Review Horizon

As the number of mobile devices in our house increased, our reliance on them also increased. Both me and my wife barely touch our PCs anymore (maybe when we do a quick Age of Empires III showdown on our home network, but with two kids, those days are fewer and long in between).

Our family also cut the cable cord quite a while ago, when the Dish Network wanted to increase our bill yet again. While we don’t have a full fledged cable subscription anymore, having Internet service from Time Warner comes with some perks, most notable the free included digital local channels (clear QAM), PBS and a bunch of other free channels as well including NBC sports.As part of my TV watching setup, I am using my Windows Media Center 7 as a local DVR, a number of XBOX 360 consoles as DVR clients to access the live/recorded TV around the house and the only thing missing would be the access of the same channels live and mobile, both from around the house and during my daily 1.5 hours train commute, via my tablet/smartphone over a 3G connections. What to do?

Well, let me tell you I have long searched for a cheap/good software only streaming solution since I already have my MCE server chugging quietly 24/7. I tried ORB and several other solutions that claim to be able to stream Live TV over the internet, but all the solutions found share one major caveat – they don’t work with digital TV tuners. Why? I have no idea, but that’s the way it is. I started to look around and the only reasonable priced solution came from Sling Media (now belonging to Dish Network) and their Slingbox Pro-HD SB300-100, their only model with an embedded ATSC/NTSC/QAM tuner. I built an entire ecosystem around it, streaming to PC, notebooks, iPhone / iPad / Nook Color / HP TouchPad running Android CM7, HTC Vivid and Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket both on my home network and away, and the result of this comprehensive experience is detailed in this review.

1. Slingbox Pro-HD box content

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Let’s be honest, Kinect is an amazing piece of technology and unlike Sony, Microsoft did not specifically tried to close it and limit its usage on XBOX 360 consoles only. Soon after the first units were made available for public, a myriad of hacks and innovative projects appeared all over the world, even 3rd party SDKs. Microsoft promised they’ll do something about it as well, and today is the big day. Kinect SDK beta version is released and yours for free to play with it if you have a Kinect sensor, a PC and good programming skills.

The SDK  is based on the software used on XBOX 360 but ported to .NET platform. You can use the libraries with the .NET language of your choice (C#, VB.NET or C++.NET). Platform wise, you’ll need a dual core machine, 4GB RAM, Windows 7 (yes, mandatory) and a DirectX 9.0c compatible graphic card. Visual Studio 2010 Express at a minimum (it is free!!!) and the latest .NET Framework, version 4.0.

Kinect SDK comes in both 32 and 64-bit versions (kinectsdk32.msi and kinectsdk64.msi both at the version 1.00.11), the download is around 20MB and it is capable of tracking your entire skeleton movements. The install kit includes the driver, API library and precious code samples. Hit the link below for download info.

via Microsoft Research

I, like many others my age, started my programming career learning BASIC. Initially on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum clone, after that on Commodore 64. Well, Microsoft wants to motivate the new generation to go into software development by releasing the 2010 equivalent of good old BASIC called Microsoft Small Basic. And it is small, at least by today standards, a meager 5.6MB install file for the current version, 0.9. I just downloaded it (for free, of course) , the installation took 15 seconds and I was good to go.

The application is very easy to use, it has Intellisense (a scaled down version of it, and very user friendly) and contextual help in the side bar. I intend to play with my 6 year old son in the weekend and see if he has any interest in it.

Small Basic is based on .NET technology, of course object oriented and also supports Silverlight, which allows you to publish your creations directly on your website and the visitors can run them in their browser, just like a Flash application. Microsoft also provides a converter to help you later “graduate” to Visual Basic. Check after the break for additional screen-shots. For more information, visit Microsoft Small Basic website. Read More…

I’ll never write myself tweets while watching TV, but reading the ones I follow might prove useful from time to time. I have been looking for a while for Windows Media Center plug-ins to improve my TV watching experience, and TwitterMCE from MCEZone seemed to be a rather useful one, so I went ahead and install it.

Description:

TwitterMCE will allow you to post tweets, view friends, followers, timelines, Read More…

Today Microsoft removes beta word from Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0. The new development suite sports a completely redesigned UI based on Office’s ribbon, and include tools for app development for Azure, Silverlight, Sharepoint and also the recently announced Windows Phone 7. The Silverlight 4 version is supported also, and it will launch tomorrow (with the release to come later).

Amongst the new features included in VS2010, you can find:

• Multiple monitor support (finally I can use my dual 24″ HP displays at work without starting two VS instances)
• Better Intellisense (it can find words that include what you type, not only that start with)
• Intellisense supports now JavaScript and jQuery
• Cleaner HTML
• Website dependency diagrams (for website developers)
• Intellitrace (to improve debugging and bug reproduction)
• ASP.NET MVC 2.0 built in
• Improved deployment tools

You can also expect to see improvements across all the functionality. To really improve the VS2010 performance, I strongly suggest buying a SSD drive which in my experience increase the compiling performance up to 5 times or more, depending of your usage.

According to NewTeeVee, Microsoft’s Silverlight client reached critical mass being installed on more than 60% of all Internet devices according with Microsoft exec. Brad Becker, director of product management for rich client platforms at Microsoft. Beside GPU acceleration, Silverlight 4 offers a bunch of useful features like multi-touch, accelerometers support, video-camera and mic support to promote voip solutions inside the web browser, etc.

Silverlight client is Microsoft’s answer to Adobe Flash and as we all now, is the technology behind Netflix’s movie streaming. Recently launched is the Silverlight 4 client, RC version and a new Silverlight client for Facebook that offers photos, feeds, Read More…

Introduction:

I promised an in-depth look of the mediabrowser plug-in for Windows Media Center and I am ready to deliver. My experience with mediabrowser started more than a year ago after I built my first Home Theater PC (HTPC). I used for a while the Movie Library provided as default, but something was lacking. After a while, I installed My Movies but it just wasn’t reliable enough for my configuration. I store all my movies on a central server and , My Movies client just didn’t work properly. So I looked around some more and found mediabrowser, a plug-in which at the time wasn’t as mature as My Movies but worked better for my configuration.

I will start describing mediabrowser by using it’s authors own words:

Formerly known as Video Browser, Media Browser is a personal media aggregator that takes your recorded, digital, or ripped media and presents it in a simple, easy to use interface. Media Browser prides itself on delivering a fast, intuitive, media rich experience for the whole family.

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I promised to blog about my HTPC software configuration, so here it is:

As we all know, nothing works anymore without software, as buggy and inefficient some of it it.  But I am here now, to talk a little bit about that software used specifically for entertainment. I was always a fan of Windows Media Center, starting with its earliest incarnations inside Windows XP, but we have come a long way since then…not necessarily in terms of what is offered out of the box (although Netflix and Internet TV integration are something to write home about), but especially in terms of plug-ins.

Talking about plug-ins, as a personal opinion, we would see way more if Microsoft would move their corporate might and create a Marketplace for Media Center, but it may be that WMC did not penetrate in terms of usage as much as an iPhone would do, and probably never will. It is just us, the technology aficionados…

OK, enough ranting. I will start by saying that I don’t use WMC for watching TV, so no TV tuners are involved. For TV, I have a VIP 722 Dish Network DVR that serves me well. And, when VIP 922 will come, I will get that as well. My current software configuration is oriented around consuming the media I already have (my legal purchased DVDs stored on a server for convenience), my music, family movies and pictures and access to any media available online (HULU, YouTube and Netflix mostly). Lately, I found WMC plug-ins to access Facebook pictures as well, so life is pretty good.

Here is a brief description:

Operating System – Windows 7 Home Premium, 32bit. The reason for choosing 32bit instead of 64bit is due to compatibility issues many of the plug-ins still have with 32bit. Because I don’t have that much time to tinker around, I choose the safe path.

Windows 7 Codecs – Windows 7 codec pack offered by Shark007. Nothing else! Shark007 covers everything I need in terms of codecs, from DIVX to MKV containers with H264 and DTS, including the dreaded MOV format from some of the current digital cameras. I never found any format that this plug-in pack won’t play. Alternative hardware accelerated (DXVA) H264 codecs are also provided to be used by all players.

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Media aggregator – mediabrowser is by far the best (in my opinion) plugin for WMC. It takes your recorded, digital or ripped media and presents it in several absolutely Read More…

Microsoft made the Windows Phone 7 SDK available online here. Based on what I’ve seen in terms of functionality, it will give Apple some reason to fight. The Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP  includes the following applications:

- Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone CTP

- Windows Phone Emulator CTP

- Silverlight for Windows Phone CTP

- XNA 4.0 Game Studio CTP

- Available as a separate application, Expression Blend 4 for Windows Phone CTP was also revealed, and it looks like this particular version will be free.

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