The Reinstall

03-12-2009

Not sure if I have mentioned this here yet but I will go ahead and do it again just in case.

The apartment that I moved into recently is wired for broadband and television by a shower of con-artists you wouldn't trust to borrow your pen and return it as promised. As much as it pains me to provide a link to this shower of fucks I figured I would just to prove my point at how dodge they are. I mean nothing says "fast, reliable, broadband" like a picture of a girl playing a fiddle or a website who has a ".com" in the address but has ".ie" plastered over their webpage.

Pick one or the other douche-bags.

Not to mention that the website looks like somebody has figured out how to get sick on the Internet and leave it there as a website.

I know dead people that could code a better looking site than that!

But enough of them, because we ended up getting broadband from a decent company and all was right with the world.

Except we had the small little problem of no T.V. coming into the apartment. Mainly because Skyconway have the monopoly on the signal coming into the building.

A few google searches later and I stumbled across a number of interesting finds, the biggest being this one. Now, as great as it looks it sadly is only available in the UK at the minute, but come the 19th of Dec things are meant to change based on some EU directive that was announced a while ago. I can't find a link to link off to, but the general idea is that the EU said all member states should be able to watch television shows from all other member states. Basically things like the BBC IPlayer or Rte Live Player need to be available outside of their home countries rather than the geolocation/proxy blocking they enforce at the minute.

Meaning good things come to those who wait.

A little researching into this website and it turns out that they have a plugin for Windows Media Center, which just happens to be a little Microsoft toy that plays excellently with an xbox 360. To sum it up in non-tech head talk, you install all the bits on your computer and then your xbox connects to the program and displays the video on your telly from an Internet source.

Nice and easy.

Or so I thought.

I am something of an old fashioned guy when it comes to using Windows (mainly because I use Linux as my full use operating system) and I have a desktop that is installed with Windows XP (if it ain't broke, don't fix it). All I use this computer for is graphical work on Illustrator or Photoshop and the odd DVD burn, so upgrading to the latest OS was never on my "to-do" list. I didn't need to.

Turns out that Vista (or at least certain versions) is meant to have this Media Center included in it. But for XP you had to purchase a thing called "Windows Media Center XP Edition" which was never retail released and only existed on a few Dell computers.

Balls.

Much google searching later and I found many enterprising people that had somehow managed to port the Media Center application as an installable feature for Windows Xp, basically letting you convert your Operating System from one to the other. I downloaded a number of tools and banged my head off a wall for a while trying to get it working (honestly, it's almost like Microsoft don't want you to do these things) and finally got the application installed.

While at the same time hosing my system from all the reg-hacking I had to do (for non-tech heads, messing with files you shouldn't really mess with).

It had been a while since I reinstalled so I figured I would go back to the start, install MCE first, then reload my applications.

Sadly I managed to get a virus from one of them (forgetting stupidly that anti-virus software should always be added first after an install) and had to go and install the computer a third time.

This third install may have broke my spirit a little, since I had gotten MCE to work (more or less) in full without any head banging on the second run through. I figured alternatives would be the answer to my problem.

The two that I found were Boxee and Tversity.

Basically they both turn a computer into a streaming server, but have the potential to stream live tv streams from the Internet (think iPlayer, but being broadcast from one PC to a number of devices in the house).

Boxee had the best promise but sadly, despite being built on an application designed to run on the original Xbox, it doesn't play all that nice with a 360.

Tversity on the other hand was very interesting. Configured and installed in seconds and I was watching Youtube videos on my 360 that were being transcoded on the fly by Tversity from my PC. Overall a funky little toy.

Until Dec 19th this story is sort of being left without a proper finish. The goal on Dec 20th is to have television being streamed from various Internet locations to my xbox 360, thus being shown on the telly. All going well it will be the answer to many problems (since myself and the girlfriend both are now refusing to ever give Skyconway any money as a matter of principal) or at least an interesting project since I never tried anything like this before.

Worse case scenario I need to get a Vista or Windows 7 machine that has Media Center configured and do some hackery, but sure that's part of the fun.

Just while I think of it as well, it might be worth nothing that I had another "motherly overreaction" the other day. I have a cold and was off work with a migraine as well (not the best combo in the world) and told her this on the phone when I rang her. She said "Oh, be careful you don't catch the swine flu!".

I am seriously considering making a website called "Things my mother says!".

Blue_jester

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