Archive for the ‘Windows’ Category

I have so much multimedia software that I am at risk of forgetting what’s what and why it’s there! So, to save me having to re-learn it all should I ever feel compelled to re-install my OS (!), here is a brief summary…

1. Music Composition and Midi File production
I used to use Noteworthy Composer, but it costs money (and quite a lot of it, all things considered). So now I use Musescore, which is GPL’d and thus entirely zero cost. It does an excellent job with music notation, and also exports to midi and WAV and a whole lot else. Excellent for writing that symphony you’ve always wanted to pen, and also good at setting down Bach music examples! Without dedicated midi hardware or additional configuration, Noteworthy does a better job of approximating violins and other instruments (everything in Musescore sounds like a piano out of the box!), but it’s not enough to convince me it’s worth paying for the upgrade. Musescore it is.

2. Blu-Ray Playing
I’ve used the trial versions of Cyberlink PowerDVD and ArcSoft Total Media Theatre. Both cost in excess of $100. Both integrate nicely into Windows Media Centre (so playing a Blu-Ray or a DVD with either of them is a simple menu option selection using the standard Windows TV remote control). However, I found the Cyberlink product to be a nightmare to use (it rarely worked flawlessly). Arcsoft’s offering is much, much better in that regard.

However, I don’t actually play Blu-Rays very often: I much prefer to extract the .mt2s stream from the Blu-Ray and play that off the hard disk. Neither Cyberlink nor Arcsoft handle that particularly well.

Thank God, therefore, for the ever-so-humble but oh-so-brilliant Media Player Classic Home Cinema. It comes in a 64-bit version, which is good. It plays .mt2s streams without a drama. It does not integrate with Windows Media Centre, which is a shame… but it’s 100% zero cost, so that makes up for everything else. In short, it might not be as convenient to use from the Home Cinema lounge, but it does everything else that I could want it to do. Blu-Ray player problem solved.

3. Blu-Ray Ripping
First off, you absolutely have to have AnyDVD HD. That will cost you money, but is definitely worth it, and will leave your Blu-Ray disks unencrypted. Turning the contents into a single, playable, still high-def file is, however, still trickier than it ought to be. The tool I use more than anything else is called Clown BD, which usually correctly outputs a single .m2ts file containing the entire movie in one hit. Subtitles seem to be trickier to handle than I expected, especially when they are of the sort where a character in the movie speaks in a foreign language for only part of the movie (ie, you don’t want the entire set of English subtitles, just for the bit where fluent German, French or what have you is being spoken).

Assuming you get that far, it is then difficult to turn a 30 or 40GB .m2ts file into something usable (say, a 10GB mkv file). The standard tool I use for converting DVD movies to MKV is HandBrake (see below), but it usually chokes when presented with such a large input file. I therefore normally use Aieesoft HD Converter to turn the .m2ts file into a standard .avi or .wmv one. It’s not the greatest program in the world -it’s grasp of English syntax seems to be lacking at one or two points, for example!- but it (usually) does the job. Sometimes, I find the audio gets out of synch with the video, which is very annoying, but if you tweak the conversion settings enough times, it usually works in the end. When it doesn’t, I’ve also used the Free Video Converter from Koyotesoft to do the same thing, and it usually succeeds where Aieesoft’s offering fails (it also has failures of its own, though, so neither is perfect).

I must confess, though, that if we are ever presented with a choice between a Blu-Ray version of a movie and a DVD version of the same thing, we will usually buy the DVD version, simply because turning it into something we can actually use comfortably in the house is a lot, lot simpler. Blu-Ray ripping and converting is still not a seamless, painless exercise, in short, no matter what software you install.

4. DVD Ripping
As I mentioned above, you have to have AnyDVD HD: there’s simply nothing like it for making working with encrypted DVDs painless.

After that, I simply copy off the VIDEO_TS directory onto my hard disk and then point HandBrake at it. I run HandBrake at insane settings, extracting every last bit of quality out of the source, even though it takes 6 hours to convert (on an overclocked i7, 4 cores, 8 threads, with 8GB RAM to work in). Patience pays, however: you end up with 1.5-2.0GB MKV files that are a pleasure to watch.

5. Audio Ripping
Just as DVDs are a pain to have cluttering up the place in their physical form, so I haven’t played a physical audio CD in years. They all get ripped to lossless WMA format the minute they’re delivered from Amazon! My preferred tool for doing that is dbPowerAmp Music Converter. It incorporates AccurateRip, so you can be certain the final rip is as good as it can be; it’s multi-threaded (if you buy the Reference version), so my 4 hyperthreaded CPUs are used to their maximum potential; it has stacks of codecs which can be plugged in at any time, so if you happen (like me) to also need to convert your WMA rips to MP3 (or pretty much anything else) for the sake of your portable media player, that’s easy to do, too. The only bummer, I suppose, is that it’s not zero cost… and at US$36, it’s no longer the peanut-sized $18 it was when I first purchased it, either. But, all in all, it’s worth it.

I’ve experimented with zero-cost alternatives (like Exact Audio Copy), but I’ve never found anything with quite the ease of use of dbPowerAmp. To take just one example: if a CD contains three different Bach cantatas, I would like to rip them into three separate folders, each containing tracks numbered 1 to (say) 5. dbPowerAmp has a unique ‘track offset’ feature that makes doing that a piece of cake; nothing else I’ve ever tried has, so I usually end up with three folders containing, respectively, tracks 1-5, tracks 6-10 and tracks 11-15. It doesn’t make a lot of difference when you play the stuff what the tracks happen to be called at the OS level, I realise, but it’s just one of those organisational things that dbPowerAmp gets right.

6. PDF Creation
I’m not shelling out hundreds of dollars for the Adobe Acrobat product, thank you very much! My needs are much more modest… so I make do with Primo PDF Creator, which costs nix, nada, zilch. It doesn’t integrate well with anything and you can’t edit the PDFs after you’ve created them… but, if you can print it, you can create a PDF with it (since the software installs as a new printer driver).

For a PDF reader, I actually make do with the Adobe offering -but the Foxit alternative is just as free and rather smaller to download. It’s also less prone to ‘phoning home’ (tip to the wise: in the Adobe Reader, visit Edit -> Preferences -> JavaScript and uncheck the Enable Acrobat JavaScript option, unless you fancy leaving your PC open to potential security exploits).

7. Graphics
The Other Half does a lot of fancy-shmancy effects work on photographs taken with a digital SLR. For that, nothing approaches the Photoshop/Lightroom combination, and ToH is happy with them. No way am I installing that behemoth on my PC, however. Apart from anything else, I’d spend the next three years learning how to use it all And besides even that, I don’t have $1000+ to spare! Therefore, I content myself with Paint.Net, which is entirely zero-cost and does all that I could ask it to do by way of simple (and also not-so-simple) image transformations and conversions.

Yup, I could use the GIMP, I suppose. But then I could also beat myself over the head with blunt hazlenuts in an attempt to look vaguely attractive. Both seem rather pointless wastes of my time! (Truthfully, the GIMP’s layout, menu structures etc. have never seemed half so intuitive as Paint.Net’s layout/menu structure etc. Your mileage, as they say, could well be different).

8. Scratched Disk Repair
I do get the occasional DVD or CD with a nasty scratch on it. The only way I know to retrieve anything from such a disk is with the IsoBuster. It can take hours to navigate past a defective patch on a disk, and you may end up having to pad the output with zeroes (which is, effectively, a data loss situation), but it will usually get there in the end. When I’ve done that on a DVD, for example, I’ve seen a second of so of cubist garbage flash up on the TV before the thing continues to play completely normally: better that than a completely unplayable disk, surely?! As a bonus, it’s completely zero-cost (well, there’s an option to upgrade to the PRO version for US$29.95, but I’ve never taken that option, and I’ve still saved disks with the freebie version).

9. Codecs
With all my movies in MKV format, it’s a little tricky to persuade Windows Media Centre to play them. But Shark’s Codecs make that a non-issue. (It also means Media Player can cope with FLACs and so on) I’m not usually a fan of installing codec packs (they are often virus/trojan infested, for example; and if not that, then they have a habit of making your PC as stable as a jelly in a gale), but Shark’s ones are safe, competent and comprehensive and make your choice of format for your multimedia files an entirely moot point.

10. Editing of Recorded TV Programmes from Media Centre
Sometimes, we want to save a TV programme recorded with Windows Media Centre. This is not especially easy, since the Windows 7 MC records in a weird format that Microsoft themselves don’t support very well (.wtv, if you’re interested). If we want to top-and-tail a recording (or strip out adverts, etc), we first right-click the file and turn it into a .dvr-ms file (that’s the format used, I think, by the much older XP media centre). Then we can load those converted files into DVR-MS Editor. That lets you edit the file to your heart’s content, and is completely zero cost.

Obtaining DVR-MS Editor is not exactly a piece of cake, however! It’s actually downloadable from Stephen Toub’s blog, right at the end of a very long article, and from a very small hyperlink called ‘OldCode.zip’. Once you’ve downloaded and unpacked that, the relevant executable (which needs no installation) is found in ..\OldCode\Code\DvrmsEditor\bin\Debug\. Easy, huh?! Still, works just fine.

I think that’s just about it. Scanning through my ‘Programs and Features’ screen in Windows 7, at any rate, that would appear to be most if not all of the key multimedia-related software I’ve currently got installed on my PC. Should make any future re-installation a bit easier, I hope!

Although I now have my Drobo as the single store of everything I care about in the multimedia world (single because, of course, it comes with its own internal data protection mechanisms), I still have a need for synchronising two or more USB external hard disks as redundant repositories of non-multimedia data (such as virtual machines, software downloads and so on).

Windows lacks the ability to synchronise two folders easily (which some might say says a lot about Windows!). But at least there is now this Microsoft tool for the job. It works simply enough -it maybe lacks, in other words, some of the more complex file synchronisation options that other dedicated software solutions have. But it’s free, is compatible with Windows 7, comes in a 64-bit version and it does the job I need it to do, and that makes me happy it’s available!

I had to agree that this would count as Christmas and Birthday present combined, but The Other Half agreed the week before last to let my buy a Drobo:

It’s a nice piece of technology: you basically stick up to four hard disks in it and it shuffles data around within the ’storage pool’ thus created to keep it safely protected from the failure of up to two of the hard drives. Sounds like a RAID array, but it’s not -as you can mix and match any size of hard disk and still have it do its thing just fine. It’s actually more like Oracle’s ASM with redundancy set -or, perhaps, a bit like ZFS. It’s bloody clever, anyway! It also looks good, doesn’t take up much room and is pretty quiet. Sticking in 4 1TB drives, I have 3TB of usable space, with all my data protected against hardware failure: it was worth the money, is all I can say.

There’s no networking with the thing, however: that requires the additional purchase of the ‘Droboshare’ add-on, which is pretty expensive. Happily, for me, it’s also completely redundant: this thing just directly attaches to my PC via USB. I can write to it about 35Mb/sec, which is reasonable for an external USB device (but makes copying 3TB of data onto it an exercise in patience and endurance!)

So you’d think I’d be into the Plain Sailing Storage Straights by now, wouldn’t you? A nice, shiny new toy and oodles of disk space: what could go wrong?

Well, it all comes down to the intended use for the thing. I had hoped to plug the Drobo into my Western Digital WDTV media player and therafter be able to watch movies and the like directly off a single, huge storage device, instead of juggling with the 4 different external USB drives I use currently. So the first thing I did was quickly do a default Drobo config, copy 2 music files onto it, plug it into the WDTV, and see if I could play the music… and the Drobo+WDTV combo passed that test with flying colours. No problems at all. Encouraged by that, I re-formatted the Drobo, spent four days copying all my movies and music and photos onto the thing and, excitedly, on Saturday morning plugged the now-fully-loaded Drobo into the WDTV. Excitement mounted. And mounted. And sort-of kept mounting, a bit. And then turned into despair, for nothing happened at all, except that the WDTV eventually displayed a message about how there was an unsupported USB device attached. It couldn’t see anything on the Drobo, in short, and my experiment was turning into a nightmare.

What had gone wrong? The damned thing was visible to the WDTV at one point. Why was it no longer usable? Well, thinking about it, the only thing I can put it down to is what happens when you reformat a Drobo: you get asked to pick a volume size. By default and by recommendation, you get a 2TB volume (even if you’ve only put in a couple of 80GB hard drive, the volume is still displayed in Windows as being 2TB in size. The volume size is, in other words, what you can grow up to, not what storage you’ve currently got). That’s what would have been in place when I first did my test run with just a couple of music files. But when I re-formatted the Drobo, I elected to use a 4TB volume size (because I don’t want too many volumes to have to manage independently). I think that’s what did it: the WDTV was happy to see and use a 2TB ‘disk’, but anything bigger than that, and it’s flummoxed. I can’t prove that to be the problem, because despite looking at the relevant webpages for a long time, I couldn’t actually find a reference to the WDTV’s maximum possible external hard disk volume size -but it certainly seems the most plausible cause to me.

So what to do?

Obviously, what I should have done would have involved copying all 3TB of data back off the drobo onto assorted hard disks, re-formatting the Drobo to use 2TB partitions, and then copying all the data back on. Sometime in early December, I might have been able to plug the Drobo in to the WDTV and actually use it, then!

So, rather than waste a large chunk of my life watching bits being moved from one spinning platter to another, I decided on a slightly different course: build a Media Center PC and plug the Drobo into that. Windows, after all, has no problem seeing and working with large volumes -and I had a perfectly capable dual-core box with 4GB RAM and a TV Tuner Card sitting around doing stuff-all in a cupboard. Might as well put it to good use, no? And since I can install Windows 7 in about 45 minutes flat, I should be able to watch a movie or some TV by lunchtime at the latest, no?

Well, no, as it turned out. But that’s a story for another post…

I’ve mentioned the fiddly nature of graphical Linux VMs on Citrix Xen Server… but I wouldn’t want you to think that graphical loveliness was particularly difficult to achieve per se on this platform. It just depends on your choice of guest operating system: pick Windows, for example -an OS that has a hard time doing anything but be graphical!- and you get a GUI straight off the installation CD or DVD:

And, as you can see, an Oracle 32-bit installation (it happened to be the only version of Vista/2008-compatible Oracle I had to hand) onto a graphical Windows 2008 64-bit Server running via Citrix Xen Server, accessed via my Windows 7 desktop is plain sailing, with no surprises. (Honestly: the mind boggles at the combination of technologies here, and the thought that not so many years ago, this would all just have been a pipe-dream!)

The significance of this particular screenshot is that I am about to convert the dev and test environments at work to virtualised servers… running on Citrix Xen Server, because it’s the only bare metal virtualisation solution that seems able to promise to come to the party with what we need to do. Our production systems are currently Windows 64-bit affairs, so it’s important to know that whatever virtualisation technology we adopt can take a direct copy of a production system and do something with it. Converting the files (of which there are many) via RMAN or doing an export/import so that we can get the data into databases running on Linux VMs are not practical options. On the other hand, I’m pushing (at an ever-opening door) to migrate all our production DB servers from Windows to Linux anyway… so our virtualisation solution for the dev and test environments has to be able to cope with running Oracle-on-Linux VMs at some point in the future, too… which Citrix Xen Server does with ease, as I’ve mentioned previously.

It’s been a “long weekend” here in Sydney: today is a public holiday (though the occasion for it escapes me… perhaps something to do with Labour Day? Who knows!)

I’ve spent most of the day finalising my server setups. Now that my new desktop has arrived, my old quad core becomes The Other Half’s PC, and TOH’s old PC becomes my new ’spare server’. It’s not bad as these things go: dual core Core 2 Duo, 3GHz, 4GB RAM, 1TB hard disk space. So I thought I’d try a bit of free (as in zero cost) bare-bones virtualisation and see how I got on.

I started with Citrix Xen Server 5, then Citrix Xen Server 5.5 (the current release). I moved on to Vmware’s ESXi 3.5 and then Vmware’s ESXi’s 4.0 (again, the current release). I tried Hyper-V (Microsoft’s offering in this virtual space). And I wrapped up with a dabble with Oracle’s own VM-Server, version 2.5.

I’ll save the gory details for a later post, because it’s worth doing a proper side-by-side comparison of these things. But the short story is: Xen Server 5.0 installed extremely well, but when trying to create a Centos 5.3 x86_64 virtual machine, the Centos installer lost contact with the Xen Server’s DVD drive immediately after booting, rendering further installation impossible. Call that the deadest of dead-ends, then! This didn’t happen with the more recent Xen Server 5.5, however, and I was therefore able to install the Xen Server, its Windows client tools and create a Centos 64-bit virtual machine in precisely 27 minutes flat… which is amazing, I think, as these things go (especially as I was cooking dinner at the time). The only slight problem was that the Centos installation refused to install graphically and subsequently refused to run X at all… so it was a command-line only affair. That’s not the end of the world, of course, since it’s possible to run an X server on your Windows machine and have a graphical experience of a console-only virtual machine. But it’s not ideal.

ESXi Server was an extremely quick install, but it’s another 100MB download to get hold of the Windows remote administration client which is mysteriously called V-Sphere …and which, as it turns out, doesn’t actually run on Windows 7! There are workarounds: they involve downloading a dll which could contain absolutely anything from a website whose trustworthiness you have to take on, er, trust. And then you have to hack around a few XML files and keep your fingers crossed. Eventually, it does all work, but the experience is deeply, deeply nasty and not one I’d recommend.

Hyper-V was a success, in the sense that I had a working Centos 5.3 virtual machine within an hour and a half… but the graphics were all messed up, with the Centos machine needing to be set to an 800×600 display before it would display correctly on an old 1280×1024 monitor. Set it actually to display at 1280×1024 and it looked more like 3856×1900… very, very large and unusable! If you didn’t mind working in a tiny screen, or forever scrolling around an enormous one, I suppose you could call it workable. But yet another download (this time, 200MB+) was needed to get the Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows 7 installed… only then to discover that no matter what one did, you just kept being told that you lacked the permissions necessary to administer the virtual server. Apparently, if you faff around with assorted Group Policies and DCOM permissions, you might get it all working, but I never did. So, if you don’t mind running everything direct off the virtual server itself, no problemo. But if you want to manage it from your Windows 7 desktop, forget it, basically.

Oracle’s own virtualisation server was slick enough… but incredibly fiddly to use, with the need to pre-provision everything (such as the Centos installation disks) made incredibly difficult. (Think of it like having to pre-declare all your variables before being allowed to use them!) It doesn’t help that there’s still no Windows client software for remote administration of the virtual machines: so you’re reduced to creating a virtual Linux machine on your Windows desktop so you can administer a virtual Linux machine on your Oracle VM Server! Pathetic, to be honest, and far more trouble than it’s worth. Especially since installing the ‘client’ software involves an incredibly adventurous and lengthy install of a complete Oracle XE database server, plus a mountain of Oracle Application Server componentry. I kept seeing visions of sledgehammers and nuts, to be honest. After all that, there’s not even the facilty to just say, ‘please install from the DVD what I’ve just installed in the Virtual Server’s physical DVD drive’. Oh no. Nothing that simple. Various import options are available to make an already-obtained ISO usable as a VM installation source, but none of them worked for me. My server just sat there, promising me mountains of virtual pleasure, but denying me any of it. Meanwhile, I’d been forced to create an additional amply-apportioned virtual server simply to act as the managing remote client for the server I’d intended to create. Bizarre in the exteme.

Short story, then: Windows Hyper-V works, but remote administration is a bugger. Xen Server works incredibly simply, swiftly and elegantly…but without X, it’s a more complex command-line only experience (update: but this can be fixed!). ESXi is OK, but seems fiddly, and doesn’t have a good Windows 7 client. And Oracle’s own Virtual Server offering is a complete load of unmanageable nonsense as far as I’m concerned.

A detailed write-up to follow, in other words. Meanwhile, a lot of fun, even more frustration… and some surprising outcomes. (I had expected Oracle’s offering to be a lot more elegant than it was, for example!)

I’m not sure how long this has been necessary, but Windows 7 appears to have broken Samba. Maybe Vista did it before; maybe it’s been this way for a long time. Sharing a Windows share to a Centos machine is not something I’ve done a lot of lately, so I can’t say for sure. But this evening, I wanted to install 10gR2 on my new Centos 5.3 x64 machine -when you buy a new PC, your original PC becomes The Other Half’s PC, and TOH’s PC becomes a new Centos server. And then the music stops! The 10g installation software is now sitting on my Windows 7 file system, shared with one of those Microsoft wizard-y things. Over on the Centos box, I typed the straightforward command mount -t cifs -o username=dizwell //10.42.43.2/software /mnt. Pretty ancient stuff, and it’s always worked before. But not tonight. Tonight I was told:

mount error 12 = Cannot allocate memory
Refer to the mount.cifs(8) manual page (e.g. man mount.cifs)

Well, if I’d taken the advice offered by that error message, I might have been there a long time! Because it turns out it’s not a cifs (the ‘proper’ name we give smbfs these days!) issue at all, but a Windows one. Specifically, it turns out that if you look at your Windows event log (easier said than done in Windows 7!! It’s buried away in Control Panel -> System and Security -> Administrative Tools -> Event Viewer), in the Windows Log -> System branch, you’ll see the red exclamation-marked Error with a source of “srv”. Drill into that, and you’ll see the message:

The server was unable to allocate from the system nonpaged pool because the server reached the configured limit for nonpaged pool allocations.

The fix for that is to fire up the Registry Editor (click the Start Orb, type in regedit in the search programs and files window and press Enter) and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\LanmanServer\Parameters. Once there, I had to create a new DWORD (32-bit) Value, called IRPStackSize, setting its value to Decimal 15. Reboot the Windows machine at that point, and when it comes back up, exactly the same mount command as issued previously on the Linux machine will now work just fine.

Update: Google reports this same issue going back to at least 2006, so it’s definitely not new. I also found there reports that suggested it was the reboot of the Windows box after the registry change that was the key to the “fix”, rather than the registry change itself. And I also found this site suggesting a completely different registry fix for the same problem. The fact that two different registry entries appears to ‘fix’ the problem does suggest to my mind that it’s the reboot that’s the key, not the registry alteration, but that’s up in the air I guess. For the record, my LanmanServer\Parameters\Size key was set to 1 and remained so despite my change to the IRPStackSize value, and yet my mount command worked just fine second time around. Go figure!

The new PC has finally arrived! It’s insanely fast and (which is even better) amazingly quiet: a mere whisper from somewhere under my desk. It was beautifully assembled by the lads at Auspcmarket.com.au, too, so if you live Oz-side, I thoroughly recommend them. Comparing their prices with those from, say, Arc or Zip Computers, they are always more expensive. But they deliver for free (at least, in metropolitan areas, which is why I always get them to deliver to work) and, if this PC is anything to go by, they take great care and enormous pride in building the thing nicely. Spare cables tied back, everything mounted/installed correctly, in-use cabling discretely hidden and tucked out of site. The nicest build job I’ve ever seen, come to think of it… which means, I don’t care if their competitors are a bit cheaper. They’re worth it (and no, this isn’t a cash-for-comment slot!). When you see how well this stuff can be done, it’s no wonder that I haven’t built my own PCs for a good four or five years, that’s all I can say!

Anyway, it’s now time for a confession of sorts: I’ve installed Windows 7. I just couldn’t be bothered stuffing around trying to get Ubuntu to handle Blu-Ray. I like Ubuntu enormously, but at the end of the day, I shall be just a little bit more productive with Windows 7, despite being just a little less free. Those who are prepared to trade liberty for productivity probably deserve neither, to paraphrase my old mate Ben Franklin -which is no doubt true, but I could honestly see no practicable alternative. Backing up my movie collection to disk is what I do; backing up my Blu-Rays to disk is something I really want to do. Ubuntu wasn’t going to cut it; end of story, really. Can you tell I’m “conflicted” about it? Well, I am. No two ways about it: open source is where I would like to be, and Ubuntu is a damn fine operating system. However, E.M. Forster put it this way at the end of A Passage To India:

‘Why can’t we be friends now?’ …. ‘It’s what I want. It’s what you want.’ But the horses didn’t want it – they swerved apart; the earth didn’t want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single-file; the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came into view as they issued from the gap and saw Mau beneath: they didn’t want it, they said in their hundred voices, ‘No, not yet,’ and the sky said, ‘No, not there’

Some other time, then!

All that said, I like Windows 7 (and have done since the Beta appeared in January of this year). I’m running the production version, which isn’t due to hit the retail channels for another month, thanks to my MSDN subscription. It’s fast(ish), and slick (sort of) and more than acceptable. It also runs everything I need it to do, including the stuff that lets me back up my DVDs and Blu-Ray disks. It’s still Windows, however: which means, it lacks a lot of things I’ve come to rely on (drop-down console, for example; multiple virtual desktops, for another). These things can be rectified, of course, but it would be nice if you didn’t have to “rectify” Microsoft’s latest and greatest. Virtual desktops ought to be a basic feature of any OS these days, I’d say. Similarly, there’s all the DRM stuff to deal with, for which workarounds exist, but which -morally, I suppose- there shouldn’t be a need. So I definitely have a “dirty hands” feeling, but I also know it all just works, without much effort or imagination (just a lot of driver disks and extra software downloads and installations!)

Fundamentally, it’s less fun to use than Linux. But it’s also more straightforward in many respects.

I’ll be documenting some of the workarounds I’ve mentioned in the next few posts. Meanwhile, forgive an apostate his weaknesses…

As I mentioned last time, there were doubts in my mind that ordering a Blu-Ray player/burner for the new PC might not have been the wisest thing for an Ubuntu user to have done. I said then that I’d have to research the matter further. And, having spent a large part of the weekend doing so, the verdict is in: the general consensus is that Ubuntu -well, Linux generally- just doesn’t do Blu-Ray very well (or possibly “at all”, depending on who you read). There are a number of Ubuntu/Blu-Ray howto’s dotted about the place, though they don’t make it sound a very easy thing to do in the first place… and, worse, they mostly seem to be describing tools and techniques which work with HD-DVD rather than Blu-Ray.

In the past, I spent good money purchasing AnyDVD -which is an excellent Windows program that transparently decrypts commercial DVDs (and Blu-Ray disks, if you’re lucky). So I wondered if that would work in Wine… but apparently not.

So then I got to wondering about virtualisation: would my VirtualBox XP machine be able to run AnyDVD … and would AnyDVD then be able to work its magic? The answer to the first of those questions was an emphatic ‘yes’, as might have been expected. AnyDVD installed just fine. But when I inserted a commercial DVD into my physical drive, AnyDVD kicked in to complain that it didn’t understand what DVD drive I was running and, basically, sayonara. A quick trip to the Control Panel/System/Device Manager revealed the DVD to be listed as ‘VirtualBox DVD ROM’ -and clearly, that’s not good enough to keep AnyDVD happy.

A long time ago, I spent good money buying a VMware Workstation license. So, in desperation, I installed that on my Ubuntu PC and created a brand new XP virtual machine to see if it behaved any better than the VirtualBox equivalent. Hopes were high as the initial OS install completed and the Control Panel Device Manager declared that my DVD was an HP DVD Writer 1060d, which it actually is. So, if the VMware machine could detect the right DVD hardware, presumably AnyDVD would work properly? One quick install later… and sure enough, I was then able to insert a commercial DVD and have it transparently decrypted. Success… at least in DVD-land. I have, of course, to take delivery of the new PC (hopefully, sometime next week) to be able to determine whether a Blu-Ray movie can be similarly decrypted in a virtual machine, but it at least looks plausible.

You wouldn’t, of course, want to watch a Blu-Ray movie in a virtual machine (unless you were insane or had a wish to beat your head against a brick wall, which amounts to much the same thing). But if the disk contents are made accessible by something like AnyDVD, then it becomes possible to use programs like Handbrake to backup the movie content to a digital file -the format of which is up to you. So, if I use virtual XP to decrypt the Blu-Ray movies long enough to copy their contents to a network share, I can then use Handbrake in Ubuntu to turn that into the sort of Matroska movie file I can play on the HD telly with our Western Digital Media Player.

So, that is at least one possible way forward: continue to run Ubuntu, but fire up a VMware virtual machine to do the necessary whenever I want to backup a Blu-Ray movie I’ve purchased. Clunky, at best, but at least (potentially) workable. It’s a shame VirtualBox’s rendition of DVD hardware isn’t workable in this way and that I have to resort to VMware to make it happen. It’s a bigger shame that Linux doesn’t have any (apparent) options regarding native Blu-Ray playback, of course: it’s truly something that needs sorting before too much longer, I’d have thought.

One of the big claims to fame for Windows 7 (apart from it being ‘Vista done right’) is that it finally provides an upgrade path for all those ancient (i.e., circa 2004!) machines still going strong and running XP. For example (and not being too picky about the examples found in a casual trawl of Google this morning):

• Keith Combs talks about Windows 7 ‘breathing new life into old machines’.
• Stuart in the UK finds running Windows 7 on an old machine ‘perfectly usable’
• Dwight Silverman thinks that Windows 7 “runs quite nicely on older hardware”

And so on and on.

My experience is somewhat different.

I recently decided that I’d like to do the ‘home theatre PC’ thing properly: at the moment, we’ve got a Topfield for doing TV recording, a Squeezebox for doing audio playback and a Western Digital WDTV to do playback of MKV-encoded movie files. All works well, but there’s about 3000 light years of cabling to make that lot happen, plus 450 different remote controls (I exaggerate only slightly, hopefully for dramatic effect!)

Anyway, as proof-of-concept for the HTPC idea, I bought an el-cheapo WinFast DTV1000S TV Tuner card. Now, doing my usual Google research, I knew ahead of time that the DTV1000T worked well in Linux and that the DTV1000S didn’t. So, whilst I’m hoping eventually to do a Mythbuntu setup, this wasn’t going to be possible right now. Besides, when we finally go ‘into production’, I’m going to want a dual tuner card as a minimum… but, as I say, all I’m doing for now is testing the concept.

So, I installed my shiny new TV tuner card into a fairly ancient (2004?) Pentium 4 machine I have, courtesy of work’s disposals process. Not bad specs, all things considered: 4GB RAM and a 3GHz hyperthreaded CPU. The machine also uses a Netgear wireless network adapter and an old ATI Radeon graphics card.

Windows 7 installed flawlessly and reasonably quickly -with the only slight problem being that it used an 800×600 screen resolution, had no network connectivity and no audio. Out came the ancient CDs containing the relevant drivers, therefore: network, check; audio, check. Graphics? Well, there we entered the deep, dark caverns of blue screens. Every time the ATI installer started to do anything, the machine would crash. After the sixth attempt, I gave up.

Out comes my Athlon 64 3500+ of about the same vintage: only 2GB RAM and an ATI RX300 graphics card. Again, Windows 7 installed easily… and again, no network, no audio and no proper graphics. Audio driver installed from CD, check. ATI graphics drivers installed, check. This is looking good! Network drivers…. nope. The drivers installed OK, and there wasn’t a blue screen to be seen: but in the Device Manager listing, there’s a yellow exclamation mark superimposed on the network card’s entry and a pop-up message informs me that the device cannot work (yet it has worked perfectly well in XP before now).

The net result of all this palaver is that I can actually watch live TV on the Athlon box, via Windows 7’s pretty attractive Media Centre extension. It’s as slow as all buggery to change chanels and do anything useful (but this is merely proof of concept, so I’m grateful for the lesson that I need a dual core or better to get a decently-responsive HTPC), but it does at least work. But not much else about the PC is usable -for, without a network connection, TV program guides and minor things like OS patches are inaccessible.

I’m not saying it’s completely rubbish. But this claim that Windows 7 will breathe new life into ancient hardware is looking a bit of a joke to me right now. Hardware for which XP drivers are abundant and highly functional are suddenly mere chunks of inert plastic, silicon and assorted heavy metals in the presence of Windows 7. All those people with 5 year-old PCs thinking that an upgrade to Windows 7 will be a piece of cake are in for a bit of doom and gloom, I’m afraid: sure, Windows 7 will install quickly and without fuss. But all will then shortly be revealed: a bunch of perfectly reasonable hardware that ought to be functional but which most definitely isn’t.

I’m not sure I blame Microsoft for that, really: I have a deal here with The Other Half that I’m allowed to buy a completely new PC every 18 months, and that sort of rate of turnover seems realistic to me, given the rate of change in the IT industry generally. I wouldn’t, in other words, particularly wish to be running a 5 year-old PC, and it seems reasonable to me that the OS vendors wouldn’t necessarily support that sort of vintage hardware. I’m just saying that the hype that we’ve seen a lot of lately, that Windows 7 will ‘breathe new life’ into venerable hardware, is (on my limited experience) hopelessly optimisitc. People are still going to have to upgrade their hardware before the OS will provide what they’re used to from XP, I reckon. And yet another quick Google search suggests I might not be entirely alone in that thought!