OTA HDTV in Canada on Vista betas

These instructions have been superceded, please click on this link for the newer and more complete instructions. 

During my testing of Windows Vista Media Center, it appeared that the off-the-air registry hack to get your ATSC tuners working in Canada was now defunct.  I’ve been doing some playing in the registry and have come up with a new method that does seem to work well in Canada.  I’d appreciate it if someone can test this out and confirm it in the comments.  If it is proven to work for others as well, I’ll publish this with screenshots as a more official looking FAQ.

Assumptions:

1. You have a working analog tuner, with MCE drivers installed
2. You have a working ATSC tuner, with MCE drivers installed

Steps to enable the ATSC tuner in Canada

1. Configure your Media Center as if you lived in the US, preferably using a zip code somewhere near your location.  I used Buffalo ZIP 14201.  Let Media Center auto-configure your tuners.
2. Confirm that it’s all working properly (obviously the guide data will be wrong at this point).
3. Open up the registry editor by typing regedit [enter] into the start search box.  Note that you can really mess things up in the registry, so be careful and if you’re not comfortable in the registry then you might want to stop here.
4. Locate the following key in the registry: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Service\Video\Tuners\{71985F48-1CA1-11D3-9CC8-00C04F7971E0}.  This is the tuning space for the digital tuner(s) and at this point it should be properly set up for ATSC tuning.
5. Right-click on the above branch and select “Export…”, save it with a filename like “ATSC_Tuners_Working.reg”.
6. Navigate in Media Center back to the TV Settings menu and set up your TV signal.  This time make sure that you select Canada and get everything set up properly for your provider.  Note that when you run through the setup this time MCE will not detect the ATSC tuner, which is normal.
7. Verify that everything is working as you would expect, albeit with no high-definition content yet.
8. Close media center
9. Find the registry file that you saved earlier in USA mode, double-click to import it back into the registry.
10. Locate the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Service\EPG\ATSC and modify its value from “0″ to “1″.
11. Reboot the computer *or* simply restart the Microsoft Media Center Receiver service using the services control panel.
12. Start up MCE, navigate to the TV Settings Guide Setup and manually add the channels you would like to receive.  This page is a good resource for the Toronto area.  The format you want to enter, using the Fox Network on the RemoteCentral page as a reference, is 29-1 for the channel designation (page one of the add missing DTV channel wizard) and 14 for the frequency (page two).
13. For any channels that don’t automatically get guide information (most likely Canadian channels like CTV) you can associate them with another channel in your guide using the edit guide setup tools.

Works well for me, please point out any inconsistencies or errors for me before I publish this more official-like.  This guide was done primarily by memory so I’m sure I’ve messed up a few references.

Matt Goyer leaving Microsoft

Well boo!  I really like Matt and what he’s contributed to both the media center product and the media center community through his blog.  Matt is a Waterloo grad who went to work at Microsoft right out of university and now it appears that he’s looking for something with more room to grow.
For those who don’t know, Matt’s most visible work is that done on the DVD player in Media Center including support for DVD changers and upcoming support for HD-DVD.
Good luck Matt, and thanks for everything you did!

Vista photo tags to use XMP

Matt Goyer points out that Windows Vista photo tags will use XMP as the metadata layer.  The topic of tagging was recently discussed in the Pix Blog, with the following statements:

There are a number of competing standards for imaging metadata. That is, different ways of reading and writing metadata for photos. One of the biggest standards, EXIF, is commonly written to photos by most cameras, but has many limitations. It’s somewhat antiquated, fragile, not very flexible, and doesn’t support international languages like Japanese very well. IPTC is a standard that is used pretty widely in journalism applications, but is undergoing a transformation towards an XMP-based system.

XMP is an extensible framework for embedding metadata in files that was developed by Adobe, and is the foundation for our “truth is in the file” goal. All metadata written to photos by Windows Vista will be written to XMP (always directly to the file itself, never to a ‘sidecar’ file). When reading metadata from photos on Windows Vista, we will first look for XMP metadata, but if we don’t find any, we’ll also look for legacy EXIF and IPTC metadata as well. If we find legacy metadata, we’ll write future changes back to both XMP and the legacy metadata blocks (to improve compatibility with legacy applications).

I just tried to test this on my vista box, and surprisingly can’t get any metadata to stick at all so I’ll assume that either my version is buggy or this is a to-be-released feature.  I did do quite a bit of testing early on and the metadata was definintely not in any standard format (at least that’s what my sometimes foggy memory is telling me).  I also came across an older discussion at Scoble’s blog that would seem to prove my memory correct.
I’m thrilled to see this change in direction, it’s something I’ve been pounding my chest about quite a bit over the last year.  My only other thoughts/concerns that hopefully I’ll get to test soon:

• Will there be a way for me to force the compatibility mode?  Until the world changes a bit more, I may still need to write out IPTC tags.  I plan to dump my current tagging tools if the Microsoft Gallery serves my needs, so legacy data won’t be in my new files to trigger the writing of IPTC tags.  I will however still want IPTC information in there at least until the rest of the world completes its move to XMP (for sharing my files).
• Is this only in the gallery application, or will tags I add via explorer also get this treatment?  I’m hoping that this extends to all of Windows and not just the gallery app.

Thank you to Microsoft, very much, for listening to the community on this one.  I sincerely appreciate this functionality.

Apparently my world is about to be rocked

Well I haven’t seen it yet, but another tester Robert McLaws has seen a sneak peak of the Vista RC1 Candidate build that is coming our way soon.  Apparently my world is about to be rocked.  When I look around at my little world, there is far too little rocking.  There is barely even a waltz in my world now, more of a ballad with a white man’s overbite.  If there were ever a world in need of rocking it is mine.  I (and my world) await said rockage with great anticipation.
All kidding aside, I’m happy to see someone excited about Vista.  I personally can’t wait until I get a build that is stable enough to re-foist upon my wife and kids.  As it stands we’re back on MCE2005, and god help me now that Prison Break is back on the air if I move back to Vista and Media Center misses an episode.

And it looks like I’ll be enjoying yet another night in Chicago

Well it’s midnight EDT and still no pilots.  I’ve been here before, and I know what happens next… the pilots show up and then get a call from the powers that be letting them know that they have no more legal flying time left in them.  Chaos ensues and I get very grumpy (oddly enough I’m still in a decent mood).  Luckily the hotel connected to the airport still has rooms, so I’ll be bunking it here in Chicago until my newly booked flight can get out tomorrow after lunch.
Of course my luggage is still in the belly of the plane, so I feel sorry for the poor soul who gets to sit beside me on the flight tomorrow.  Mmmm… day-old business clothes…

Finally boarded the plane…

… and the pilots have arrived at the airport.  Slight mixup though, our plane full of passengers ready to get home is in Chicago and the pilots are in Milwaukee.  Now this is fun!  There are rooms available at the Chicago Hilton, I’m thinking I should learn from my past mistakes and just book a room.  In case you’ve missed it in the past – never, ever travel with me or this will happen to you too.

Has anyone ever left O’Hare ontime?

Oh I just love connecting via O’Hare.  For this flight I “took one for the team” and flew BUF-ORD-MSP instead of a direct YYZ-MSP and saved the company $1000.  The warm and fuzzy feeling of saving money is going away right… about… now.
I should start keeping stats of my personal ontime performance flying through Chicago, officially the average last year was 75% ontime but I think my personal stats are closer to 50%.  The worst experience was when flying with a group of colleagues a couple of years ago when a Blizzard hit.  I had a Las Vegas vacation to start the next day, so I worked my a** off to get home in time to pick up the wife and make it to Vegas on-time.  I bounced across a couple of different flights and airlines eventually making it all the way to the runway before the pilots gave in to mother nature. 
Of course all of my colleagues, not caring so much about going to Vegas with their wives the next day, had already checked in to the Ohare Hilton and were sending me drunken heckles via Blackberry.
This one’s not so bad (yet).  It looks like a 1-hour delay but still, that’ll get me in to Buffalo at about 1:00am and there’s another 90 minute drive back to Toronto.  I might end up getting a hotel in Buffalo so I don’t doze off and plow into oncoming traffic on the drive home.
I remember when I was 22 travel was glamorous and exciting, oh how naive I was!

Rogers Home Phone now in Milton

If you’re anything like me, you hate the fact that you have to live with Bell Canada for local phone service.  Several years ago, Sprint Canada launched one of the only competitive local phone services in Ontario but it was only available in select markets.  Those who could get access to the competitive service liked it, those who could not just begrudgingly paid out the local phone service bill every month to Bell.
Then came along VoIP, which is already shaking up the market enough that local phone service is suddenly becoming competitive again which is good news for consumers.  The information that’s been for the most part kept from people who I know is that VoIP service just isn’t quite on par yet with the traditional service that you’re accustomed to.  Sure it’s cheaper, but comes at a cost that is too high for me:

1. The quality isn’t always there, and moreso than traditional landline service VoIP calls are succeptible to interference and traffic out on the wild, wild internet.  It’s gotten much better in the last two years and I have zero quality complaints about my home office line provided by Vonage.  But beware, it’s not always great.
2. 911 service doesn’t always work as you’d expect it to.  Now again, this has improved a ton in the last few years but until someone can prove to me that 911 will work 100% of the time and in the worst of conditions, it’s not good enough for my family.  The babysitter must be able to pick up any phone in the house, dial 911, and have an ambulance arrive within 3 minutes (the ambulance garage is just a couple blocks away).
3. Doesn’t always work in a power outage.  There are lots of failure points between your phone and the ultimate destination, and many internet networks were not designed to provide 100% uptime like the phone networks were.  For VoIP to work well, you need to have lots of battery backup in your home, the cable company needs to have battery backup out on the major street posts and in their headends, and battery backup where they plug in to the traditional phone network.  That’s not always there.
4. Uptime mentality amongst the technicians isn’t always there.  I personally think that my cable company is one of the best in North America, but still the cable goes out too often (one outage every three months is too much in my world).  When I call in to see what’s up, it’s usually “we’re performing maintenance in your area” or something like that.  In the old world where you were only missing out on daytime soaps that was acceptable, but now that it’s your phone service that is unacceptable.
5. Regardless of how much VoIP companies try to improve on their own, I quite simply won’t have faith in their systems unless they fall under the same strict guidelines as the Bell Canada landline services from the CRTC which mandates very strict uptime, quick repair tunraround, and massive fines if those targets are missed.  Once again I’ll state that my cable company Cogeco is the most likely to provide a fantastic VoIP service and they have started offering one in this area that does everything I’ve asked for.  But, until they can prove to me that they’ve ditched their old ways of “cable’s out for the afternoon, deal with it” I’m not buying.

So let’s return back to where this rant started; the Bell Canada versus Sprint Canada competition that started out many years ago before anyone even knew what a voip was.  Sprint Canada continued to very slowly build out its copper network, and was last year acquired by Rogers Communications.  Just today I got a flyer in the mail announcing that Rogers Home Phone service is now available in my area.  Interesting…  I called in to verify that this was indeed the copper-based sprint canada service and not some new voip offering and they confirmed for me that yes, this is the traditional landline service I’ve been waiting for with all the CRTC regulated goodness that comes with it.  Quick price check, and it would appear that the pricing is similar for the basic service but there is a fantastic promotion going on right now that’ll get me unlimited North American long distance free for a year.  That immediately makes this service about $20 a month less – sign me up!

Microsoft accouncing XBox game writing tool

Very cool for them to be moving in this direction, I think it might produce some interesting results.  The XNA Game Studio Express will allow regular deveopers and hobbyists write games that can be compiled to run on the 360.  Annual cost is $99.

Let me make my prediction now… this is the vehicle by which the XBox 360 wil lbe eventually hacked.

Not a good week to be flying

Wow, I’m glad that I’m not on the road this week.  The US, Canada, and Britain have just gone into critical alert status for the first time ever and air travel is just a mess.  Here in Canada, carry-ons with any sort of liquid or gel are not allowed on any flight to the UK or the US.  In Britain, Heathrow airport is effectively shut down (still running, but everything delayed, many flights canceled, and many flights just not going there any more).  In the US, lineups are growing as Continental, United, and American airlines appear to have been targeted.
It’s hard to complain in a situation like this, and I doubt that many people are (other than the passengers who are inherently belligerent) but it sure would be frustrating to be stuck in this.