The Richter Scale^®

Sunday was a pretty miserable day for me. The Terabyte RAID disk array in my Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4-based file server I use here at home suffered a major drive problem that was not resolvable using the RAID system. In plain English, I had a system crash and data loss. I discovered this around noon, and had to cancel my plans to attend a Superbowl party hosted by a Colts fans here on Bonaire, as well as another social engagement later that evening. Instead I spent the day downloading new Red Hat install CDs, backing up my backup (I only lost about a day’s worth of data), setting up a temporary replacement file server, and building the RAID-based server from scratch. I ultimately had to rebuild it yet a second time, as the drive that was causing the crash was not the one I originally thought. By the time I was mildly operational it was 5am on Monday.

At which point I realized I had completely missed the Superbowl and, more importantly to me, the Superbowl commercials, one of my annual guilty pleasures.

Well, I spent yesterday in additional recovery mode, and am now catching up on my e-mail and work, again, but thanks to iFilm, I have been able to watch all the 2007 Superbowl commercials without the long gaps of football in between. My favorite is the Blockbuster Mouse Ad. The Snickers Kiss and Bud Light Auctioneer ones are pretty good too.

So here’s another one of my current TechAnnoyances. And this one is probably all Microsoft’s fault too. Late last year I bought a Hewlett-Packard z565 Digital Entertainment Computer (DEC). That’s a fully loaded Windows XP Media Center Edition PC designed to reside in one’s living room among all the other A/V toys one has (never mind that it’s very deep and wouldn’t fit on the shelf under my TV).

The Microsoft weltanschau (world view) is that all media should pass through a media PC, incidentally, which doesn’t work very well with a family that just wants to be able to turn on the TV and watch it without having to also boot or wake-up a PC and Media Center software to do that. But that’s a separate annoyance.

My particular gripe is that the remote control for the HP DEC’s media center functionality happens to emit a number of the same coded commands as the remote for the Xbox 360. And in my living room, both of these devices are situated close to each other (not that moving one a few feet would make much difference).

The one remote control button which really causes me grief is the On/Off button, as when I power off the HP DEC (which puts it into standby mode), on comes my Xbox 360. Conversely, if I use the remote to power on my Xbox 360, the power state on the HP DEC changes too. I’ve taken to burning the extra calories it takes - all two of them, to go and manually switch on or off the HP DEC and Xbox 360 just to avoid this Tech Annoyance. But sometimes I forget (or my kids do), and on comes the Xbox 360 when you don’t need it…

This morning a friend called to say that humpback whales had been spotted in the water off Bonaire’s Pink Beach area, which is only about a 10 minute drive from my house. Humpbacks are exceedingly rare here, so I grabbed Linda, a tripod, and a camera with a big lens, and headed out.

We saw two whales breach right as we arrived, but did not get a chance to take pictures - they went back under too quickly.

So while waiting for them to resurface (they didn’t do that where we could see them, and we had to leave after about 25 minutes), I spotted the above pictured special denizens of Bonaire, Caribbean Flamingos - more exactly a flight of them - coming back from feeding in nearby Venezuela to nest here on Bonaire.

The wide shot is what I shot with my Nikon D2x with a Nikon 80-400mm VR lens at 400mm. The close-up is a crop of that same image. Note the nice Bonaire scene in the cropped shot - blue and turquoise waters, sunny skies, a dive boat in the background, and of course, flamingos.

Living in the modern age we do, we become dependent on our technological tools working properly. And when they don’t work like we expect them to, we get annoyed. Case in point - Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0 and capturing HDV (high definition digital video) content with scene detections.

As part of my raft of technology investments last year, I bought a Sony HDR-HC3 Handycam - a very nice and compact HD camcorder. I also upgraded my years old copy of Adobe Premiere (a top of the line video editing tool) so that I could attempt to edit my high definition video content.

One key requirement of being able to edit video on a computer is getting it into the computer in the first place. And Premiere Pro 2.0 has a very nice Capture utility that allows one to connect a FireWire (IEEE 1384) cable to one’s camcorder, and digitally capture the video off the tape. Another nice feature Premiere Pro 2.0 has is something called “Scene Detect”, which looks at the time codes your camcorder records onto the tape and when it detects a time shift, it ends one clip and starts a new one. This is a lot easier that the old way, which was to manually figure out where each clip’s in and out (start and end) points are and manually feed them into the software. Scene detection is nothing very new, but it is very useful.

However, here’s where the annoyance part comes it - Premiere Pro 2.0’s scene detection doesn’t work with HDV input. After scouring the Web, I found two solutions:

1) Use an external program to do the capture, like the free HDVSplit (I tried that and it worked for about 10 minutes before crashing, but it did work, and I’m sure I could have tweaked some settings to make it not crash); or

2) Switch the camcorder into DV (non-HD) output mode, use Premier Pro in DV capture mode where scene detect works to capture all the scenes on the tape, export a batch list of all the start and stop times of the DV captures, switch the camera into HDV output mode and then import the batch list of clips to use for recapturing all the HDV content in HDV resolution and format (see here for details). This approach, which is really more than twice the work (and time) than being able to do the HDV scene detect capture normally, does work. However, I found that you need to leave a dummy clip at the front of your tape, and a dummy clip at the end (otherwise you have to manually capture the first and last clips, based at least on the two tapes I captured this way).

Now, I ask you… Does this make sense? That a multi-hundred dollar piece of software which offers this scene detect capability in one older (DV) mode of operation can’t do it in the current mode (HDV), but a free piece of software can? Damn, I’m annoyed.

I’ll be back soon with more recent Tech Annoyances.

Last night I tried an experiment to see if I could get relatively inexpensive (sub-$300) HD-DVD playback going on my PC. The components of this experiment, other than the PC, involved an Xbox 360 HD-DVD Player and Cyberlink’s PowerDVD Ultra software.

I’m pleased to say the experiment worked. The $199.99 Xbox 360 HD-DVD Player (which I raved about here) is a USB 2.0 device. I merely plugged in the HD-DVD drive, waited for Windows XP to recognize it (I allowed Windows to go to the Windows web site to look for drivers too), and after around a minute or two, the drive was fully installed and usable as a DVD drive.

The next step was to install the $99.95 Cyberlink PowerDVD Ultra software. The current version of the software (pictured above) installs for either HD-DVD or Blu-ray Disc support - you have to choose, although company officials tell me that as soon as next month, a free upgrade will be made available to all purchasers of the current version which will support both versions for folks fortunate enough to have both HD-DVD and Blu-ray Disc drives in their PC.

The PowerDVD Ultra software comes with a tool called HD Advisor, which scans your system for compatible drives and to ensure your system is powerful enough to do a real-time decode of the high definition formats. The minimum requirements are actually not insubstantial, as processing high definition content requires a lot of CPU and graphics horsepower. However, if you do have a suitable system, it works very well. The only minor annoyance I found was the inability to turn off subtitles, but I suspect that is user error (or at least a lack of reading relevant documentation).

The other nice thing about this combo is that you get a free copy of the remake of King Kong in HD-DVD (at least as of last week), and a spare Xbox 360 remote control (not much use on your PC, but maybe you can sell it on eBay or use it with your Xbox 360 if you have one).

So, for $299.94 (not including any possible shipping costs or sales tax), you can watch HD-DVD movies on your PC. Not a bad deal at all (assuming your PC is powerful enough, of course).

I know over the years I have subjected many of my readers to the “woes” of living on Bonaire, a small Caribbean island with, among other things, lousy TV service, and obviously no U.S. ZIP code. You might ask why TV is even important when living in paradise, and would answer that mindless entertainment is needed even here.

The reason the ZIP code (or more specifically, not having one) is important is because it means we cannot get Electronic Program Guides - EPGs - see my post on “TV Time Shifting in Paradise” from over a year ago about this.

I have managed to cobble together a partial EPG on my new HP z565 Digital Home Entertainment Center (a Windows XP Media Center Edition PC that’s designed to sit in your living room) by using a Miami-area ZIP code, and then renumbering and deleting channels as best I can. It at least works for three major U.S. networks, Cartoon Channel, HBO, Showtime, and Disney, and has already been useful. As an added bonus, I can stream recorded shows to the Xbox 360 in my bedroom should I choose to.

However, an acquaintance recently reminded me that I am paying for an expensive business connection for DirecTV in my office in Marshall, Texas, where I only spent a few weeks last year, with the TV there being unwatched the rest of the time (and I only watch it for background noise in the evenings when I am there). The Samsung DirecTV decoder also has an 80GB driver and TiVo service. But, still it’s rather expensive per-hour viewing cost.

Around the same time as I was reminded of this, a couple of other friends mentioned that they had installed Slingbox devices so they could watch their home TV signals remotely while traveling. Ding ding ding - bells went off in my addled brain.

So, during my most recent visit to Marshall a few weeks ago, I installed a Slingbox Pro box (ordered from Amazon.com - about $218), and I couldn’t be much happier. The Slingbox Pro device takes video signal input in the form of either a cable TV signal, composite video or S-Video plus audio, or HDMI (with an optional cable) digital input for HD signals. I plugged in my DirecTV TiVo box, hooked up the infrared transmitters that come with the Slingbox Pro so they could control the DirecTV box, and I was off.

The Slingbox software, which maker Slingmedia calls “SlingPlayer”, was easy to set up - both to control the Slingbox itself, as well as provide the necessary controls on my notebook to view my TV signal. I also had Linda try it back on Bonaire after I set it up, and she was able to get it going there too. The really neat thing about SlingPlayer is that it knows all about the particular DirecTV decoder I have, and even has a virtual remote control (looks identical to the physical remote) that I can manipulate with my mouse. That in turns means I can access all the TiVo functionality of the box remotely too. And it all works over an Internet connection. The more upstream capability you have to send out a signal, the better. In my case the DSL connection at my office in Texas offers 768Kbps upstream, sufficient for a pretty reasonable 640x480 video stream from the Slingbox.

After I got back from Texas and CES I went and set up Slingplayer software on the HP z565 in my living room, and can now watch live TV from Texas in my living room. Full screen on my 61” TV is too grainy and jumpy, but I can get a decent image at about 24” diagonal, which is just fine to catch up on missed shows and programming I would otherwise not get. It also means I can stop paying $1.99 for missed episodes of Grey’s Anatomy, Desperate Housewives, and Lost. And, I can also watch it from any PC with the SlingPlayer software. And for certain handheld devices, there’s even Slingplayer Mobile version for mobile phones and PDAs running the Windows Mobile operating system.

I’m also considering installing another Slingbox at my in-laws in New Hampshire so I can watch their TV signal here on Bonaire, kind of as a back-up of sorts (no TiVo there yet, though, but I can fix that too).

My biggest regret with the Slingbox is that I didn’t think of getting one sooner.

My next issue to solve is how to get a video signal from the output of my big screen TV in my living room to the small TV in my kitchen without running cables (my wife hates cables across the floor or ceiling). We have concrete walls, so there’s no good way to run them inside the walls. The concrete walls also effectively destroy my use of a wireless AV transmitter - those really need to be line of sight, or at least through a wood/drywall panel, not eight inches of concrete in order to have an interference free image.

However, if I wait long enough, Sling Media will be selling the SlingCatcher - a box which will let me use my network connection (wired or wireless) to receive TV input from a Slingbox either in the same building or anywhere else there’s a Slingbox I have access to.

I give the Sling Media Slingbox Pro a 9.5 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale.

Well, in addition to now being closely associated with discussions on the future of HD-DVD and Blu-ray standards, in particular with respect to the adult entertainment industry, a recent interview of mine has made it to the web (not YouTube yet, though).

Take a look at this clip, shot during a media luncheon at Pat Meier-Johnson’s Lunch@Piero’s event. It’s a five minute interview dealing with commentary on multimedia convergence and the future of tangible media (e.g. CDs, DVDs).

As 2006 came to a close, Microsoft did a lot of chest thumping to declare themselves the winner of the next generation console battle, touting console sales (over 10 million Xbox 360s sold) and content (160 high definition Xbox 360 titles). Disregarding the fact that the next generation console battle is really just starting in earnest, and Microsoft merely had an early lead, the 160 titles proclamation puzzled me. After all, I think I am probably one of Microsoft’s best individual consumer clients - I have three Xbox 360s and a couple of dozen Xbox 360 packaged titles - and I add another few every month as they are released, and I did not realize I was missing well over 100 games in my collection. Nor have I seen that many games on shelves at BestBuy or GameStop. So, I asked my media contact at Microsoft for a current list of high definition Xbox 360 titles, and this is what they sent back:

2006 FIFA World Cup
A Train HX
Amped 3
Aqua Zone*
Assault Heroes*
AstroPop*
Bankshot Billiards 2*
Battlefield 2: Modern Combat
Bejeweled 2*
Bionicle Heros
Blazing Angels: Squadrons of WW II
Blitz: The League
Blue Dragon
Bomberman Act: Zero
Bullet Witch
Burger King: Big Bumpin’
Burger King: Pocketbike Racer
Burger King: Sneak King
Burnout: Revenge
Cabela’s African Safari
Cabela’s Alaskan Adventure
Call of Duty 2
Call of Duty 3
Chanbara Beauty X
Chromehounds
Cloning Clyde*
Condemned
Contra*
Crystal Quest*
Culdcept Saga
DEAD OR ALIVE 4
Dead or Alive Xtreme 2
Dead Rising
Defender*
Dig Dug*
Disney/Pixar’s Cars
Doom*
Dynasty Warriors 5 Empires
Earth Defense Force 3
Enchanted Arms
Eragon
Everyparty
F.E.A.R.
Far Cry Instinct: Predator
Far East of Eden ZIRIA
Feeding Frenzy*
FIFA 06 Road to World Cup
FIFA 2007
Fight Night Round 3
Final Fantasy XI
Football Manager 2006
Football Manager 2007
Frogger*
Full Auto
Galaga*
Gauntlet*
Gears of War
Geometry Wars Retro Evolved*
Gun
Hardwood Backgammon*
Hardwood Hearts*
Hardwood Spades*
Hexic*
Hitman: Blood Money
Import Tuner Challenge
Jewel Quest*
Joust*
Just Cause
Kameo
Kengo ZERO
King Kong (Peter Jackson’s King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie)
LEGO Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy
LMA Manager 2007
Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth II
Lost Planet: Extreme Condition
LOVE FOOTBALL
Lumines Live*
Madden NFL 06
Madden NFL 07
Major League Baseball 2K6
Marble Blast 2*
Marvel Ultimate Alliance
Moto GP 2006
Mutant Storm Reloaded*
NBA 2K6
NBA 2K7
NBA Live 06
NBA Live 07
NCAA College Hoops 2K6
NCAA College Hoops 2K7
NCAA Football 07
Need For Speed Most Wanted
Need for Speed: Carbon
New Rally X*
NHL 07
NHL 2K6
NHL 2K7
NINETY-NINE NIGHTS
NovaDrome*
Open Season
Outpost Kaloki*
Over G
Pac-Man*
Perfect Dark Zero
Phantasy Star Universe
Pimp my Ride
Prey
Pro Baseball Spirits 3
Pro Evolution Soccer 6
Project Gotham Racing 3
Project Sylpheed
Quake 4
Ridge Racer 6
RoboBlitz*
Robotron*
Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis
Rumble Roses XX
Saints Row
Samurai Warriors 2
Scramble*
Senko no Ronde Rev. X
Shin Sangoku Musou 4 special
Small Arms*
Smash TV*
Sonic the Hedgehog
SPECTRAL FORCE 3 INNOCENT RAGE
Star Trek Legacy
Street Fighter II Hyper Fighting*
Super Robot Wars XO
Superman Returns: The Videogame
Tenchu Senran
Test Drive Unlimited
Tetris Grand Master 3*
Texas Hold’Em*
The American Civil War
The Conveni 200X
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
The Godfather The Game
The Outfit
Tiger Woods 2007
Tiger Woods PGA Tour 06
Time Pilot*
Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter
Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas
Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Double Agent
Tomb Raider Legend
Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland
Tony Hawk’s Project 8
Top Spin 2
Toryumon
Totemball
Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3
Uno*
Viva Pinata
Wik & the Fable of Souls*
World Championship Poker 3
World Series of Poker: Tournament of Champions
Wrestle Kingdom
WWE SMACKDOWN VS. RAW 2007
Xbox Live Arcade Unplugged Vol. 1
X-Men 3: The Movie Game (aka X-Men: The Official Game)
Zegapain NOT
ZEGAPAIN XOR
Zoids Infinity EX Neo
Zuma*

Okay - I am not into sports games, certain car racing games being an exception - I love Burnout: Revenge, although calling that a sports game is a real stretch. But sports games make up a healthy percentage of the titles on the list. There are also a number of games on the list that are only available outside the U.S., including Bullet Witch (Japan for now, U.S. in the next couple of months) and Chanbara Beauty X. And a few others appear to not be shipping yet anywhere as best I can tell (e.g. Super Robot Wars XO).

But, the other group of games I was surprised (or maybe not) to find Microsoft touting as high definition games were Xbox Live games for the Xbox 360. They may be high definition, I guess, but in Bejeweled 2 that only buys you nice looking cut scenes and prettier sparkles. I guess, however, they really still are high definition titles. And Microsoft never said 160 “packaged” titles, did they? (Although that’s what I thought was implied.)

For now, I guess I actually have all the games that I want and can easily get my hands on and be able to play/read - my Kana and Kanji skills are lacking, so I prefer games in English. And I am eagerly awaiting Lost Planet, which arrives here on Bonaire for me in less than a week. Not that I will have much time to play it. One more thing to delegate to my kids, I suppose.

I have spent the last week setting up over a half dozen new UPSes, a new multimedia receiver, and three high end Windows XP Media Center Edition computers - two fully loaded Dell XPS 710 systems and an HP x565 Digital Entertainment Center. Seeing as these were new installations, I decided to bite the bullet and go ahead an accept Microsoft’s Automatic Update suggestion to install Internet Explorer 7 (IE7).

Well, one of the other things we do here at the Richter high-tech household is use a central file server (running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3), and that file server includes some applications we run on local systems. Well, Microsoft, in it’s desire to help the average user avoid running bad programs has implemented additional security features as part of IE7, features that get really annoying for more advanced users. In particular, when you run applications off a server on a LAN, IE7’s default settings cause a dialog box to pop-up entitled “Security Warning”, and asking you to verify you really really really want to run the program in question.

One application we use in turn spawns calls to a Windows version of the PERL scripting language, dozens of times, and each time we’d get a warning.

We used Google to try to find a solution, and the closest we got to a solution was here. But the real answer was in the comments to that blog post, and not the blog post itself.

In any event, if you have a similar problem, including for the error “Publisher Code Not Be Verified”, try this solution to see if it makes it go away. A concise summary of the solution follows.

First, get to the Internet Options control. Three ways to do this: 1) Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Internet Options; 2) Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Security Center -> Internet Options; and 3) IE7 -> Tools -> Internet Options (works only if you have the menu bar enabled).

Once there, click on the Security tab at top, then in Local Intranet, click Sites, and then unclick “Automatically detect intranet network”. Voila.

Nice of Microsoft to make it so easy to locate and resolve. Not.

Those who have followed my writing over the years know that I have a strong belief that the adult entertainment industry drives a lot of technology forward. The adult industry is credited with making VHS a successful standard resulting in Sony’s Betamax losing the video tape recording standards battle. Likewise, the first profitable commercial uses I witnessed of streaming live compressed video over a network connection (ISDN) were of on-line interactive peep shows. And arguably, multimedia PCs, with speakers and CD-ROM drives, were driven by the adult industry’s foray into MPEG movies, and interactive adult titles.

And now the issue of the importance of the adult industry’s adoption of technology (or the lack of adoption a technology) comes to the fore again with the standards battle between HD-DVD and Blu-ray Disc.

For those not familiar with HD-DVD and Blu-ray, they are competing standards for high definition (HD) content on discs similar to DVDs. But they offer many times the resolution of traditional DVD on a properly equipped high definition television or display. From personal experience I can tell you that the imagery is incredibly crisp with both HD-DVD and Blu-ray, and I now find myself cheated when I have to watch a normal DVD because it seems so grainy and fuzzy.

HD-DVD is supported mainly by Toshiba on the hardware side, while Blu-ray comes from Sony. Each side has its exclusive hardware supporters, as well as exclusive studios which support that format, and there are a few companies that are “bi-definition” - they support both formats. Both sides want the other to just go away. Blu-ray is technologically superior to HD-DVD, but HD-DVD is cheaper and has some perception issues in its favor (I’ll post my Richter Scale column from TechWatch over on http://www.RichterScale.org in a couple of weeks that explains this in greater detail).

But back to the adult industry. A year ago the big production companies in the adult industry were all for Blu-ray - they appreciated the greater disc capacity (50GB vs. 30GB for HD-DVD) and the quality reputation that Sony has. Fast forward one year later where all the top adult studios are now declaring for HD-DVD as their next generation DVD standard.

Why? Well, in speaking with management at two of the studios - Wicked Pictures and Digital Playground - they could not find anyone to replicate their discs in Blu-ray. Joone - an award winning director and manager of Digital Playground told me that Sony forced him to go HD-DVD because they have an agreement with their replicators that they will lose their license to make Blu-ray discs if they duplicate adult content. The head of marketing at Wicked, Jackie Ramos, said much the same thing.

At a meeting I had with Sony Pictures last week during CES, I asked Don Eklund, Vice President of Technology, whether this was true. Eklund indicated that while the three replication facilities Sony itself owned indeed were under agreement not to replicate adult content (see this Computerworld article for more), he was not aware of this restriction applying to the other handful of Blu-ray replicators out there.

One adult publisher - Vivid - appears to not be facing the same issues, or maybe not yet anyway. Vivid plans to release their first high definition disc title ("Debbie Does Dallas Again") in both HD-DVD and Blu-ray format. I was unable to reach Steven Hirsh of Vivid to get more insight into how they are able to claim to do Blu-ray when everyone else that counts in adult entertainment is not able to do Blu-ray.

One thing is for sure, though. The legend of the Adult industry breaking Betamax and making VHS did make an impression on at least some members of the HD-DVD camp, as Wicked’s Ramos disclosed to myself and fellow journalist Dan Nystedt (see here and here) for his article (with quotes from yours truly) during a meeting with Ramos.

Ramos said that in the Fall of 2006 his company was approached by someone in the HD-DVD camp to adopt the HD-DVD format, and once that happened, all sorts of previously closed doors opened up for them. So, after months and months of no progress, they finally got started for earnest in November and last week released their first HD-DVD title - “Camp Cuddly Pines Powertool Massacre”, an HD-DVD re-release of the 2005 AVN Award winning movie by the same name.

Folks in the Blu-ray hardware camp are certainly not making similar overtures to the adult entertainment industry, and it may ultimately be Blu-ray’s downfall.

However, content is still king, and the best weapon Blu-ray has against HD-DVD is exclusive content, such as movies from Disney. Will this become a popularity contest between Disney and adult movies? Time will tell.