Gladinet http://www.gladinet.com/p/download.htm

this is an application that allows you to mount Cloud storage such as Amazon’s S3 or Microsoft’s Skydrive as a drive letter on your system.

Wow.  Almost a year since my last posting.  Is my face red.  Well, I’m back and going to try to do a better job in the future on this stuff.

 I’ll be putting up a couple of new postings in the next few day.  One will be a list of applications, software, and hardware that I use on a regular basis to do the things that I want to do.

 the second will be my investigation list – a place where I put things that I’m evaluating.

Both of these posts will be constantly evolving as my applications and investigations change.

So, I finally got my hands on one of these 3rd party Media Center Extenders for Vista Media Center.  Up until now, I have been using my Xbox 360 as my extender as that was pretty much the only game in town if you were running Vista.  The older Media Center extenders do not work with Vista.

The problem is that my media center PC is in the basement next to my 46 inch LCD panel and I was using the Xbox upstairs on my 27 inch television to watch recorded shows.  I finally decided that I really did not like playing Xbox games on a 27 inch tube television when I had a perfectly good widescreen in the basement.  So, I was anxious to get a substitute for the Xbox upstairs.  The Linksys certainly seemed to fit the bill.  It is a tiny box – about the size of an Apple TV – about 7 inches square and maybe an inch and a half high.  It has no fan and generates no virtually no heat, It is a welcome replacement for the jet engine the Xbox is both in terms of noise and heat.  At $299, it is a little more expensive than the Xbox arcade ($279), but you don’t get a media center remote with the Xbox arcade.  The $20 that will run you makes them essentially on par price wise – provided of course you don’t want to also play games or DVDs.  So, it was with great enthusiasm that I picked it up, plugged it in and started to play with it.

So, what do I think?  Well, my mother always told me that if you can’t say something nice, then you shouldn’t say something at all.  Problem is that if I did that, I wouldn’t be doing my job as a reviewer.  So, let me summarize – aside from the fact that it is quieter and generates less heat, I couldn’t find one redeeming feature.  The advantages that it is supposed to have over the Xbox media center extender are implemented so poorly that you would have been better off without them.  So, let’s explore in a little more detail this sad excuse for a tech device.

First of all, to use the device, you need to download a hotfix for your windows media center PC.  Not sure why it needed to do that – if it implemented the Media Center extender code in the Xbox 360, it should have just worked.  Hotfixes worry me as they are generally subject to less rigorous regression testing than other types of updates and my media center is not where I want instability.

The next problem is that the interface is dog slow.  With the Xbox 360, moving through the menu is fairly snappy with almost no lag between keypress and action.  Not so with the Linksys.  It’s press a key and wait a second, press another key, wait another second, etc.  This would be fine if this was a first generation device in a new technology area, but Linksys has built Media Center extenders before, and their original one for XP Media Center did not exhibit this lag problem.

One of the big benefits of the DMA 2100 is the ability to supposedly play DIVX/XVID/MP4 etc. movies from within the media center interface itself.  The Xbox 360 can play MP4 files, but it is not from within Media Center – you need to exit and go to the Xbox dashboard for that.  Furthermore, the Xbox is somewhat limited as to what MP4 files it will play – Divx and Xvid are out, but the H.264 files that Nero recode spits out work fine.  There has been some controversy as to whether the Linksys really supports Divx.  In fact it does, just an older version of Divx.  For the best results though, you should use Xvid.  I didn’t have any true Xvid files handy to test with, so I can’t comment personally on how well it works, but from what I have read elsewhere it does seem to operate as advertised.

The problem again though is the lag.  It can take a minute or more to start the movie from the time you select it, and the fast forward/rewind functions did not appear to work on the H.264 videos that I was using to test with.

I took the Linksys back to the store today and bought an Xbox Arcade.  Let’s compare the two devices to see how they stack up.  Note that I am going to use the DMA 2100’s big brother, the DMA 2200 which includes a DVD player for comparison as the Xbox can play DVDs.

Features: Full Media Center extender functionality, DVD Playback, HD-DVD option, Plays all Xbox 360 games.

Features: Full Media Center extender functionality, DVD Playback

Aside from the noise and heat issue and maybe the Xvid playback capability – I can think of no real reason to spend more to get less.  Even if you don’t think that you would want to play Xbox games, why not leave yourself the opportunity to change your mind in the future.  Don’t waste your money on the Linksys DMA Extenders.  They are underpowered, overpriced, and just plain annoying.

Well, I just realized that I never posted my follow-up article on the Anchor Bay VP30 and my Samsung 1080P TV. As you can probably glean from the title, not much changed.

The same problems that I mentioned in part one were still in place – Since my High Def cable box only outputted in 1080i, the VP30 did nothing for the signal as it requires a 480i signal (The VP50 will process 1080i, but it’s a lot more money). I now could use the HDMI output on my VP30, but after conducting a similar battery of tests, I had the same result – there was no visible difference between VP30 and no VP30, so the box went back to Anchor Bay.

The one thing that I will mention is that Anchor Bay made good on their 30 day return policy, but shipping the VP30 to and from Anchor Bay cost me about $100 or so for the experiment. An expensive lesson, but at least I now know whether or not it made a difference. As I mentioned in part one, the cost does not yield enough value to me so unless I win the lottery or find a lot more money somehow, I’ll probably call it a day with Video Processors.

For some time, I have been less than pleased with the picture quality of Standard Definition (SD) Television on my older HDTV. I currently own a Panasonic LCD Projection Television. This model was one of the top options back in 2003 when I purchased it. It supports 720p and 1080i but does not offer any digital connections. I am limited to Component Video or VGA.

I have been looking for ways to improve the image quality of Standard Definition Cable, which for me is most of the channels I get. There are HDTV options for the major networks, the sports channels, and some of the movie channels, but the vast majority of cable is still in SD. From my research, I had learned that a Video Processor might solve my problems.

First of all, a little primer on why you should care about Video Processors. HDTVs are most happy when you can feed them a signal at their native resolution be it 720p or 1080p. 1080i is an intermediate resolution supported by some HDTVs. Basically the difference between the p and the i designations is how often each line on the screen is refreshed. In the case of p, every line is refreshed each time. In the case of i, every other line is refreshed each time. What this means is that p signals are generally superior to i signals. Many HDTVs today support 720p and 1080i. The higher end ones support 1080p. Cable signals are generally output in either 720p or 1080i. HD-DVD and Blueray offer support for 1080p signals.

If you feed a television a signal that is less than it’s standard resolution, the TV must make use of scaler circuitry to “upconvert” to the native resolution. How well the TV does this upconverting determines the picture quality that you see. Most TVs today do not have really good upconverters which is one reason that many HDTVs display spectacular HD signals, but mediocre SD signals. This is a problem as most of the cable and all of the regular DVDs are output in 480i. Some of the better DVD players are capable of performing the upconversion to 480p or higher, but you are pretty much out of luck when it comes to cable or satellite TV. This is where a Video Processor comes in. A Video Processor generally has very high end circuitry that accepts lower resolutions and does the upconversion to the native resolution of the Television.

I experimented with an Anchor Bay DVDO VP30 Video Processor with the optional AB102 upscaler card. The VP30 is one of the lower end Video Processors offered by Anchor Bay, but it still clocks in at a list price of $2,500. the AB102 card accounts for $500 of the price, but it is essential as it does a much better job of scaling 480i signals than the VP30 alone would. Anchor Bay also offer the VP20 for about $500 less than the VP30, but it lacks the ability to output in analog component video – it only supports HDMI outputs which means that it would not work with my television. If you do have HDMI inputs for your television, then you can save the cash and go with the VP20. The VP30 does have some extra bells and whistles, but unless you are a serious Videophile, you are not going to make much use of the extra features. The AB102 upscaler card gives the VP30 the ability to tear a 480i signal completely apart and re-encode it to a higher resolution.

My test environment consisted of a Scientific Atlanta HDTV cable box supplied by Charter Cable, a Sony DVD player capable of outputting in 480i and 480p, and a Microsoft Vista Media Center PC running an NVidia 8600 Graphics card that outputs in Component Video format (my card can also output in DVI, but as noted earlier, my TV does not accept digital inputs).

The biggest problem that I ran into was that for the VP30/AP102 to do its magic on a Standard Definition signal, I needed to feed the VP30 with a 480i signal. That proved to be a problem in two of the three cases. The only way that I could get my Scientific Atlanta box to output a 480i signal was to use the S-Video output port, which means that even the HD signals would be downconverted by the box. The Component video port on the back of the box refused to output anything less than 1080i. As for my media center PC, if I tried to force a 480i signal, that would be the equivalent of a 640 x 480 resolution, which is unacceptable. The VP30 does a straight passthrough of HD signals, so no processing would be performed on either my cable input or my Media Center. I could do a 480i out of my DVD, but quite frankly, I could not see any significant difference between the 480i that was processed by the VP30 and the native 480p (which was passed through).

The bottom line of all of this testing was that there was really no justification for the price tag of the VP30 using my Panasonic TV. There is an old saying that if you try to put lipstick on a pig, it’s still a pig, and that is what I have with my Panasonic TV. The VP30 did not offer any benefits based on my setup, so I am going to avail myself of the 30 day return privilege and send the VP30 back.

Anchor Bay does offer some higher end boxes that will perform video processing on HDTV signals, but those boxes start at $3,000, which is a bit out of my price range at the moment. I think that if you are a serious Videophile and are looking to wring every bit of performance out of your gear, the higher end VP boxes may do that for you, but $3,000 will buy me a new 1080p television, which would be my first choice. This incidentally is what I decided to do. I went out and bought a Samsung 1080p television and I am going to retest the VP30 with that. Look for my next post on that topic.

I am a fairly regular listener to Leo Laporte’s Security Now Podcast. I finally broke down the other day and decided to give the Astaro Security Gateway product that Leo is always pitching a try – particuarly since all it would cost me was my download time and an old computer. Currently, I run a SonicWall TZ170 at home and while I have no complaints, it does bug me that I have to write a check to SonicWall every year for a couple hundred dollars to pay for the security subscription that I have. The SonicWall has anti-virus, anti-spam, and anti-malware filtering plus it can do some outbound content filtering should I want to enable it (not a big deal right now, but as my kids get older, something to look into). Anyway, if the Astaro gives me the chance to get all of that filtering without the $210 annual fee, I’m all for it (Astaro used to charge something like $40 per year for home users, but they have eliminated that fee – home users get all of the subscription features for free).

So, in the interest of letting others learn from my experience, I am going to document my life with the Astaro over the next few weeks. I have already encountered some minor warts along with some relatively cool features. Let’s see what else we can find.

This is certainly not the first blog to talk about using the XBOX 360 HD-DVD drive with Windows, nor will it probably be the last. That said, some new information is available about using the XBOX 360 HD-DVD with Windows since the folks at Uneasy Silence initially documented the possibility back in November 2006. Since that time, there have been a couple of changes. First of all, you no longer need to download the third party drivers to run the XBOX 360 drive under Windows XP. As with Vista, when you plug the drive into your computer and the “Find New Hardware” dialog pops up, let it look on the Internet for drivers and it will automatically load them. Looks like Microsoft has quietly made these drivers available.

The second change is that there is now more software available to play HD movies. While Intervideo does make a version of WinDVD that supports BlueRay (and provides the player with BlueRay drives, they do not currently offer a version for general sale. Cyberlink offers PowerDVD Ultra for $99.95. If you don’t own a software player, this is probably not a bad deal, but it seems a bit steep to pay if you already own a DVD player application and only want to add HD support. Interestingly, Cyberlink does not even offer an upgrade price if you own a lower version or older version of their software. Not only that, but unlike the rest of their products, no trial version of Ultra is available either. There is a relatively recent alternative. Nero offers a BlueRay/HD-DVD plug in to their Nero 7 Ultra for $25. Granted you already have to own a copy of Nero 7, but many people do and even if you do not, you can pick up a copy for about $50 if you look around hard enough. The nice thing is that if you purchase any full version of Nero 7, you can download and use the absolute latest version from Nero’s home page.

8/13/07 Update – Nero does not properly support hardware HD-DVD decode on NVidia 8600 cards. For this reason, I would recommend the PowerDVD application. See my August 2007 update here