond. 

Whew!  Case closed, Rx Pause in the Gigabit ethernet driver flow control settings.  I'll have to remember that one.

UPDATE (4/24): It's back and I don't know why!!!  This sucks.

UPDATE 2 (4/24, part 2): Troubleshooting some more...  So don't do both, even though I had only set the flow control to RX Paused, having the 100Mbps Full duplex setting with RX Paused might've been slowing it down too much.  Turning the Speed & Duplex setting on my DLink DES-1024D switch back to Auto seems to have fixed it (at least for now).

UPDATE 3 (4/30): Problems came back again, and this time, I know why it keeps coming back.  Evidently, the network adapter driver on Vista for Broadcom's NetXtreme 57xx series doesn't retain its advanced settings on reboot.  Even though the settings show Rx Pause after a reboot, its really not set, it must just be a UI setting it's remembering.  Everytime I reboot I have to change from Rx Pause to AUTO and back to Rx Pause for it to work.  So the original problem wasn't XP, it was the gigabit issue and the recurrance of the issue is caused by a faulty Vista driver.  I'll have to see what type of support I can get from Broadcom on this...

I've got a 100Mbps wired home and the Media Extender of the 360 continually tells me:

Session Terminated.  Another user or application on the windows media center-based PC has disconnected this device.

It makes me reconnect and everything is really slow.  Very frustrating, especially since I just spent a lot of time and effort wiring the house to eliminate wireless slugishness.

I stumbled on this knowledge base article from Microsoft:  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/911123.

Everything on my end was go, except I did have an error in the Application event viewer using Method 4.  The application listed was not very helpful.  It pointed to the Visual Studio Just-in-time debugger which was trying to catch the problem in a different application.  The error in the event viewer said:

Unauthorized window was detect while running the Media Center Experience, 'Visual Studio Just-In-Time Debugger', with file name '.

I removed Visual Studio 2005 hoping it would directly name the problematic application or driver, but apparently removing VS2005 doesn't remove the JIT debugger.  I also saw an article describing a DirectX filter that could cause problems and crash the Media Remote Manager throwing up Dr. Watson which has the same result as what I was seeing for those that don't have Visual Studio installed.

A few weeks ago, there was recorded TV show that I couldn't delete.  After deleting it finally, the extender from the 360 worked fine.  In a couple of days, the problem came back.  This time I moved all the recorded shows away and it didn't help.

A bunch of speculation is floating online as to what the problem could be: drivers, firewalls, virus protection, directx filters, FAT32, switches, routers, driver settings, etc.  I tried a lot of stuff and finally got it working let me tell you what did and didn't work:

Didn't work:

• Setting the network interface duplex mode to 100Mbps full, leave this on Auto.
• Wasn't the network cables or the switch.  Having an extra switch, cables and a laptop helped out here.  The network performance tuner showed terrible performance, but I think I had changed the duplex at this point.  Putting the desktop MCE and my laptop on a local switch bypasssing the house wiring helped figure out the house wiring was fine.
• Turning off the firewall didn't help.
• Turning off virus scanner didn't help.
• All the DirectX video decoders were fine.
• Removing MyTvToGo, Musicmatch MCE
• Removed Windows Media Player 11, went back to 10 with Windows Media Connect, lot of hassle but had no effect.
• Removing about 10 - 15 other applications

This is were it gets a little sketchy because I'm not sure extactly which of these solved the problem.

• Removing Quicktime/iTunes and it's update manager
• Removed Media Center Extender, searched in registry and hard drive for MCX which is the media center user.  At one point, I had 3 MCX profiles in Documents and Settings.  In this search, I found nothing.
• Reinstalled the latest Media Center Extender software from www.xbox.com/pcsetup.  I already had the latest and did this several times, hard to believe this could be the solution.
• A few other applications, not ZoneAlarm or any of the other biggies mentioned online.

Bottom line is that it's working fine now.  It had to be an application or an application's driver, but unfortunately I can't tell you exactly which one.  Hopefully this will be a good starting point for you.  Let me know what your experience was like.

UPDATE (4/24/07) - Fixed it.  See other blog entry: Vista and Xbox 360 Slow Wired Network Performance

UPDATE (11/15/07) - Just to be clear, remove all of these apps didn't help.  The network duplexing was the issue.  With Vista, the broadcom network drivers settings weren't being retained after reboot.  See other blog entry for details: Vista and Xbox 360 Slow Wired Network Performance

After trying to use Movielink to stream movies to the XBox360 and failing miserably, I thought I'd give their competitor a shot. At first look, their interface through MCE seemed better, less pixelated and it fit better in the screen, but their content wasn't nearly as extensive as Movielink's. They have a very limited selection and absolutely no free samples to test out the technology. Since there were no free samples, I passed trying it from my MCE2005 server to the XBox360.

Result, not enough content to bother.

Unbelievable that Movielink doesn't work with XBox extenders. After seeing how this is a company that Intel supports with Viiv (MCE + special hardware), I can't see how they can get away with it. I recently downloaded a sample movie of theirs to test streaming through my XBox360. I got in a loop where the Movielink Manager wouldn't complete it's install, it kept failing. Since they offered with the Live Chat (I guess they expected problems, huh?), I tried it out. Here is the transcript.

Katie S.: Hello Shawn
Katie S.: Do you have your pop up blocker enabled?
Shawn: i disabled it.
Shawn: that's what happened though
Katie S.: Ok, now click the following link
The agent is sending you to http://4077.movielink.com/moviemanager/CleanWMPDRM.exe
Katie S.: Follow the link above. We will need to delete your DRM component, which may also delete licenses from other music/movie rentals that you have in windows media format. If this is ok, proceed to click "Yes."
Katie S.: Let me know when the clean up is successful
Shawn: ok
Shawn: ok meaning its done
Katie S.: Good, now click the following link
The agent is sending you to http://drmlicense.one.microsoft.com/Indivsite/en/indivit.asp .
Katie S.: Click upgrade when enabled
Katie S.: and let me know when it is complete
Shawn: it's done
Katie S.: Click Start -> Programs -> movielink -> Relaunch Movielink Manager and let me know if you are able to open the Movielink Manager
Shawn: that did it.
Shawn: thanks

Ok, that's fine, got it to work on my MCE2005 desktop. Now I want to stream it to my XBox360 as a Media Center Extender. Didn't work. Unfortunately I get this error while trying to play the sample movie:

Security Error.
Unable to validate security of your media center extender. As a result, the extender will not play protected media content.

Now I contact "Live Chat" again to see what the problem is:

Fred C: Hello
Shawn: hi
Fred C: Shawn, unfortunately I cannot offer support for Media Center Extenders
Shawn: ok thanks.

Slam! Result, Movielink + Xbox360 = Waste of time. Now time to try CinemaNow.