Looking at XBMC again – Part1

I decided to look at XBMC again but in much more detail this time with a possible view of actually migrating away from Windows Media Center to XBMC. Why you may ask? Well I still love WMC and its served my needs very well over the years, I still have a live system running on all the TV’’s in my home, the back-end is a home made WHS server with My Movies. I think everyone is aware now that WMC is a legacy product, yes it will still be available in the Pro version of Windows 8 with a paid download and yes that means it is still going to be around for many years yet. But it means that nothing is really going to be changing with WMC as far as new features and development goes, well at least not from Microsoft but third party developers I’m sure will continue. I don’t think XBMC will come close to WMC in the PVR department, this Wiki page suggests you can use XBMC as a PVR but its under heavy development. Anyone using it?
So anyhow I downloaded the latest version of XBMC Eden 11 for Windows and installed it on my laptop. If I do decided to switch to XBMC I will probably go the whole hog and use some distribution of Linux as well! But for now Windows it is. I initially plan to keep the back-end running My Movies for WHS too much work to ditch everything and start totally from scratch although that may happen if I go live with XBMC. My Movies has some integration / support for XBMC. In the Collection Management and in the WHS console you can enable metadata for XBMC which will create NFO / TBN files for all your Movie titles. They don’t support XBMC metadata for TV Series at the moment which is a bit of a problem to say the least.
I was recommended Ember Media Manager by a friend and I am currently using that to scrape for data and create the NFO / TBN files for my TV Series on video files. I can seem to get TV Series that are on DVD rips to even be displayed properly or play in XBMC at the moment, I have a feeling it just doesn’t work? Or maybe I’m not doing it quite right?
The first thing that hits you with XBMC is just the potential of what could be possible with it and the sheer size and scope of development, there are so many skins and program addons and addons of all types. I have already installed addons for BBC iPlayer, ITV Player, 40D, Demand5 and TVCatchup, had a quick go with them and they seem to work pretty well, none as pretty as TunerFree MCE but you don’t have to contend with embedded webpages, all the videos play natively in the XBMC player. The other thing that hits you is the number of settings, they seems to be way to many for my liking especially when compared to WMC. But I guess settings means you can do a lot more if you know what those settings do?
Below are some screen shots of my standalone XBMC install on the laptop, although it is linked to all the media files on the WHS so has full libraries built up. I am currently using the Aeon MQ3 skin which appears to be the best looking and my friend who is an XBMC guru and has been helping me a bit, says its just the best skin to have!
If I get in to XBMC more I may post up some demo videos of my setup when I am  happy with it.
Main start menu – not sure what they call it.
Movies

TV Shows

Whilst on the start menu you can push up and go to Recent. I am assuming its listing recently added TV shows although it might be recently watched?
You can do the same on the Movies menu as well as on the Music and Concerts menus.

Music menu item

Videos menu item

Concerts menu item – This only appeared after I had installed the Aeon MQ3 skin.

Images menu item – You can move the position of the main menu by pressing up or down, this is in the down position. I don’t like the images area its only folder / file browsing mode there is no pictures library like WMC / WMP.

Shutdown

Settings

And finally weather

I haven’t actually tried using a remote control as yet so can’t comment on that.
Movies - Views
Wall

3D Wall

Showcase
There was an artwork addon that had to be added for the Aeon MQ3 skin, this artwork addon scrapes for additional images like the four thumbs you can see below. It has saved these additional images in each movies folder on my WHS. I had a bit of a panic when I saw it doing this but it appears not to have over written any existing images that My Movies had put there.

Cover Flow had to be there didn’t it!

Shelf

Large List

Low List

Panel

List

Multiplex

As you can see with this Aeon MQ3 skin there are a lot of views in the movie library. It is recommended you turn off the views you know you wont be using, makes it faster apparently.
You can right click any movie title and select Movie Information from the popup menu to see a screen like this

I have to say the native codec support is well, amazing. It plays Blu-rays out of the box (Main movie only). The XBMC player played virtually every file format and container I threw at it, from my collection of test sample video files. There were two things it did not play for me, one being WTV files (DVR-MS OK) and the second being some .MOV files I had which originally came from the iTunes store. It did play other .MOV files I had fine however. I have not connected to an AVR yet and tried to bit stream, does that work? Looks like XBMC has a new Audio system coming in version 12 called Audio Engine.
Well that’s it for part one more in part two. Let me know if you are a Windows Media Center user? and how you feel about its future and your plans if any, to stay or move away?

Installing Windows 8 Consumer Preview first thoughts

Just a quick post as I’ve installed Windows 8 CP on to my older HTPC today and took some photos on my iPod.

You can download the ISO images from here

I installed the X64 bit English version.

I used an old 40GB Western Digital IDE hard disk.

A fish!

You can choose UK for Time and Currency Format and for the Keyboard, you then end up with a UK location in the region settings.

Product Key: DNJXJ-7XBW8-2378T-X22TX-BKG7J

The System Reserved partition that Windows creates during setup has increased from 100MB to 350MB.

Setups asks for your email address to create a new Microsoft account, I used my regular Live ID details.

I have to say the new Metro Start menu for me is confusing and makes finding what you want to do difficult, I’m sure with some time you would get use to it, but I’m not sure I’d use it on my workstations and would probably go back to a classic start menu which you can do in the registry. Obviously the Metro start menu is going to work better on tablets, touch screen devices etc.

To get the "classic" start menu back set the below registry key.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer

RPEnabled (DWORD) = 0

I configured Windows Media Player and Media Center as usual and added content in to the WMP library from my WHS shares. I was able to install the WHS V1 Connector OK.

However when I go in to the new Metro Music, Videos and Photos apps they are all empty showing no files, I’m not sure why this is?

I quickly tested Media Center (Not Live TV) and installed some of the 3rd party MCE add-ins I use.

Not working:

Microsoft UK MSN Player - Installs OK but every time I play a video I see: Video Error - There was a problem accessing this video.

However the video does then start to play in the background, if I click OK on the Video Error dialogue the video then stop playing.

My Movies - Installer checks Windows Version and won't proceed

Macrotube - Youtube videos not playing just get the blue MCE background

Appears to be Working:

MCE LoveFilm - Possible issue with existing titles in favourites, now all say "no streaming"

TunerFree MCE - Installing DRM update for WMP was not as straight forward as normal

Also I now have two menu strips in 8MC called Milliesoft instead of one, both have MCE LoveFilm and TunerFree icons on them.

RadioTime (TuneIn)

mControl - Home Automation - Could not find the mControl Client Config utility from the start menu / apps area / search - How do you see the normal program groups?

Other issues

WMP/8MC is doing some strange things. If I look in Windows Explorer I can see a D:\ System Reserved drive and E:\ which is my other Windows 7 drive. Initially in WMP E:\ drive could be seen in the WMP library as a mobile device and I had all sorts of weird stuff in the WMP library that shouldn't have been there. I could also see this E:\ drive in 8MC in the Photos and Video Libraries.

I rebooted and then in WMP/8MC it showed the D:\ System Reserved drive instead and I can now see this drive in Media Center in the Photos and Video libraries. Why is this happening?

ATI CCC isn't working? / doesn't look as normal, I can't see any usual options for desktop graphics properties, only CPU and Power Plan Settings. So can't set the scaling on the desktop size.

1280X720 is too small a resolution for the Metro Media apps to run ??? Had to change to 1080P but my Samsung TV only supports 720P native.

Summary

Obviously its early days, but my first day with Windows 8 I would have to say has been frustrating and confusing. But I need to spend more time and get use to things and testing more. Hopefully the Metro start menu will grow on me the more I use it. I was able to pin Windows Media Center and Windows Media Player on to the new start menu, to initially find them I had to use the search feature of the Metro start menu as they are not visible anywhere. WMP appears to still be version 12 I didn’t compare the version number to a Windows 7 PC, WMP looks the same to me as does Media Center.

How have you been getting on with Windows 8 ?

Standard MCE remote control - DVD button to launch My Movies!

I’ve wanted to be able to do this for along time but never figured it out and then I switched to using Logitech Harmony universal remote controls. But I had a requirement this week to be able to press the DVD button on a standard MCE remote control and for My Movies to be launched and not the native 7MC Movie Library.

There are probably many ways you can do this using programs such as Girder, Intelliremote, Eventghost, LM Remote KeyMap, ControlRemote to name a few.

However I wanted to just edit the registry to change the functionality of the remote controls DVD button and to use AutoHotKey which I am already using on the HTPC.

So if you want to do this, its a two stage process, first you need to edit the registry and change the DVD button to use a different keyboard command. By default Ctrl+Shift+M launches the native Movie Library. I wanted to change this so that Ctrl+Alt+M would be used. Secondly you need a small AutoHotkey script that detects Ctrl+Alt+M and launches the My Movies entry point in Media Center.

Editing the registry:

Open regedit and navigate to this key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\HidIr\Remotes\745a17a0-74d3-11d0-b6fe-00a0c90f57da

Right click 745a17a0-74d3-11d0-b6fe-00a0c90f57da and select Export from the menu.

Save it as HIDIR.reg

Right click 745a17a0-74d3-11d0-b6fe-00a0c90f57da again and export again and save a second copy as HIDIR-Modified.reg

Now find where you saved HIDIR-Modified.reg right click it and select edit. It will then open in notepad.

Scroll down to the end of the file and add:

,24,00,00,00,04,05,\
10

The Report Mapping Table should look like the below, I’ve marked in bold the code we added.

"ReportMappingTable"=hex:01,00,00,00,04,00,1e,02,00,00,00,04,00,1f,03,00,00,00,\
04,00,20,04,00,00,00,04,00,21,05,00,00,00,04,00,22,06,00,00,00,04,00,23,07,\
00,00,00,04,00,24,08,00,00,00,04,00,25,09,00,00,00,04,00,26,00,00,00,00,04,\
00,27,0b,00,00,00,04,00,28,0a,00,00,00,04,00,29,1d,00,00,00,04,02,25,1c,00,\
00,00,04,02,20,1f,00,00,00,04,00,51,1e,00,00,00,04,00,52,21,00,00,00,04,00,\
4f,20,00,00,00,04,00,50,22,00,00,00,04,00,28,4e,00,00,00,01,08,02,0f,00,00,\
00,01,09,02,23,00,00,00,01,24,02,3b,00,00,00,01,04,02,16,00,00,00,01,b0,00,\
18,00,00,00,01,b1,00,17,00,00,00,01,b2,00,14,00,00,00,01,b3,00,15,00,00,00,\
01,b4,00,1a,00,00,00,01,b5,00,1b,00,00,00,01,b6,00,19,00,00,00,01,b7,00,6e,\
00,00,00,01,cd,00,10,00,00,00,01,e9,00,11,00,00,00,01,ea,00,0e,00,00,00,01,\
e2,00,26,00,00,00,01,8d,00,12,00,00,00,01,9c,00,13,00,00,00,01,9d,00,0c,00,\
00,00,03,82,00,29,00,00,00,03,83,00,2a,00,00,00,03,82,00,24,00,00,00,04,05,\
10

Save the HIDIR-Modified.reg file and then double click it to load it back in to the registry.

Or you can download my already edited HIDIR-Modified.reg file from my Sky Drive here.

Add the AutoHotKey script:

If your not already using AutoHotKey you will need to download and install from here. When you install it, it asks you if you want to create a sample script file in your Documents folder say yes.

You should have a green icon with a H on it in your system tray, if not find AutoHotKey from the start menu and click on it, then in the system tray right click the AutoHotKey icon and select Edit script.

Paste the below code in to the end of the file:

^!m::
IfWinExist Untitled - My Movies
WinActivate
else
Run %windir%\ehome\ehshell.exe /entrypoint:{8984aed5-7c9d-42f0-b2ad-c39bbcf04a25}\{810d7b87-1300-4aed-a700-1c6179f8f14b}
return

Save the AutoHotKey.ahk file and ensure you add AutoHotKey in to the Windows Startup folder so AutoHotkey runs at startup. Then reboot the PC.

Now when you press the DVD button on your standard MCE remote control the My Movies – Movie Library should be opened and not the native 7MC Movie Library !

If you need to restore your registry back to how it was before you started just double click on HIDIR.reg that you created in the first step.

More details can be found on The Green Button here

MCE LoveFilm updated–2.1.1

My new favourite Windows Media Center add-in MCE LoveFilm has been updated to version 2.1.1

What’s new since version 2.0 ?

• Added "New Releases" and "Just Added"
• Added the ability to save favourites.
• Online favourites for licensed customers.
• Improved streaming capabilities.

New Releases and Just Added are now available under genres, this should make finding new content a little easier.

Favourites - you can now add titles in to a favourites list, I think this is a handy feature for when you are browsing around looking for titles of interest, you can now mark them for later viewing and find them in the new favourites menu item.

Online favourites for licensed customers. You can now set a pin code in the settings on each HTPC that you have MCE LoveFilm installed on. The idea is that your favourites are stored in the “cloud” and you can access the same set of favourite titles from multiple HTPC’s running MCE LoveFilm.

You can now also install a web browser extension for Chrome and Firefox, which enables you to browse the LoveFilm website and then click a button to add the current title to your MCE LoveFilm favourites. Full details are here.

Still on my wish list are watched icons and for the TV Series / Episodes to be grouped like they are in TunerFree MCE.