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/what-e-mail-provider-do-developers-use/ http://blog.milliesoft.co.uk/2010/03/what-e-mail-provider-do-developers-use/#comments Mon, 22 Mar 2010 18:00:35 +0000 Martin Millmore http://blog.milliesoft.co.uk/?p=224 As does happen from time to time, I got an e-mail today where everyone on a list’s e-mail address was visible, rather than being BCC’d. I don’t want to beat the company up about it, because it’s an unfortunate fact of life that that kind of thing does occasionally happen due to simple human error, and they sent out an apology straight away.

Anyway, the interesting thing about this mail was that it was to developers who scrobble music to last.fm. That means it is not a general public sort of list – typically one person from each organization what has some software which can scrobble, and also most importantly, these are very technical people who are almost certainly all computer experts, who’s opinions on technical things are probably quite illuminating.

Now, normally I wouldn’t have looked twice at the actual addresses, but they had actually put them in the body of the e-mail, so I had no choice but to scroll through them all to get to the text. What struck me about this list of 312 e-mail addresses was there seemed to be quite a lot of gmail addresses. So many that I decided to do some analysis. What I discovered was that 117 e-mail addresses were gmail or goolemail. That’s 37% of developers using google for their e-mail. The next highest was yahoo at 1.6%. That’s quite a commanding lead for google.

Now, I use Google Apps for my e-mail, so although my e-mail address is at milliesoft.co.uk, my mail is actually handled by Google. I wondered how many of the rest of the developers fell in to that category, so there was only one thing for it. I wrote a script to do a lookup on the MX record for each domain to see who actually ran e-mail for the rest of the addresses. The findings were that 47 domains in the list are actually google apps domains. That means that for my sample of developers, we have the following e-mail providers (anyone with <1% share is on the “Others” box).

Answer:

More than half  of  the developers use Google as their e-mail provider – nearly 30 times more than the next contender, Yahoo.

According to wikipedia, gmail has 146 million users, hotmail has 343 million, and yahoo mail has 266 million users, so developers certainly buck that trend.

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.

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.