Virtuality = Caprica?
Ronald D. Moore is the creator of the highly successful Sci-Fi Channel show, Battlestar Galactica, and his spin0ff venture called Caprica seems to be just as good. I bought the direct-to-DVD pilot episode of Caprica and really liked the story, characters, and acting. I can’t wait for this show to start up next year.
Another one of Moore’s creation is a TV show called Virtuality which aired yesterday night. It involves 12 astronauts on a deep space mission who use Virtual Reality devices to help them keep their sanity while traveling on a 10 year mission. In my opinion, the pilot show was a bit slow and had too much of the “reality show” stuff that turned me off. What was really disappointing, is the fact that the virtual reality component of the show resembled much of what was shown in the Caprica pilot. It was just too similar, appearing that Virtuality took an interesting piece of Caprica and put it in a different setting (traveling spaceship). If I had a choice between the two shows, I’d probably select Caprica over Virtuality because Caprica appears to have more options so far as story development, new characters, etc. Of course, this is a moot point since from what I’ve been reading Caprica is a definite new series while Virtuality still hasn’t been give the green light by the Fox network.
Streaming Videos From Home PC
Earlier this week I was out of town on a business trip, and I had several TV recordings waiting for me on my Home PC. Since I was bored surfing the local TV channels in my hotel room (nothing was on, of course), I wished I had access to my video recordings so I could watch them. Sure, I could have used logmein to put the WMV video files on an ftp server and then download them to my laptop, but that would have been a big hassle with the extra work, transfer times, etc.
Recently, I did discover a new free service called Orb which is a software package you install on your home PC (with an “always on” Internet connection) that will stream video, music, pictures, or documents to a remote computer system via the Internet. So if I had this software installed on my home PC, I could have watched my TV recordings on my laptop in my hotel and feel right at home!
Also, Orb can be used to display a live TV show from my home PC via the installed TV Tuner card, which sounds very much like what the SlingBox hardware can do. As a test, I found that streaming live TV shows in this manner appeared choppy and had a lot of delays with the stream buffering, but I imagine some of that can be fixed with some tuning of the streaming settings.
To use Orb, you simply go to mycast.orb.com in a standard web browser and log into your Orb account. From that point, you can select which video you want to watch from your home PC, and let Orb do its thing. Orb will do a quick speed test (to determine the resolution and streaming speed) and will then bring up an appropriate media player on your remote machine for playing the video.
When I tried streaming one of my WMV video files (converted by my PC for my Zune), it did come across the Internet connection very well with no delay in stream buffering. Most likely this was due to the fact that the video resolution was 320×240 and thus it didn’t need to send across too much data per frame. Still, using Orb seems to be an effective way of watching my TV recordings while away from my home PC.
What’s really cool, is that I was able to stream a WMV video file from my home PC to my Motorola-Q cell phone (with Windows Mobile 5 OS) which played in Windows Media Player. The video image was reduced in resolution, but it played fine. Not bad for a wireless internet connection via the Verizon cell phone service. I can certainly see myself using Orb to watch my TV recordings on my Moto-Q phone while waiting at the airport gate, in my hotel room, etc.
As another test, I tried accessing Orb using my wife’s Blackberry Curve smartphone. Sure enough, it worked fine for playing the selected video (albeit, the video image was small on her phone).
So, I highly recommend you check out Orb to see if it meets your video watching needs.
Back to Watching TV Re-Runs
With so many crappy TV shows on the air these days (a.k.a., reality shows), I’ve decided to go back to watching old TV shows from the 80’s and 90’s. One such show, is ER which is being broadcast on cable channel TNT every weekday (two episode per day). They are currently up to season 4, which was originally broadcast around 1997. Although these episodes are from 12 years ago (evident from the large cell phones and ancient PC computers), the stories are still relevant today. Of course, I have my trusty Vista Media Center system diligently recording these shows everyday, and I can watch them at night in bed before I hit the sack!
Can’t Convert AMC TV Recordings
The other day I recorded “The Searchers” (old John Wayne movie) using my TV Tuner card in my PC with Vista Media Center, and I noticed that DVRMSToolbox had difficulty converting the recorded DVR-MS file to WMV format for my Zune. Upon inspecting the generated log file, I noticed that the conversion software crashed. I then tried several different methods for converting the DVR-MS file (to WMV format, to MPEG format, etc) but everything I tried failed.
I then did a Google search on the topic, and discovered that the AMC (American Movie Channel) broadcast must have DRM protection enabled. As such, I can watch the recording on my PC but I can’t convert the video file to any other format. What a bummer! So, there’s not much I can do to get this video on my Zune, so “The Duke” will have to wait until I have time to watch it on my PC screen. 
My Terminator Salvation Review
I saw Terminator Salvation yesterday, and I have to say it wasn’t as good as I expected. It was ok, but it didn’t seem to have the impact as the first two Terminator movies. The special effects was cool, but the story line was a bit slow and uninteresting. The Marcus character was cool, as he was an unknown to the viewers. Also, having Arnold as the Terminator appearing at the end of the movie was great (who needs real live actors any more?).
This movie basically “jumped the shark” for me, so I hope they don’t come out with any more installments unless they have a really, really good and original story.
Low Audio with TV Recordings
Recently, Comcast Cable sent out a letter stating that most of the premium cable channels would be moving to digital, as such I was required to use a digital Set Top Box (STB) with my PC Tuner card if I wanted to continue recording my favorite TV shows. You can read about how I made all this work at this blog posting.
One problem I noticed, is that the audio was really low with these new TV recordings. In fact, watching the TV shows “live” on my Desktop PC through the TV tuner card (and Vista Media Center) was also very low in volume. I finally realized that the STB remote control had a volume setting, so I turned up the volume on the STB which seemed to correct the problem. For some reason, I didn’t think the STB controlled the volume (as in most cases, it’s the TV’s amplifier that you adjust for sound loudness), but in this case the STB had some volume control.
So, if you’re in the same situation, try jacking up the volume on the STB to solve the low volume problem! 
Conversion Issues with Windows Media Encoder
For the past few years I’ve been using DVRMSToolbox (Dtb) and its assortment of tools for converting DVR-MS files (recordings from my TV Tuner card) to WMV format for my Zune media player. I’ve set up a “profile” in Dtb to do the following:
- Use ShowAnalyzer to detect all commercial segments in the DVR-MS file
- Cut out all found commercials and create a new DVR-MS file
- Use the tool DVRMStoWMVHD to convert the commercial-free DVR-MS file to WMV format (using specs for my Zune)
- Migrate all the metadata (i.e., show title, description, etc) from the original DVR-MS file to the generated WMV file
- Copy the WMV file to my Zune sync folder
- Delete all temporary files
It all seemed to work great, until a recent update to the DVRMStoWMVHD software caused the audio and video for the converted WMV file to gradually go out of sync. So by the end of a 45-minute show, the audio was about 6 seconds off from the video (really annoying to watch). So, I decided to use this modified profile for my video conversion:
- Use ShowAnalyzer to detect all commercial segments in the DVR-MS file
- Cut out all found commercials and create a new DVR-MS file
- Use the tool FFMPEG to convert the commercial-free DVR-MS file to MPEG format
- Use Windows Media Encoder 9 to convert the MPEG file to WMV format (using specs for my Zune)
- Migrate all the metadata (i.e., show title, description, etc) from the original DVR-MS file to the generated WMV file
- Copy the WMV file to my Zune sync folder
- Delete all temporary files
This method worked for me in the past, however, I noticed that on several recent recordings the converted WMV file did not contain all of the TV show material. Normally, a 1-hour TV show will reduce down to 42 minutes when the commercials are removed, but in this case I was getting 19 or 24 minute shows. What’s going on? After doing some investigating, I concluded that ShowAnalyzer was working properly, and the MPEG file created by FFMPEG was the expected 42 minutes in length. It turned out that Windows Media Encoder 9 (WME9) was the bad link in the chain, converting the 42 minute MPEG file down to just 24 minutes. Why… I’m not sure.
So, I’ve gone back to using method 1 along with an older version of DVRMStoWMVHD (1.0.1.0) which doesn’t have the audio/video sync issue.
Automation is great… when it works!
Another Favorite Show Gets Cancelled…
Seems like a lot of my favorite shows get cancelled prematurely, which is really disappointing. For example, Jericho was a good show that I looked forward to watching every week, but it was cancelled after the 2nd season. It took a huge effort by fans to bring it back for a 3rd and final season, which thankfully the writers were able to provide some closure in the final episodes. Not so for Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which was just cancelled by Fox after it’s second season on the air. It had a really good cliffhanger season finale, and I guess we’ll never know what happened to the characters. It just seems that the networks are so quick to cancelling shows and airing new ones that nothing gets a chance to take hold with audiences. Instant gratification doesn’t just apply to consumers, but also to producers and the TV networks, I guess.
Comcast Digital Takeover
I got a card in the mail last Friday notifying me that Comcast will be switching their premium channels over to encrypted digital signal, so that means I’ll need to get a set top box for all TVs which I want to view such channels. Currently, I have set top boxes for two of my TVs, but come June 22nd I’ll need a set top box for my PC which has a TV tuner card. Fortunately, Comcast will provide me with two set top boxes free of charge, so I ordered them online this afternoon. I should get them in 3-5 days by mail, after which I’ll have to configure them to work with Vista Media Center and my PC Tuner card.
Since my TV Tuner card (or PC) can’t change the channels on these set top boxes directly, I’ll need to also get a special MCE remote control with IR emitters (or “blasters”) so that Vista Media Center can change the set top box channels. It’s a real hokey setup using IR emitters, etc. but I don’t have any other practical options. As such, I’ve also ordered a Vista Windows certified remote from Amazon.com ($33.00 US) which should also arrive in about 5 days.
So, once I get everything delivered and working, I’ll post back about my success and/or failure so you’ll know how it all turns out!
New Star Trek Movie Definitely a Fresh Start
I’m a closet “Trekkie”, having watched Star Trek since I was a small boy in the late 60’s. I also watched all the re-runs from the original series (TOS), all the various “Star Trek:” TV shows as well as all the theater movies. When Star Trek: Enterprise came out on UPN, I was hoping that a prequel show to TOS would bring a fresh perspective to the Star Trek anthology, however, Enterprise ended up being as formulaic as ST:Voyager, ST:DS9, and ST: The Next Generation.
I recently saw the new Star Trek Movie by JJ Abrams, and it certainly was entertaining, and very different from the past Star Trek incarnations. The movie uses familiar wording and phrases (Starfleet, phasers, hailing frequencies, etc.) as the previous Star Treks, and the same character names, but everything else seemed very different. It was definitely geared toward the younger crowd, with fast paced action and a very edgey feel with all the close up shots.
I have to say that my two favorite characters are Scotty and Dr. McCoy, as they were both pretty funny and quite the characters. I won’t give any more away for those who haven’t seend the movie, but the other characters are somewhat different than their TOS counterparts.
I’ll also say that the next Star Trek movie better be well written with a very good story, otherwise it will be a let down after seeing this exciting revival!
