On Holidays for 2 weeks..

to the beat of Dr. Seuss..

If the weather does your tether, and the mornings are too cold, And your coding is eroding – the very insides of your soul,
For the Beaches are a waiting, for us to park our butts, And from here we’ll not be moving – except to fill our guts.
Although I’m taking one of these, to send/receive my e-mail, Connecting to the online world – may ultimately e-fail,
We’ll also miss our family – who can’t join us on this trip, And hope they don’t destroy the house – or leave us any gifts.

Tomorrow midnight – I’m heading off on a well needed holiday to Thailand (with my wife) – for 2 glorious weeks. We’re spending most of the time in Phuket – but have a couple of days in Bangkok as well (for some shopping) – and we are very much looking forward to relaxing and escaping the Melbourne winter.

I’m not sure whether I’ll have decent internet access at the hotel – but I’m sure I’ll find an internet cafe somewhere – so will get to most emails within a couple of days (if you need to get hold of me).

btw – I managed to get through 8 months of blogging without posting any photos of the kids cats – but guess I’ve blown it now. (sorry) Their names are Zac (left) and Tabba (right)…

Big Screen Photos 2 Private Beta has been (auto) extended..

If you are one of the people running the  Big Screen Photos 2 Beta – and wondering if your trial has/will expire - please note that all expiry dates have been automatically extended to August 1st, 2007. (as the public beta is not yet ready).

The good news is that you won’t need to download/reinstall anything nor enter your serial key again – instead, you can just simply click through the ‘revalidate’ function that will appear on the addin’s splash page (and the addin will automatically retrieve the new expiry details from my server – and lock them in to your settings).  These expiry dates were actually updated at end of June (so nobodies trial should have expired) – but I previously forgot to mention it!.

I initially received some pretty negative feedback from some folk about the inclusion of a ‘phone home’ registration system in Big Screen Photos 2 – however for legitimate users (ie. those who have been supplied an ‘official’ key) - one of the benefits of this mechanism will be realized immediately. That is – auto trial extension without any reinstall/reregistration – all done with a single click of the ‘OK’ button from inside Media Center- pretty nifty huh?. 

In future this mechanism will also enable users to upgrade a trial version to a full registered version without any further installs (unless of course a completely new release is made available).   

For those waiting for the public trial / or the new version with the ‘Digital Frames’ functionality as demonstrated at WebJam@Remix (and other assorted fixes/changes) – this is still a work in progress (stay tuned) .  

 

If I was in the Simpsons ..

A very cool Simpsons Avatar Generator has been made available via the Simpsons Movie site (spotted via Delicate Genius Blog) – so I thought I’d have a bash at creating my own likeness.

I couldn’t get the ‘download’ function to work – so instead I screen captured the result – and added a couple of extra bits (like the t-shirt logo + smoke).  Apart from the extra bushy goatee (mine is more of a stubble) – it’s (almost) recognizable as me :

Free TV Australia announces plans for Industry Supported EPG

Free TV Australia announced today that an EPG for Australia is in the pipeline – and that the commercial broadcasters have agreed to :

"make their program listings information available to manufacturers of set top boxes, personal video recorders (PVRs) and other service providers provided the equipment displaying the EPG complies with some base level requirements designed to protect copyright, protect the integrity of the program information and facilitate collection of ratings information."

What these "base level requirements" are exactly – and when the actual EPG might appear – are some details I’m a little dubious of – given there’s been a few official announcements around an EPG over past few years (from FreeTV an DBA) – and very little action. However it seems like a positive step forward in the journey towards having an EPG – as a basic outline of some requirements was at least given this time (in the past it was just announcements of everyone ‘agreeing’ to talk).

I’m also a little unclear if this means MediaCenter may eventually get an ‘official’ EPG for Australia – as there was no real mention computer based PVR’s – and it’s a big unknown still if MediaCenter will be able to comply with these ‘base level requirements" out of the box. (very unlikely)

Going by the past history of government regulated tech rollouts in Australia however (DVB-T "AU")- there’s a high chance it’s not going to use any ‘common’ standards and specific "Australia Only" features may need to be implemented by a PVR maker before it can work.

Hence a likely outcome of this – is that we won’t actually get an official MediaCenter EPG. Instead, companies such as IceTV will continue to offer a service where this official EPG data is massaged into a format that is MediaCenter ready – and provide the additional components for gathering ratings data etc as needed for compliance. I’m sure that once these rules are decided upon – many other companies (now underground) may also offer similar commercial EPG services to IceTV, and make the market a little more competative (without risk of being sued).

In any case – this announcement *hopefully* means good things are coming for PVR users at some point – rather than later (or never).

Update :  Some more articles have appeared in the press this morning - one from news.com.au indicating a "3 month time frame" for rollout of these services. The bad news is that it’s very much looking like something not digestible for MediaCenter owners – as even Foxtel’s IQ has been flagged as being ‘not compliant’ with the requirements/conditions being set out. (and hence Foxtel users will not receive this free to air EPG either).

From what I understand of the yet to be activated DRM functionality in MediaCenter/DVB-T/DVR-MS – available functions are mainly based around not being able to copy the recorded tv file to other machines /and/ observing a ‘Do Not Record’ flag set by the broadcaster (similar to how it works on DRM protected music) – and not around supressing the 30 sec ad-skips (which appears to be one of "basic requirements" for using the Australian EPG Service). Although with a fair amount of hacking / patching (and breaching of the Microsoft EULA) – it’s possible some 3rd party may be able to provide a fix which removes the 30 second skip feature on MediaCenter – but you can be assured it won’t be an elegant solution at all. Same could be said about ratings/tracking of tv usage - there’s some basic stuff built in to MediaCenter – but unlikely it’s the exact solution required for compliance.

So it’s again looking like whats going to come out of this will be (yet another system) which requires companies to spend large amounts of $$ making their PVR systems complaint with an "Australian Only" set of restrictions. (which in MOST cases means it ‘wont’ happen – as the Australian marketplace is far to small by world standards to ever justify this sort of investment). We do know however that have already missed out on a lot of the features of Digital TV on MediaCenter in the past (Teletex, Subtitles, ITV etc) – due to our version of "DVB-T" being somewhat different to how DVB-T is implemented in the UK and other big markets.  So it’s again not looking like the solution we were waiting for - and likely any "compliant" system will carry a hefty price premium at the cash register.