The T7-MP2 is based on Tranquil’s popular T7 chassis, which is a fanless case, achieving it’s cooling by having a black aluminium case which is basically one big heatsink. An external power supply like on a laptop also helps them to get rid of the heat silently. The compact design does allow for 2 hard drives inside if you like, but doesn’t have space for an internal DVD driver or TV tuner. Both can of course be added using external USB devices, but Tranquil wanted to do better than that, and wanted to make it a proper media centre system out of the box. They therefore asked me if they could include TunerFreeMCE on the T7-MP2 so that people have access live and catchup TV straight away. I was already a big fan of Tranquil, not least because their PCs are all carbon neutral for 5 years use, so I was very happy to work with them – it’s a fantastic partnership of a great media center PC with excellent software.

I received a T7-MP2 as part of  getting TunerFreeMCE pre-installed and branded, so I decided to write a review of this new entrant to the Media Centre market.

The first thing I noticed when starting the T7-MP2 is how much care Tranquil have taken to make a good out of the box build. Tthose of you used to buying boxes from the likes of Dell and HP will be familiar with spending half a day uninstalling the unwanted crapware, installing and configuring the right software, and getting everything up and running. My T7-MP2 came without the usual bloat, and booted really quickly straight in to media centre. It was all configured ready to go, and had useful software like Microsoft Security Essentials installed already instead of trying to sell you some high-profit, low value AV software. The whole experience was thoroughly refreshing, and made me appreciate the benefits of avoiding the big box brands.

My box came with the lowest spec – 2GB RAM and a 500GB hard drive. Of that 2GB RAM, 250MB is used by the graphics card, leaving just 1.75GB available. Given that it comes with 64bit Windows 7 Home Premium installed, I was concerned that the memory was just too low for the system to operate properly. I gave it a go though, and was surprised that it ran without problem. That’s really a tribute to Windows 7 – you’d never have got away with that on Vista. If you change your mind though, the case is pretty easy to open to add more memory yourself .

Other good features is the excellent number of connections at the back – it has 6 USB, eSata, Gigabit Ethernet, Wireless N, VGA, DVI and HDMI, SPDIF toslink and  coax, audio in/out, and even an old school PS2 keyboard/mouse connector. Unfortunately there are no connections at the front though, so if you want to plug in a USB drive, you have to rummage round the back. That seems like a surprising omission to me – there’s space at the edges at the front where a couple of USB connectors could go, but instead there is just a power button and an IR receiver.

That brings me to my only real gripe with this box – the IR receiver. An IR receiver is essential on a media center PC, but unfortunately while this one works fine with a Media center remote, it is not compatible with the Microsoft Media centre keyboard. That means that if you want to use the IR keyboard, you need to plug in a regular IR receiver too, making the internal one a waste of time. In fact it’s worse than a waste of time. If you do plug in a proper IR receiver, the internal one and the external one interfere, registering double clicks. Needing to use the external IR receiver, I tried and failed to find a software way of disabling the internal IR receiver. In the end I put some black electricians tape over the front panel to block out the internal IR receiver. It solves the problem, but it annoyed me that what should have been a good feature was in fact a problem. My suggestion to Tranquil would be to ditch the internal IR, replace it with 2 front facing USB ports, and ship with a regular external IR receiver, which has the advantage of being positionable somewhere convenient for those folks who want to hide all of their kit.

Moving on from that complaint though, and back to the coolness. The greatest feature of this PC is that it is quiet. Really quiet. A claimed 17dB makes it hundreds of times quieter than your average PC. The only noise comes from the hard drive, and the 2.5″ Samsung laptop drives that they have used  are nice and quiet. I previously had a Shuttle SFF PC, which claimed to be quiet, but in retrospect really wasn’t. Swapping that out for the T7-MP2 actually made me aware of other noise sources in the room that I hadn’t even heard before (and so now I have a new quieter fish tank pump, but that’s a different story).

So, 17dB is very quiet, but it’s not quite silent. However, if you want a truly silent experience (0dB), there is also a solid state drive option. Of course, SSHD’s aren’t massive for storing all of your recordings on, but when combined with Windows Home Server, that is becoming a realistic option for many people.

Finally, given that it has an Atom 330 processor, how does it perform as a media centre PC? The answer is flawlessly. It played everything I had on my local network (recorded TV, high def videos, DVDs) without a stutter. It handles streaming video from the internet with the same ease.  Music and pictures are handled just as easily, and that’s everything you need. Clearly this isn’t a gaming rig in terms of power, but that’s kind of the point –  Tranquil have done a great job of putting the right machine together for the job it is meant to do.

Summary

At £563, the T7-MP2 is a reasonably priced computer. Combined with it’s near silent operation, it makes a fantastic media center PC. The lack of front USB and the non-standard IR receiver are an annoyance for some people, but are overcome with little difficulty if it bothers you. With HDMI and SPDIF both built in, it’s ready to plug straight in to your TV and surround sound box if you like, and off you go.

Specifications

]]> http://blog.milliesoft.co.uk/2010/06/tranquil-t7-mp2-review/feed/ 0 http://blog.milliesoft.co.uk/2010/03/code-based-dialogs-in-media-center/ http://blog.milliesoft.co.uk/2010/03/code-based-dialogs-in-media-center/#comments Wed, 10 Mar 2010 08:50:09 +0000 Martin Millmore http://blog.milliesoft.co.uk/?p=216 I’ve written a few posts on how to implement dialog boxes in media center (Adding a version checker and Simpler popup dialog). They are both great examples of how to trigger a dialog box in mcml. Suppose though you want to do it all from within code, not within mcml. Why would you want to do that? Well, for one it means not having any AddIn calls in your mcml, and AddIn calls mean you can’t use the mcml preview tool – which significantly hampers development. For this example, I’m going to repeat the Adding a version checker example, but all in code.

So, to trigger a dialog from your code, the first thing you need to do is to build some buttons;

ArrayListDataSet dialogButtons = new ArrayListDataSet();
dialogButtons.Add("Download Now");
dialogButtons.Add("Remind me later");
dialogButtons.Add("Ignore");

This adds 3 buttons to the dialog. Obviously add as many or as few as you like. The next thing you need to do is to add the call to open the dialog;

String dialogText="There is a new version available";
String dialogTitle="New Version";
Microsoft.MediaCenter.Hosting.AddInHost.Current
.MediaCenterEnvironment.Dialog(dialogText

, "dialogTitle, dialogButtons, 30, true, null
, new Microsoft.MediaCenter.DialogClosedCallback(versionCallback));

This will open a dialog as a modal dialog with a timeout of 30 seconds. When it is closed, the method versionCallback will be called, so now we need to write that method;

public void versionCallback(Microsoft.MediaCenter.DialogResult result)
{
    if (result.ToString() == "100")
    {
        InstallNewVersion();
    }
    if (result.ToString() == "101")
    {
        RemindLater();
    }
    if (result.ToString() == "102")
    {
        IgnoreNewVersion();
    }
}

And obviously fill in the appropriate actions for each method.

Finally, you may want to block this dialog from triggering when you are in the debugger (since it won’t work), so put an if statement round it to stop it running in debug mode;

#if(!DEBUG)
   String dialogText="There is a new version available";
   String dialogTitle="New Version";
   Microsoft.MediaCenter.Hosting.AddInHost.Current
.MediaCenterEnvironment.Dialog(dialogText
  , "dialogTitle, dialogButtons, 30, true, null
  , new Microsoft.MediaCenter.DialogClosedCallback(versionCallback));

#endif

And that’s it – an mcml dialog operated entirely from your code.

After Project Kangaroo was shut down, the technology was bought up by Arqiva and re-branded as SeeSaw. Since then they have been working on content agreements with various providers, and now have agreements with 4oD, Five and BBC Worldwide, and are working on more agreements with other providers.

Earlier this week SeeSaw officially went in to beta, inviting members of the public to sign up. Once you sign in, you can browse programs by Category, Channel or just search by name

Under the channels for example there is a list of programs;

and then when you pick a program you will see a list of episodes and can play any of them;

interestingly, all programs – even BBC ones – have adverts at the start. The programs come from BBC Worldwide, who feed the profit back in to the BBC, which is OK by me if it brings us nice new features.

The video player is of course a flash player, and it offers different bandwidth settings, although there are no specific details of what the different resolutions are – but it doesn’t look to be HD.

It’s a nice aggregation of content, some of which isn’t available anywhere else, so definitely worth checking it out.

And for those of you who are wondering about TunerFree integration, a plugin is available here.

Secondly, I have been trying to find out how independent developers such as myself can make use of Flash in Media Center. A friend of a friend managed to get this unofficial response;

As far as I know, the Platform/APIs are only available for internal use. We don’t have any plan to release public documentation on that at this moment.

So that means that until Microsoft change their minds or someone manages to dissect the delivered code to work out how to use the libraries in an unsupported way, we are stuck without Flash support for independent developer.

Of course if you want to watch iPlayer on the Xbox 360, just install TunerFreeMCE on your PC and access it via Media Center. The latest version of TunerFreeMCE includes wmv streaming of BBC programs, so works great on extenders like the Xbox 360 too.

1) Here in the UK, the Internet TV Beta 2 link has disappeared from our menus. I suspect that is because it was really buggy (I often got errors that my video library was unavailable). Hopefully it just means that a new better version is on the way

2) An advert for Sky Player has appeared in the menus;

At the moment it is just a link to http://www.microsoft.com/uk/windows/skyplayer/, but hopefully it should be live soon. Unfortunately it looks to be a complete rip off. According to Sky, you can watch the following channels live for £15 a month:

• G.O.L.D.
• Sky Real Lives
• Sky Arts 1
• MTV ONE
• Sky Sports News
• British Eurosport
• ESPN Classic
• Sky News
• National Geographic
• Nat Geo Wild
• History
• Eden
• Cartoon Network
• Boomerang
• Nickelodeon
• Disney Channel
• Nick Jr

I struggle to see a single one of those I would want to watch even if it were free, and certainly wouldn’t pay £15 a month for it.

This is also available on the Xbox 360 without a PC, but for that on top of the £15, you need an Xbox Live Gold Membership (£3/month). When you compare it to the lower cost of £17.50 a month for hundreds of channels and free broadband with a regular sky box, that doesn’t seem like a bargain.

More interestingly you can add Sky Sports 1, 2, 3 and Xtra for £34 (+£3 XBOX Live) a month, but again that doesn’t compare well with the £35.50 you would pay for it on a regular sky box along with all of the other channels and again broadband.

So, perhaps Sky are more interested in the catch-up TV market. That certainly offers slightly more, with Sky One programs available for £1.47 a time, and Sky Box Office movies available for £3.43 a time. But when compared with bittorrent for free TV programs and the likes of Love Film at £1.99 for a blu-ray movie, I just don’t see it working.

3) The big shocker for me was this post from Stuart at  The Digital Lifestyle announcing that Flash is now in use in Media Center. This is a major shocker for me because Sky are using silverlight to integrate in to the Windows architecture, and I had assumed that Microsoft were too blinkered to acknowledge that Flash is the market leader, however it seems that they have been very pragmatic here and allowed the use of Flash in media center. Unfortunately there are no details on how anyone other than Netflix can use it yet, but I am sure that will emerge over time. The bad news is that it won’t work on extenders, but it is a step in the right direction for the rest of us.

One of my great annoyances with Windows 7 is that you don’t have the option to auto-play DVDs with Media Center. I logged it as a bug during the testing phase, and was informed that it was intentional – something along the lines of if you wanted to use Media Center, it would be open already, so auto-play wasn’t appropriate.

Anyway, I disagree, and fortunatly someone has come up with a fix for the problem. Mikinho over at Seven Forums has produced a simple registry change to get Media Center added to the DVD movie auto play options. I tested it out, and it all works great;

WebTelek approached me with the request to create a top of the range Media Center interface for their internet television service. They already had a web interface and a Media Portal interface, but wanted to expand in to Media Center. One of their biggest concerns was that it look great so that they could confidently have a superior interface to their competitors. That was a challenge that I was happy to take on, especially with the prospect of developing new library components that I could use in TunerFree.

I won’t be publishing the full code for this project for obvious reasons, but wanted to share some of the key things I learnt from this project.

TV Guide

The first thing that WebTelek wanted was a program guide for their live TV. I wanted to produce a program guide that was as close as possible to the native TV Guide from media center.

Some people may not realize that the Media Center SDK doesn’t give you access to standard widgets like a program guide. In fact the only visible things you get are boxes, text and you can drop your own images on the page too.  That means that everything had to built from those basic components, which as you can imagine isn’t trivial. Ideally I wanted both an x and y scrolling region to scroll down the channels and left and right through the times. Unfortunatly this wasn’t possible for two reasons – first of all media center seems to fall over when you put a scroller inside a scroller, and secondly, I need both time in step with the program boxes fixed at the top of the page, and channel naes in step with the program boxes fixed at the left of the page, and you can’t do both of those with a scroller. That meant that I needed to construct the guide scrolling vertically, but horizontally just displaying 2 hours at a time, refreshed every time you navigate right in the right hand box, or left in the left hand box.

Spinner

Displaying all of the guide boxes takes about 0.1 seconds to calculate, but about 1.5 seconds to display. To avoid an unpleasant user experience, I also had to find a way to display a wait spinner on the screen. Again, media center doesn’t give you access to the native spinner, so I had to build my own;

The way I managed to achieve this was by surrounding the page with a “Fill” region with a “Center” region inside it, with an image inside that. I needed to animate the icon within media center, so I then added a rotation animation to the image to make it rotate like the native windows spinner, and hide/show it when I am doing processing.

<Panel Layout="Fill" Name="Default">
<Children>
<Panel Layout="Center" Name="spinner">
<Children>
<Graphic Content="image://styles:Spinner" MaintainAspectRatio="true">
<Animations>
<Animation Animation="animation://styles:spin2"/>
</Animations>
</Graphic>
</Children>
</Panel>

<Animation Loop="-1" Name="spin2" CenterPointPercent="0.5,0.5,0.5">
 <Keyframes>
 <RotateKeyframe RelativeTo="Current" Time="0" Value="0deg;0,0,1" Interpolation="Linear"/>
 <RotateKeyframe RelativeTo="Current" Time="0.33" Value="90deg;0,0,1" Interpolation="Linear"/>
 <RotateKeyframe RelativeTo="Current" Time=".66" Value="180deg;0,0,1" Interpolation="Linear"/>
 <RotateKeyframe RelativeTo="Current" Time="1" Value="270deg;0,0,1" Interpolation="Linear"/>
 <RotateKeyframe RelativeTo="Final" Time="1.33" Value="360deg;0,0,1" Interpolation="Linear"/>
 </Keyframes>
 </Animation>

The key to hiding and showing it is to do the work in a background thread so that the main thread is able to show the image and the animation, e.g.;

public GuideUI()
 {
   ShowSpinner = true;
   Microsoft.MediaCenter.UI.Application.DeferredInvokeOnWorkerThread(init, endInit, "");
 }

 public void init(object o1)
 {
   _theGuide.init();
 }

 public void endInit(object o1)
 {
   ShowSpinner = false;
 }

Archive TV

The next thing in the system is a catchup screen. This contains a grid of channels, a horizontal scroller for dates, and a vertical scroller for the channels shown. I experimented with various different animations and styles for highlighting the current channel (one of which you will see in TunerFree V3), but in the end settled on a basic Scale animation. One of the important lessons in this though is when you hover over the item, use a Scale command with a scale animation, rather than a PlayAnimation command, because while Scale works on extenders, PlayAnimation does not, e.g.;

<Condition  Source="[Input.KeyFocus]" SourceValue="true">
 <Actions>
 <PlaySound Sound="sound://styles:FocusSound"/>
 <Set Target="[Background.Scale]" Value="1.3,1.3,1.3"/>
 </Actions>
 </Condition>

...

<Panel Name="Background" Layout="HorizontalFlow" Padding="5,5,5,5">
 <Animations>
 <Animation Animation="animation://styles:ScalePicture"/>
 </Animations>
 <Children>

...

<Animation Name="ScalePicture" CenterPointPercent=".5,.5,0" Type="Scale">
 <Keyframes>
 <ScaleKeyframe Time="0"  RelativeTo="Current"  Interpolation="SCurve"/>
 <ScaleKeyframe Time="0.5" />
 </Keyframes>
 </Animation>

Movies

For the movies part of the add-in, I had quite a lot of metadata to play with, such as a high resolution image, and information about the move. I wanted to find a way to show that off as well as possible, and eventually settled on a cover flow style of layout, with rotated images to the left and right of the larger central image, and with reflections of the images below each one. The key to this was finding a way of identifying if the scroller item was to the left or to the right of the current item selected so that it can be rotated in the right direction. Key to this is passing the current index item from your repeater in to each movie item;

<me:Thumbnail Data="[RepeatedItem!a:Movie]"  Name="Thumbnails" MovieUI="[MovieUI]" RptdItemIndex="[RepeatedItemIndex]"/>

and then within the thumbnail both storing off the current selected item, and comparing that to the passed in index, e.g.

<Properties>
 <Index Name="RptdItemIndex" Index="$Required"/>
 <cor:Int32 Name="SelectedDifference"/>
</Properties>
 <Locals>
 <MathTransformer Name="SubtractIndex" SubtractInt="[RptdItemIndex.Value]"/>
 </Locals>

 <Rules>
 <Condition  Source="[Input.KeyFocus]" SourceValue="true">
 <Actions>
 <PlaySound Sound="sound://styles:FocusSound"/>
 <Set Target="[Background.Scale]" Value="1.3,1.3,1.3"/>
 <Set Target="[MovieUI.SelectedMovie]" Value="[RptdItemIndex.Value]"/>
 </Actions>
 </Condition>

 <Binding Target="[SelectedDifference]" Source="[MovieUI.SelectedMovie]" Transformer="[SubtractIndex]" />

 <Condition Source="[SelectedDifference]" ConditionOp="LessThan" SourceValue="0"
  Target="[Background.Rotation]" Value="75deg;0,1,0" />
 <Condition Source="[SelectedDifference]" ConditionOp="GreaterThan" SourceValue="0"
  Target="[Background.Rotation]" Value="-75deg;0,1,0" />
 <Condition Source="[SelectedDifference]" ConditionOp="Equals" SourceValue="0"
  Target="[Background.Rotation]" Value="0deg;0,1,0" />

and then as you scroll through the items, they neatly rotate in to the right place.

Clicking on a movie takes you to a full page of details, with the ability to play different chapters of the movie;

Search

Normally for a search page, I would just use a standard triple-tap text entry region. Unfortunately, since Russian text entry was a key requirement here, that wasn’t sufficient. I therefore had to adapt the keyboard from the “Z” project in the media center SDK to meet my needs. This involved changing it to have Russian characters as an option, to change the actions to behave properly for a search box on a page, and to shrink the UI so that it could fit side by side with the search results. Not trivial, but I would strongly recommend looking at that project as a starting place for building your own keyboard if you have special requirements.

The other thing you will see on this page is the highlighting round the selected item in the search results list. This was done by swapping in and out a selected and unselected panel depending on the focus, e.g.

<Condition Source="[Input.KeyFocus]" SourceValue="true">
 <Actions>
<!-- when focused, play a sound and show the Selected region -->
 <PlaySound Sound="sound://styles:FocusSound"/>
 <Set Target="[Selected.Visible]" Value="true"/>
 <Set Target="[Unselected.Visible]" Value="false"/>
 </Actions>
 </Condition>

 <Condition  Source="[Input.KeyFocus]" SourceValue="false">
 <Actions>
<!-- when unfocused, show the unselected region -->
 <Set Target="[Selected.Visible]" Value="false"/>
 <Set Target="[Unselected.Visible]" Value="true"/>
 </Actions>
 </Condition>

...

<Panel Layout="VerticalFlow">
 <Children>
<!-- shown when selected -->
   <Graphic Name="Selected" Content="image://styles:TextBorder" >
     <Children>

       <Panel Layout="HorizontalFlow">
         <Children>
           <Text Name="ProgramName2" Color="White" Font="Sergio UI,20,Bold" WordWrap="false" Margins="5,10,0,0"/>

         </Children>
       </Panel>
     </Children>
   </Graphic>
<!-- shown when not selected -->
   <Panel Name="Unselected" Layout="HorizontalFlow">
     <Children>
       <Text Name="ProgramName" Color="LightBlue" Font="Sergio UI,18" WordWrap="false" Margins="5,0,0,0"/>
     </Children>
   </Panel>
 </Children>
</Panel>

The key to getting it looking like the media center selection is to draw a nice rounded button with a circular shade in it. I use the open source GIMP package to draw all of my images, and something like this can be achieved quite easily with that.

Preferences

Finally, the system had to run in multiple languages, and change which language it is running in based on user preference, not based on installed language (there are many US customers running with US English installations who want to have the WebTelek software running in Russian). Media Center gives no kind of native support for language switching like that, so I put the different language prompts in a static class;

public static class Language
 {
 public static String PlayPart, Loading, Actors, Length, mins, Producer, NoMovieDetails, Categories, Genres;

 public static void setLanguage(string language)
 {

 switch (language)
 {
 case "US":
 Loading = "Loading";
...

and then in the UI class for each page, exposed the prompt;

public string PreferencesText
 {
 get
 {
 return Language.Preferences;
 }
 }

This allows the text to be referenced in many places without constantly re-instantiating a new class, and also allows for the text to be changed on the fly without re-entering the application.

Summary

Hopefully I have managed to share some useful development tips, and if you are looking to get some Russian television within media center, hopefully I have enticed you enough to sign up with WebTelek.

At the moment I am looking for people who would like to work on a plugin to test this. Ideally you need;

1) A channel that you want to add
2) html and xml skills to be able to produce the metadata

If you are interested in producing a plugin, e-mail me at martin@milliesoft.co.uk

Thanks

Martin

      <Condition Source="[Preferences.TwitDialog]" SourceValue="true" ConditionOp="ChangedTo">
        <Actions>
          <Set Target="[Preferences.TwitDialog]" Value="false"/>
          <Invoke Target="[AddInHost.MediaCenterEnvironment.Dialog]"
                  caption="Authorize Twitter"
                  text="Please authorize twitter."
                  buttons="Ok"
                  timeout="15"
                  isModal="true"/>

        </Actions>
      </Condition>

The buttons can only be ones from the list described in the documentation. A modal window requires either the user or a timeout to close it before any other actions can be done, whereas a modeless window allows the user to continue with other things in the meanwhile.

The dialog is fired in this example by a property which is set in the code to true, and then set back to false when it is read. The condition only fires when the value is set to true in the first place by using the ConditionOp.