Month: November 2004

First flaw found in my Portable Media Center, the Creative Zen has horrible audio quality in comparision to my iRiver H120.  Testing is being done with 192kbps MP3’s encoded with LAME and with a pair of Sony MDR-EX71SL Earphones.  The quality is just not what I expected from a Creative Product!  I am very much assuming that this is a flaw in the hardware used and not the Portable Media Center OS.  Using the supplied earphones (Which I think I now have 3 pairs of them from Creative) the sound quality is okay.  But spend $50 on a set of new … Continue reading Zen Portable Media Center Has Horrible Audio Quality!

I got my Portable Media Center (PMC) today and I have to say it’s much more then I expected! I hooked it up today, installed the software, and then started to sync. Windows Media Player 10 did a great job moving all the content directly to the device.  I moved a few movies, TV shows, and a bit of music to the PMC just to test it out. I have got to say, it’s very cool. Many people have said (Including myself at times) that a laptop beats the need for a Portable Media Center. Not true at all here. I … Continue reading Portable Media Center’s = Cool Portable Devices

GraphEdit is a simple tool that will give you a visual for building and testing filter graphs. This is part of the DirectX SDK but can be found on may websites (However, it's not exactly legal to redistribute it). A Filter Graph is basically a collection of filters used to either render, compress, or convert media files. If you are interested in troubleshooting DirectShow playback in Windows Media Player, this is the best and coolest thing you will ever find. This is a very simple introduction to view a filter graph being built, GraphEdit is so powerful that I could … Continue reading Introduction To GraphEdit

Faster is better!  For the past 2 days I have been encoding all of my ripped content to WMV to go on my new Portable Media Center that I will get in the next few days.  I have a few dozen DVD’s that I have ripped to XviD over the past few months.  Generally I would just rip the DVD with DVD Shrink, but my dorm does not exactly have a monitor/TV that would make that worth while. So, my task has been to transcode these XviD encoded DVD Rips to WMV to go on my Zen Portable Media Center.  Two … Continue reading Transcode To WMV

ASP.net pages use IE specific tech. to display a text formatting box. This can not be seen in Firefox, which is the only reason I still use IE. Both this blog and TGB are running on ASP.net. So, via a right click, I can format text. Such as bold text, hyperlinks and others. This is done using XHTML Code. If Thomas Hawk is reading this you are about to sh** yourself if you have not already found this. You can download it via Mozilla Extensions page, once installed you will want to enable XHTML. Tools | Extensions | Options | … Continue reading Testing BBCode From FF 1.0

Still using Internet Explorer?  Why?  Download Firefox 1.0 and see what you have been missing.  More secure, more features, faster, and good 101 more good reasons to leave IE behind.  There are only a handful of times you should be using Internet Explorer, and for those times, make sure you have ieView installed in Firefox to make it easy. Firefox 1.0 Downloadhttp://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/ Firefox 1.0 Release Noteshttp://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/releases/1.0.html

First-day sales of Microsoft Corp.’s new video game “Halo 2” will reach $100 million, a senior Microsoft games executive said on Tuesday. “I’m calling a $100 million day on ‘Halo’ today,” Peter Moore, a corporate vice president in Microsoft’s games division, said at a Harris Nesbitt investment conference in New York. The game, in which a super-soldier called “Master Chief” must save the earth from aliens, went on sale around the world on Tuesday, with thousands of stores opening their doors to eager customers just after midnight last night. In addition to 1.5 million pre-sold units, Moore said one retailer … Continue reading $100 Million First Day For Halo 2!

Windows Media Center Edition has always been built on Windows XP Professional.  We like to call this a superset.  Windows XP Tablet PC Edition and Media Center Edition are the two big supersets, both built on Windows XP Professional.   Does that mean Media Center Edition 2005 is XP Professional?  Kind of.  Here’s the tricky parts, new to MCE 2005 is the ability to use Media Center Extenders.  These Extenders use Fast-User Switching (FUS) to basically create concurrent sessions on your MCE PC.  FUS will not function correctly in a Windows Server Domain, so in MCE 2005 the ability to … Continue reading Home or Professional? Which One Is Media Center?

What Is Digital Joy?  I’ll let you click the link to find out more about this.  Hint: Windows Media Media Center is a key part. 😉 Digital Joyhttp://www.digitaljoy.com