blog://brycem@microsoft.com : Personal Posts

AD: Two slightly used TiVos for sale

BryceMilton — Wed, 22 Jun 2005 03:35:00 GMT

Before Windows Media Center Edition was released, I purchased two TiVo DVRs. My family has really enjoyed these units - In fact my 3 year old daughter has become so used to being able to watch a favorite episode of Rugrats on demand that when we explained that grandma's TV can only play scheduled programs she was shocked and disbelieving :-) Also, (slightly embarrassing, but true) TiVo taught my 5-year old how to read! Nevertheless, the TiVos in our household are being supplanted by superior technology: Windows Media Center Edition! I started by playing around with the free CD that Microsoft employees could get and putting a Hauppauge MCE250 tuner card my desktop, and helping them beta test their subsequent updates and was finally won over. When I started using MCE, it seemed a weak facsimile of my beloved TiVo, but the rate at which it has been evolving has far-outstripped TiVo, and the home media scenarios they've been working on have made the anemic Tivo II Home Media Option seem pretty, well anemic. We really liked our TiVos but I'm thinking the time has come to sell these units while there are still people out there willing to buy them!

-Bryce

The Windows Server System Song

BryceMilton — Tue, 10 May 2005 05:36:00 GMT

Jeff Swift was asking me about royalty-free music earlier today and the first thing that popped to mind was Richard Stallman's magnificent "Free Software Song" - Jeff thanked me for my suggestion, but pointed out that it wasn't very appropriate fare for a Microsoft blog entry... He was of course right as usual, but he got me thinking: Why not introduce my very own version of this timeless classic that is (slightly) better suited to a Microsoft blog? Without any more ado, I present to you the Windows Server System Song for your listening pleasure! (MP3 version here)

Run Windows Server System Software;
Time and money, admins, spend less of both.
Run Windows Server System Software;
Time and money, admins, do more with less---

Penguinistas get tons of free press,
Sad but true, admins, sad but true
Hippy freeware can't run an enterprise;
Not "good enough", admins, hold out for great---

If you buy Penguinista freeware
Support costs, admins, Kernels Panic,
Just fdisk that kludgey OSS
Windows Server, admins, ever more---

Run Windows Server System Software;
Time and money, admins, spend less of both.
Run Windows Server System Software;
Time and money, admins, do more with less---

-Bryce

6/21/05 note to Groklaw.net readers: I wasn't my intention to mock the FSF itself, so much as it was to mock Richard Stallman's taste in music and I stand firmly by that criticism :-)

Paintball Outing

BryceMilton — Fri, 06 May 2005 22:01:00 GMT

This last weekend a couple of guys from the EEC and the Windows Server TAP team went down to a place called Hole-in-the-wall Paintball to shoot each other with small projectiles from pneumatic weapons :-)

Before

From left to right, we have Matt Wagner, Dave Kearney, Do Kim, myself, Nathan McAffee, and Nathan's neighbor.

The tactics were pretty loose, but we got better as the day progressed. We played "air ball" (shooting at each other while taking cover behind inflatable obstacles), and "woodsball" team matches until someone had the bright idea of challenging a large contingent from the Woodinville High School Baseball Team who were there playing that day as well. We were outnumbered by about 2.5 to one against this large band of high school boys and girls :-) We acquitted ourselves honorably by taking out about 2 or more of theirs for every player we lost, and won 2 out of four matches by the time we were ready to pack things in. There were no serious casualties, but a few paintballs did manage to find their way behind Matt's mask (the swelling had gone down considerably by Monday, thankfully :-)

-Bryce

After

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

BryceMilton — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 22:09:00 GMT

What Kind of American English Do You Speak? - Having been born and raised here in the Redmond area with a couple of years spent in rural parts of Pennsylvania and Maryland and elsewhere, here's how I tested out on the latest "timewaster of the week":

75% General American English

15% Yankee

5% Dixie

5% Midwestern

0% Upper Midwestern

-Bryce

Terminal Dodgeball

BryceMilton — Fri, 15 Apr 2005 06:15:00 GMT

Last week the Terminal Services Team squared off against the EEC crew in a very one-sided dodgeball game at the ProClub in Redmond... I wasn't able to make it, but as I hear things, the score was something like EEC=3, TS=0! Stanley Jones took some video of it using a Kodak digital camera which I've put up on a streaming media server for your viewing pleasure :-)

-Bryce

Microsoft's version of the Darwin Award...

BryceMilton — Mon, 04 Apr 2005 23:03:00 GMT

Well, it's official: Richard Gregg has been sentenced to 2 years in one of Washington State's fine correctional facilities for the crime of tragic stupidity. This is really a shame - Richard is a very likable fellow who had run the software library for the Windows Application Compatibility Testing Team, first as a contractor and later as a full-time employee, since the days of Windows '97 "Memphis" (later known to the world as "Windows '98" because we shipped late). Given that a large part of his job was to buy MS and 3rd-party software, his management chain had been shuffled a half-dozen times over the years, and the inadequacy of our controls on the internal software purchasing system, I can see why it would have been easy for his activities to go undetected and unquestioned for quite some time. Two years plus full restitution is a stiff penalty, but I'm really glad to see that he's had the courage to own up to this rather than going the way of the dude...

-Bryce

Windows Messenger in Corporate Environments

BryceMilton — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 23:03:00 GMT

I had a surprise the other day - I run MSN Messenger 6.2 on my laptop here at work for occasional IM sessions with friends and family, and after I signed in yesterday morning with my user@microsoft.com Passport, it prompted me to change my Passport email addy to user@messengeruser.com! It told me to wait an hour to sign back in while they "upgraded" my account, and then later in the day when I did sign back in with MSN Messenger 6.2, it prompted me to download and install a special version of Windows Messenger 5.1 for my new corporate account... It was automagically configured to use both internal LCS SIP accounts and external .NET Passport accounts and seems to work fine. In fact, nothing appears to have changed here on the front-end so I'm kind of curious about what may have changed on the backend... I'm guessing that anyone with a user@microsoft.com Passport will have gotten the same prompts - Anyone know what's going on here?

-Bryce

Inappropriate relations with a Sun server...

BryceMilton — Sat, 12 Mar 2005 02:50:00 GMT

Wow! If a Microsoftie has a few complimentary words to say about Sun's latest Windows-compatible hardware, should he be fired for revealing his latent "hardware fetishist" tendencies? According to TheRegister, the answer is a logic-defying "yes". Fortunately, my boss doesn't look to the Register for staffing guidance, and colleagues assure me that having the Register tear into you personally is in fact something of an honor:-) At least el Reg managed to preserve the core message that Microsoft and Sun are capable of putting the customer's needs before egos (even if it was sandwiched between baseless hints at an impending termination) I'm thinking of having some nice t-shirts made for my team here at "the Beast's Enterprise Engineering Center", what do you think of enlisting Beastie's help, now that he's about to be unemployed? Ok, ok - Perhaps not that's not such a great idea, after all...

-Bryce

Making life as a LUser more livable

BryceMilton — Mon, 28 Feb 2005 19:30:00 GMT

Well, after reading Aaron Margosis' blog, I decided to give running as a limited user at home another try... I'm used to running *Nixoid workstations in this manner of course and I've tried running this way on my Windows boxes on a couple of occasions in the past and had been dissatisfied with the experience: The first time, I had just clean installed my NT4 Workstation machine and ran for a few weeks as luser until my lovely wife put a stop to it because of the applications compatibility issues we saw with a bunch of applications she was attached to. The second time was a few years later on our Win2000 Pro machine that I had setup and operated for quite awhile as admin and when I tried to get our luser profile running by default, I ran into a maddening series of MSI issues with Office applications and other app-compat issues, not to mention getting fed up with having to logout\logon whenever I wanted to install apps or visit Windows Update.

This time however, was different: Following the guidance contained in this article for PCs that aren't domain joined, I took the XP SP2 Media Center PC that serves as our primary desktop at home and kept the renamed administrator account password protected, limited the permissions of our shared primary login, removed it's password, and created another admin account without a password. I had to make a few permissions tweaks to some files and directories to make Media Center happy among some other apps, but by and large it was truly painless this time. Switching to admin is a matter of hitting Win+L and clicking over to the "red desktop" and my wife hasn't squeaked once about anything not working as it did before.

So far it appears to be the most livable luser setup for Windows I've yet seen and I'll probably give this a try on our daughters' spyware server this next weekend :-) Actually, the Microsoft Anti-Spyware utility has been running for quite a while on their PC and giving it a clean bill of health, but my uncle was not so lucky. A few weeks ago, he called me up and asked me to drive up to his house up north and help him clean up his family PC. His teenage kids had been running Kazaa on it for P2P and the machine was literally possessed of virii, spyware, and trojan malware! Between the McAfee-identified virii (whose prompts my uncle had been ignoring because they were getting drowned out by the din of other pop-ups that were assailing him every time he logged on), and the Microsoft Anti-Spyware depth scans, more than 60 (yes, 60!) threats were identified and removed with apparent success! If I'd had more time to get into it, I would likely have clean-installed the machine just to be safe but it does appear to be in much better shape now. I went ahead and set his machine up as a luser box as well and he's been reporting that this is working well for him, though his kids have noted that their P2P apps tend to be much more unstable because their failed attempts to write to locations they shouldn't are apparently not being handled very gracefully ;-)

-Bryce

Kingdomality companion worksheet

BryceMilton — Fri, 14 Jan 2005 21:10:00 GMT

On the topic of Kindomality, for those that have a copy of the book, they may have noticed there's a different version of the personality test in the appendices than the better known online version. Here's a companion worksheet I put together that let's you visualize the breakdown of your responses for the version in the appendices. For example, while the bulk of my responses were heavily Explorer-centric, this worksheet shows that challenger and helper responses were also well-represented (maintainer responses were a different story). The book does a great job of describing the achetypes in a memorable and engaging manner, it didn't spend much time dicussing our complexities as they relate to the archetypes presented in the book.

-Bryce

Kingdomality - Helpful insights into team dynamics

BryceMilton — Fri, 14 Jan 2005 09:47:00 GMT

I know the www.kingdomality.com quiz has made the internet rounds a few times, but I was recently handed a copy of the book by my boss and I really did find "Kingdomality: An Ingenious New Way to Triumph in Management" to be quite an engaging read that was very worthwhile. Thanks for putting me on to it, Chris.

-Bryce

So far so good - Lovin' the new Windows AntiSpyware beta

BryceMilton — Sat, 08 Jan 2005 01:58:00 GMT

A friend put me on to this the other day: Microsoft has released a free beta download of our new Windows AntiSpyware application. I ran it on a couple of machines at work and at home and it detected nothing, but on my daughter's PC, it found several problems. This beta appears to have done a fair job of cleaning them off the system and the process was painless. The real-time protection agents running in the background haven't caused any compatibility problems that I've noted and the signal:noise ratio is surprisingly high compared so some of the chatty personal firewall products I've played with in the past. I'll have to run this on some more machines in our family to see how it holds up.

-Bryce

Analog AV Capture - Conclusion

BryceMilton — Sat, 25 Dec 2004 00:33:00 GMT

Well, I'm pleased to report that after sinking an excessive amount of time into this project and stumbling through all of the gotchas detailed in the previous two installments, I finally hit upon a set of products and a work flow that resulted in really nice quality output as follows:

I've purchased and installed Turtle Beach's Video Advantage PCI - Great hardware at a reasonable price. I'm afraid that besides the ADFullCap capture application and the driver itself, the rest of the software bundle wasn't worth the disk space, but there's nothing unusual there. PowerDirector's MPEG-2 output was really grainy and Audio Surgeon literally crashes whenever the app is doing something and loses\regains focus. ADFullCap however is a tight little app that fired up on first boot with the perfect settings for pixel-perfect interlaced or deinterlaced captures of my analog VHS output to 720x480 YUY2 type-2 DV-AVI files that worked great with every editor I use. Zero sound synchronization or frame dropping issues observed even on long captures. On the hardware side, the card has a full assortment of inputs for a variety of equipment and though the driver was not WHQL signed, I have not had any serious issues to report with it to date.
I relied primarily on Adobe Premier 1.0 Elements to edit and render the DV-AVI content to DVD as the Adobe editor allowed me to easily create and arrange multiple layers of video and audio tracks. I see that Premiere can export the videos for use on the web as well but I haven't yet experimented with their output.

As I stumbled through all of this, I found I was following in the footsteps of a great many others who had experienced all of the same issues I had with these various products... In the end, the whole experience told me that while many of the scenarios I was working through aren't yet ready for the masses, the Longhorn planners really are on the right track for the next release of the world's preeminent consumer desktop operating system. It's the right time to bring together all of the advancements in hardware, software, and media and wrap it up in a package that is easy enough for my mom to use. Thanks to all who offered advice and help along the way.

-Bryce

Analog AV Capture Sequel...

BryceMilton — Sun, 19 Dec 2004 11:54:00 GMT

While I am pleased to report that Movie Maker and Windows XP Media Center 2005 have been responding within specified parameters, I am displeased to find that the most of host of 3rd party media capture products I've tried since have not lived up to expectations...

At CompUSA, I purchased Pinnacle Systems' 9.0 Studio Plus and AV/DV capture PCI card and rapidly returned it for the following reasons:

The MPEG-2 and AVI files it captured from my analog VHS-C tapes were not acceptable by Movie Maker2.1, Windows Media 10, or Adobe Premiere 1.0 Elements on my system (out of sync audio, frozen video, hung apps, and even blue-screens etc.)
The Studio 9.x app had an excessively "trialware" look and feel to it - Every feature I wanted was trying to dig me further into the hole...
The Studio 9.x app had an excessive number of bugs ( "cannot open files", outright crashes, and XP DEP protection exceptions) in dealing with the QuicktimePro-produced and NeroVision Express-produced AVI and MPG files I was working with, not to mention other core functionality gaps that quickly displeased me with my purchase

I then returned it and tried out Adaptec's VideOh! PCI product: Mui non bueno:

The capture steams were MPEG-2 and pretty much indecipherable by the capture programs I was trying (NeroVision Express 3.0 and Microsoft Windows Media-based products) and though it appeared to be able to capture to MPG fine through the bundled SonicDVD apps, the resulting output hung any other app that I tried to run them through when captured at or near the hardware's advertised capacity

Last up: An inexpensive video capture PCI card from Avermedia purchased from Fry's:

This is another soon-to-be-returned item whose shortcomings include blue-screening whenever tested apps attempt to capture from the device at any rate above the default 320x screen aperture size...

I must say that the Adobe Premiere\Photoshop Elements bundle I picked up for a reasonable price has been a saving grace through this project, and that Windows XP Media Center 2005 has been very resilient through all of these software configuration changes on the system but I am still in search of an inexpensive and robust hardware solution for turning my analog video tapes into robust and high-quality digital video formats - Suggestions welcome!

My recent trials and travails with Windows Media-based Home Video scenarios

BryceMilton — Wed, 15 Dec 2004 22:25:00 GMT

While catching up on some time off this month, I decided to sit down the other day and digitize several hours of old and recent home video, but despite having what I thought were likely to be all the right tools for the job, this turned out to be much more painful than I had anticipated!

The tools:

A homebuilt 3.06ghz PC with 1gb RAM and half-terrabyte of SATA IDE storage
A Hauppauge PVR250 Media Center Edition PCI card paired with an Nvidia FX5200
Windows XP Media Center 2005 edition
Microsoft Movie Maker 2.1
Microsoft Windows Media Player 10
Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 9.0
Ahead Software's Nero 6.6 Ultra Edition
Apple Quicktime 6.5.2 Player
Kodak LS753 Digital Camera
A Panasonic VHS-C camcorder
An old VHS player with VHS-C adapter

The Content:

A half-dozen VHS-C tapes
A half-dozen VHS tapes
A dozen or so Kodak-produced MOV files

The Journey:

I began with the MOV files - The first thing I noticed was that neither of the Microsoft tools I had for producing WMV files supported the Apple MOV file format, so I needed to transform them into AVI or MPEG. I'd used The "RAD tools" "Bink and Smacker" freeware for this in the past but had noted some issues with AVI export, so I decided to spring for the $30 bucks or so to upgrade my Apple Quicktime Player to Quicktime Pro to enable the export features. This process was simple, except for the fact that it was unclear whether they were shipping me shrink-wrap, or enabling me to download the package - In the end, I found a PID in my inbox in an email that cleared up the confusion. Pro functionality enabled, I could now edit and export MOV files. In exploring this functionality however, it soon became clear that this was not going to be the silver bullet, however... The Quicktime Player could play MPEG-2, but only exports MPEG-4, and my WMV encoding tools don't yet support MPEG-4. Furthermore, when trying to export to AVI or MP4, the Quicktime app invariably hung while continuing to spool what I can only presume to be gibberish to the output file indefinitely! In surfing Apple's support info, I found the same complaint from other Kodak digital camera owners which pointed to some issues with the Kodak-produced MOV files themselves in addition to the Quicktime error-handling bug... After trying out some workarounds, I noticed that if you export the Kodak-produced MOV files to another Quicktime MOV file format, the resulting MOV files could then be successfully exported to AVI, which could then be successfully encoded to nice quality and reasonably sized WMV files. I shared what I found with Apple and Kodak support and haven't yet received any response. Problem solved, sort of.

On to the VHS-C content! I first tried hooking my Panasonic VHS-C camera up through the RCA inputs in the back of my Media Center, but soon saw this was a big no-go:

None of the video capture tools I tried (Movie Maker, NeroVision Express, or WinCap) can handle the output from a Media Center-compatible tuner cards (MPEG-2) correctly - They work great with normal XP Pro drivers and capture hardware, but complain about invalid streams from Media Center hardware...
The Media Center application itself cannot record content directly from the RCA jacks on my card without messing up the current TV setup (program guide info gets reset)

Ok, so I pulled out an old VHS recorder, wire up it's coax output into my Hauppauges coax-input, and can now view and record the VHS-C content through this setup using the VHS-C adapter and the Media Center application. Recording turns out to be somewhat counter-intuitive however as the first time I hit record and walked away, it switched off 14 minutes later because it had assumed I only wanted to record the last half of whatever the guide thought was playing on CH3... Now I rewind and try again, this time using the "Add Manual Recording" UI path which works fine, even though it did add a few steps. Success! My first VHS-C tape has been encoded as a DVR-MS file. Problem is that neither of the current WMV encoding tools I had (Movie Maker and Media Encoder 9.0) support Microsoft's very own DVR-MS file format! Fortunately, NeroVision Express does, so I used this rather slick tool to edit the files and export them to MPEG-2. Since, as I've heard it, DVR-MS files are simply re-packaged MPEG-2 files, I would have expected this to go rather quickly, but it turns out that it takes nearly an hour to handle half-an hour's worth of video on my machine. It appears that Nero has to decode the DVR-MS files and transcode them all using Nero's own software implementation of MPEG-2 encoding... Transformation to MPEG-2 complete, I tried using both Movie Maker and Media Encoder 9.0 to encode the files to WMV, but found that they both choked on the MPEG-2 files created by NeroVision Express! I checked on Nero's Website and found an updated version that had corrected the problem, but found I had to recreate the DVR-MS files I had deleted earlier in the process to make space because the new NeroVision Express couldn't fix the messed up MPEG-2 files produced with it's earlier version. Incidentally, while NeroVision fixed their MPEG-2 export issue, they appear to have introduced a new bug not present in the previous version in which AVI exports only work in raw uncompressed format as the video compression codec drop-down control is now inexplicably disabled (Ahead notifed as well, no reponse received to date)...

I haven't yet gotten to the VHS tapes, but all of this futzing about, working around workarounds, and recording-playing-recording-transcoding-decoding-transcoding-decoding gigabytes worth of video has eaten up nearly a day and half worth of man and machine hours! Kodak, Apple, and Ahead all make great products that were worth the price I paid for them despite their glitches, but what disappointed me were the holes in Microsoft's own media scenarios that caused much of the trouble in the first place! Like many people, rightly or wrongly, I hold Microsoft products to a higher standard and was really humbled to see the inconvenience caused by these gaps in the scenarios and feature-sets of the Microsoft Windows Media products and shudder to imagine what my Dad would have had to say about it had he been the one to fight his way through all of this! "Integrated Innovation" only delivers on its' promise when we do a great job of collaborating on the scenarios accross our teams to nail our targeted user scenarios.

I'm sure the next generation of Microsoft Windows Media tools and applications will have the uniform and consistent Media Center, DVR-MS, and WMV support throughout that will make all of this work much smoother (Apple MOV support wouldn't be a bad thing either, IMHO) and that Media Center is only going to get stronger at the capture scenarios in future iterations, but I sure wish we were already there. Now that the files are in a nice WMV format with reasonably high-fidelity intact, Media Center and the suite of Windows Media tools and applications will unlock a huge range of cool scenarios from viewing these movies anywhere from my XBox to streaming them from my website which I'm expecting will make all of the trouble worthwhile in the end.

-Bryce