In an interview with Billboard this week, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek confirmed that Spotify are just a month or two from launching Spotify in the US. Apparently they have got a data center set up, and are in the final stages of setting up agreements and educating US record companies about the Spotify concept. He also announces that they are in the process of expanding the capabilities and integration that Spotify has to help drive the all important purchases that they need to make their business profitable.

Personally I’m bracing myself for the mass of new Songler users when this launches in the US. I’m sure Spotify have a similar sense of dread – it’s not easy launching a popular product in the worlds largest market.

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.

The reason this is shocking is that for years the music industry has been chasing universities to get them to stop students from stealing music, and then along comes a legal service and the university blocks it. These students (except the PPE ones) are smart people who will find other less legal ways to get their music if the legal ones are blocked, and that doesn’t help anyone.

Update: Manchester University bans Spotify too. Could be a bad trend for fans of free legal music.

Anyway, if you are currently at Oxford missing Spotify, why not try listening to last.fm through Songler. Fantastic way to get your music, and not blocked!

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.

Windows Home Server has had it’s fair share of embarrassing issues that really shouldn’t happen to a server. First of all, it didn’t really support the sort of home power users who were buying it, because it didn’t support backing up 64bit systems for the first year after launch. Secondly, it was corrupting files (I personally lost a few photos to that when they were corrupted while rotating them). Thirdly, until recently you couldn’t back up the server itself, so it was a fairly lousy place to store files.

Now a new issue is becoming more common, which is the inability to recover backups. More and more users are reporting that when trying to mount a backup, the process gets to 81% and then gives the error “Cannot mount the backup”. This was meant to be resolved with Power Pack 3, but from personal experience, I can tell you that it is not, even in the final version. To make matters worse, the symptoms are that you can mount a backup once on each client machine, and then never again. So you get the false sense of security that everything is working fine if you check the backups, but it fails as soon as you really need it.

The key thing about the “81%” part of the issue is that this is the percentage that you get to when WHS has built it’s own internal image of the drive as of a certain date and is then about to mount the drive for you. An error at this stage means that the system is basically unable to mount the drive for whatever reason. There are lots of potential reasons for this, such as having a drive already mounted to “Z:”, or having not enough disk space on your system drive on the server, or needing to rebuild your server database.

Unfortunately though for many users, the issue is not that simple. There are lots of feedback issues logged on Connect for this issue, so it’s hitting lots of people. Some have said it is restricted to Windows 7 RC1 too, but I personally have seen the issue on Vista Ultimate 64 bit, Vista Premium 32bit, Windows 7 RC1 and Windows 7 RTM, so I don’t believe it’s just an OS specific issue. At the moment there seems to be no solution in sight.

Update: Last week I tried to do a complete restore of my Media Center, which had got corrupted somehow. It was a complete disaster – it ran for 2 hours then wouldn’t reboot (no boot sector on the hard drive). After several runs through with the System Repair disk, I got it to boot, but it was not a proper restore – my user profile wouldn’t work, and nor would most of the applications. In the end I just did a clean install. Very disappointed in that too. Thank goodness I keep my media on a different partition to my OS.

So, as far as I am concerned, I think that Windows Home Server has failed in the key tasks that it was meant to do. It didn’t store files without corrupting them (fixed now admittedly), and it doesn’t allow you to restore either files or complete partitions. A basic NAS would do a better job. Anyone got any suggestions for a simple alternative OS to put on an HP EX-475 to turn it in to a working dedicated server?

Update 2: I have a solution (kind of). Since none of the backups would restore, there was no point having them, and because of the problem, I wasn’t getting any new backups. So, I decided to delete my entire backup directory and start from scratch. Steps to do this were;

1) Go in to Home Server and remove every computer from the Backup tab.

2) Uninstall the home server connector from all PCs

3) Open a Remote Desktop Connection session to your home server.

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;

Those of you who actually really do any serious web site coding also know that you will sooner or later be asked to work on a site that makes heave use of tables, and when faced with re-coding the whole system to use css or sticking with tables, it’s often going to be stick with tables.

Unfortunatly, IE8 has a nasty habit of simply ignoring any table cell widths you specify and rendering them as whatever size it sees fit on a truly random basis (refresh the page and see a different layout!). Fortunatly I found a solution to get IE to behave nice again. You can use the table-layout: fixed style to get it behaving well again, so just stick the following in your stylesheet (you do at least have one stylesheet don’t you?);

table{
  table-layout:fixed;
}

And there you have it – freedom to continue coding like it’s Web 1.0 time!

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.