Tom Salinsky

As long-term readers may recall (oh, the delusion!), my primary “use case” for my iPad is entertainment on long journeys – videos, ebooks, games (music is more convenient on my iPhone). The longer the journey, the harder it is to manage two key elements, especially where video is concerned: having a long enough battery and having enough choice.

Let’s take choice first. Depending on what kind of iPad you’ve bought, you’ll have 16Gb, 32Gb or 64Gb of storage. Once you’ve installed a few apps, a few ebooks and a few videos, you may find that even 64Gb is gobbled up quite quickly. As a f’rinstance, as each Doctor Who DVD comes out, I rip it in an iPad-friendly resolution (with commentary and trivia text turned on, naturally) and stick it in iTunes to watch at a later date. I’ve got about half-a-dozen I have yet to watch and a new one comes out almost every month. Sometimes more than one, if it’s a boxed set. Each one takes up around 1.5Gb. Add some iTunes movies, some other DVD-rips and pretty soon I’m looking for external storage. Other (lesser) tablets let you plug SD cards or even USB sticks straight in but the iPad is pickier, sad to say.

When I bought my iPad I had the foresight to get the Camera Connection Kit to go along with it. This dongle plugs into the dock connector and then accepts a USB connection to a camera or an SD Card. Images and crucially videos can then be copied off the card for viewing on the iPad. Copied off, notice, so there needs to be room (but existing videos in your library can be deleted to make room).

However, the source and the files need to look exactly like they’ve come off a camera. This means a folder structure something like this DCIM » 100DICAM and then giving every file an 8.3 filename. So your copy of Casablanca needs to be renamed CASABLAN.M4V, or on a really bad day DCM_0001.M4V. Worse, this filename is not visible when you inspect the SD card from within the Photos app – all you have to go on is thumbnail, often black. And folder structures are ignored. Still, it’s a cheap solution, especially if you have some SD cards lying around, and once you’ve copied the right file over, watching from within the Photos app is fine, if a little weird – why can’t I copy it to my media library? Better still, why isn’t the “Open With” option available so I can open a video file in any format using an app like AVPlayerHD.

Other options exist. For a while, I was considering an AirStash. This is a wireless transmitter for the contents of an SD Card which works with a companion iPad app. It’s not expensive, only $100, but hard to get in the UK without the help of Bundlebox and crucially the battery only lasts five hours without a recharge (and you can’t transmit from it while it’s recharging).

In the end, I wound up getting a 320Gb Hyperdrive for $200 which has turned out to share many of the same limitations as the Camera Connection Kit option, but thankfully not all. It’s a kludge of the Camera Connection Kit software, “fooling” the iPad into thinking that it’s importing files from a camera and although it again denies you access to filenames, and tends to provide only black thumbnails, you can have folders and sub-folders on the disk and navigate through them, so I’ve just put each file in a folder which identifies it. I copied my iTunes movie folder on to it, and most movies were already in an appropriately-named folder which saves time. With TV series box-sets, it was a bit more laborious. I had to create a folder called Breaking Bad S2, and then 13 sub-folders, each called Breaking Bad 2.x, each with one episode in. Sounds tedious, but actually it only took a minute or two. When plugged in to a laptop, the Hyperdrive behaves like any other USB drive. Plugged into the iPad with a mini-USB lead, via the Camera Connection Kit – take note, it takes 4-5 minutes to copy a whole movie over, then you can unplug the drive and watch your movie through the Photos app (and delete it when you’re finished to make room if you wish).

Just before I entered my credit card details, I had a quick tour of the site and spotted this little beauty – the Hyperjuice Stand. Now, it’s true I already have a navy blue Smart Cover to prop my iPad up, but that doesn’t stop this being a really, really clever idea. It’s a rubberised stand, lightweight, but just heavy enough to securely hold the iPad in place (360g), at a near vertical angle for watching movies or a flatter angle for typing – but the space inside is filled with battery! 11,000mA of battery which will keep an iPad going for around 16 hours! For only $130 it’s an absolute steal, and because it’s got a standard USB port on it, you can use it to charge or power a great many other devices besides iPads. It charges via a mini-USB connection too, so you can use the same AC adapter as your iPhone, or charge it off your laptop if that’s more convenient.

Having watched my choice of videos, secure in the knowledge that my battery will never run out, and arrived at my destination, I don’t want now to revert to a regular laptop. However, as lovely as the iPad is, it’s hard to type anything as long as, say, this blog post on the on-screen keyboard. So my other purchase was this handsome Aluminium Keyboard Buddy Case, only $49. It pairs quickly with the iPad via Bluetooth and the battery life is very good. Typing is certainly easier than without a physical keyboard, although the keys don’t have quite as much travel as I would ideally like – however it doesn’t really work as a case. I can fold my SmartCover out of the way, but even with it removed altogether, the iPad and the supposed case never snap together securely, they just sort of lie together. I tend to carry them separately in my Troop Brown Canvas Bag.

What toys have you bought for your iPad?

The whole family

So, Steve brought us the iPad 2, and my cycle of responses to new technology repeated itself. My first thought, on watching the keynote (on my original iPad, on a plane to South Africa) was that I’d dodged a bullet. By foolishly (but necessarily) buying the orginal model months before the new version was announced I risked almost instant obsolescence. However, the new model struck me as only a bit better than the old model, albeit with a very snazzy magnetic “SmartCover”.

The tipping point for me came when I discovered that iMovie, Apple’s video-editing software, would not run on the old iPad. Having struggled mightily with various versions of Windows Movie Maker over the years, I was eagerly anticipating becoming Tablet B deMille, but this was not to be unless I upgraded. Then, Apple went and cut the price, despite the VAT hike, and so it was all over. My first-generation iPad is currently on eBay, and I have a slim new iPad 2 with a navy blue leather Smart Cover which I always have with me.

And it’s the size and shape and weight which has turned out to be the killer app for me. Despite loving having with me on my trips to Australia, South Africa and the West Midlands, the old iPad in its case was that bit too clunky, chunky and bulky for me to be able just to toss it in my bag and forget it’s there. The new one slips into the side pocket of my briefcase and I can be editing a document, writing a blog post, drawing a diagram or reading an email in ten seconds flat. It’s a little marvel and I love it.

Deborah’s little netbook had an attack of the vapours last week and refused to run Outlook, telling me to try and repair the .pst file using scanpst.exe. Unfortunately, this proceeded to hang and so I did a quick Internet search looking for an alternative. I quickly came across Stellar Outlook PST Repair from Stellar Phoenix, also known as Stellar Information Systems. At the time of writing, I can’t find the third-party site which referred me there, but I shall attempt to find it and update this paragraph if I do.

If you follow the link above to the Stellar website, you will see several large and shiny “free download” buttons. I downloaded the software, and for two or so hours, it ground through Deborah’s emails, contacts and calendar entries and recompiled the .pst file for her. “Would you like me to save this for you?” it asked. “Yes,” I replied, “of course.”

“Oh, all this work I’ve done – you want me to save it? That’ll be $129+VAT. Click here and have your credit card ready.”

Okay, so first of all, I’m an idiot. If you scroll down, it does indeed say on their website (in rather small, pale grey type) that the software costs money, but I was in a hurry, needed a fix for Deborah’s email and found the FREE DOWNLOAD buttons rather more prominent. So this is sharp practice, bait-and-switch, but the defence is simple – don’t be an idiot.

So, I grumpily forked over the money, got the confirmation email and tried to activate the software. And tried. And tried. And then watched it crash, taking all that repair work with it. I fired off an angry email.

From: Tom Salinsky [tom@the-spontaneity-shop.com]
Sent: 11/4/2010 7:05 AM
To: support@stellarinfo.com
Subject: Outlook pst repair won’t activate.

Error: Unable to get site code in the function myLoadLibrary().

So, I guess that was $150 I just wasted, huh?

Tom Salinsky

A little while later, I received the following response.

From: no-reply@salesforce.com [mailto:no-reply@salesforce.com] On Behalf Of Support1
Sent: 04 November 2010 15:04
To: tom@the-spontaneity-shop.com
Subject: RE: Outlook pst repair won’t activate. [ ref:00D9HfSr.5009rpYA:ref ]

Hi,

Thank you for contacting Stellar Technical Support,

Regarding your concern, we are unable to locate your order details.

Please provide us the order number or the invoice copy of your purchase.

If you have purchased the software from the Safe cart then please provide us the confirmation mail which you have received after the purchase.

Kindly forward the confirmation email to support@stellarinfo.com

Please get back to us with the details so that we can assist you further.

Warm Regards,

Ankur Talwar

Technical Support Executive
Stellar Information Systems Ltd.

The email address which I used was, naturally, the email address which I used when paying for their useless software. By this time, I had run scanpst.exe again on another machine and retrieved Deborah’s emails, so I was in no mood to be generous to Stellar. I responded with incredulity that they were unable simply to search their records for my email address and I copied in my confirmation email as requested. I also told them.

Please note, this software took two hours to recover my data, then refused to activate, then crashed taking the repair with it. I have no further interest in using it and would like an immediate refund of my $151.58. Your records will no doubt show that the software was not activated and so was never used by me.

I received the following reply the next day…

From: no-reply@salesforce.com [mailto:no-reply@salesforce.com] On Behalf Of Support1
Sent: 06 November 2010 14:10
To: tom@the-spontaneity-shop.com
Subject: RE: Outlook pst repair won’t activate. [ ref:00D9HfSr.5009rpYA:ref ]

Hi,

Regarding your concern, kindly make sure that you are not using the system remotely and you are physically present on the machine.

After this, please uninstall the previous version of the program completely and also delete the folder from the installation directory and then open the registry editor (for this go to run prompt and type “regedit’) and erase all the existing entries by using following words “Stellar Phoenix”, please find and remove them one by one.

Onward this, please restart the computer and download the program again from the below mentioned full version link:

http://stellar.fileburstcdn.net/stellar/StellarPhoenixOutlookPSTRepair.exe

Make sure that you must be having Administrator account to the computer and install the software to this location i.e. C:\Program Files\Stellar Phoenix Outlook PST Repair

Now, follow the below mentioned steps to activate the software:

1. Uninstall the CrypKey License service. To uninstall the license service you must go to a DOS prompt to your application directory and run setupex.exe /U. This will uninstall the drivers.

2. Go to your application directory and delete the *.rst, *.ent, *.key and the *.41s. Also go to the Windows/system32 directory and delete the esnecil.ind file.

3. Reboot the machine.

4. Download the attached file and rename its extension from .zi to .zip and then unzip the file into the application directory, then run setupex.exe(make sure the new cks.exe is in this directory as well) out of the application directory. Reboot.

5. Now, open Stellar Phoenix Outlook PST Repair.

6. Click on the ‘Activate’ menu bar and Select the option ‘Activate Online’.

This would launch the Electronic Software Registration wizard, click on ‘Cancel’.

7. As you click on ‘Cancel’, you will get a message stating: “Online activation failed, do you want to send serial number to us”.

Click on ‘Yes’.

8. It will prompt you to enter the serial number. Just enter ‘XYZ’ there instead of serial key.

9. This would take you to a wizard where a file would be generated at your desktop with the name of PHX_REG.txt

10. Click on ‘Finished’ and minimize the software to the taskbar. DO NOT CLOSE IT!!!

11. Now, send the PHX_REG.txt file to us (support@stellarinfo.com), along with the full name of the software that appears in the title bar.

12. Upon receiving the file, we will send you a site key, which you can use to activate the product.

Note: Please do not close your program until you get the site key from our side.

Warm Regards,

Ankur Talwar
Technical Support Executive
Stellar Information Systems Ltd.

Now, there are several things to notice about this.

1. My request for a refund has not even been acknowledged. We are proceeding directly to a technical fix.
2. This is clearly a standard technical fix, so they know that this problem exists and yet continue to sell the buggy software.
3. Nothing in this email requires any information they could have got from my account, so they just spent two days frigging me around before sending me these canned instructions which I have already told them I had no interest in following.

I sent the following email in response.

From: Tom Salinsky [tom@the-spontaneity-shop.com]
Sent: 11/6/2010 7:50 PM
To: support@stellarinfo.com
Cc: support@stellarinfo.com
Subject: RE: Outlook pst repair won’t activate.    [ ref:00D9HfSr.5009rpYA:ref ]

Thank you for your email.

However I have NO INTEREST in attempting to follow a further sequence of arcane instructions. A program which requires this sort of intervention is clearly not fit for the purpose.

Why you are sending me this list of instructions is also a little hard to understand, since I thought my previous email made it clear that I have NO INTEREST in receiving a technical fix for this problem. The software failed to work when I needed it to, I have received no benefit whatsoever for the money I paid and so…

** I WOULD LIKE A FULL AND PROMPT REFUND PLEASE **

I hope this email clarifies my position.

Tom Salinsky

The reply I received is as follows…

From: no-reply@salesforce.com [mailto:no-reply@salesforce.com] On Behalf Of Support1
Sent: 08 November 2010 11:01
To: tom@the-spontaneity-shop.com
Subject: RE: Outlook pst repair won’t activate. [ ref:00D9HfSr.5009rpYA:ref ]

Hi!

We would like to inform you that we can not consider your refund request as, according to our refund policy, a refund can only be processed in case, if we are not able to provide you any support or if there is any bug found in our software.

Please visit the link given below to know more about our refund policy.

http://www.stellarinfo.com/refund-policy.pdf

Hoping for your kind cooperation!

Warm Regards,

Tarun Mittal
Technical Support Executive
Stellar Information Systems Ltd.

We are presumably meant to infer from this that the necessity to go through the long list of processes included in their email of 6 November is a deliberate design feature but one which they neglected to mention in any of their onscreen prompts or documentation in order to make the urgent process of email-recovery that little bit more fucking challenging and fun.

That refund policy PDF also contained the following gem…

Unless otherwise indicated SISL will only refund the purchase price
- If, the client was able to see all the recoverable data with the demo version of the software and
- If, Stellar Technical Support Team fails to help the client recovers the data due to software limitation

Taken literally, this implies that if the software fails to function in any way (or falls short of showing the client all the recoverable data in demo mode) then no refund is due. This is clearly illegal, but Stellar Information Systems has shown no respect for its customers so far – why should I expect them to respect the law?

My response was fairly terse.

From: Tom Salinsky [tom@the-spontaneity-shop.com]
Sent: 11/8/2010 5:20 PM
To: support@stellarinfo.com
Cc: support@stellarinfo.com
Subject: Re: Outlook pst repair won’t activate. [ ref:00D9HfSr.5009rpYA:ref ]

There is clearly a bug in your software. It would not activate and provided an error message.

Please process my refund immediately.

With thanks

Tom Salinsky

Their reply was every bit as unhelpful as their previous efforts.

From: no-reply@salesforce.com [mailto:no-reply@salesforce.com] On Behalf Of Dispatch/Orders
Sent: 09 November 2010 09:34
To: tom@the-spontaneity-shop.com
Subject: RE: Re: Outlook pst repair won’t activate. [ ref:00D9HfSr.5009rpYA:ref ]

Dear Tom,

Regarding your concern, I would like to inform you that refund is not an issue for us, our prime motive is to help you in any way.
So I request you to kindly co-operate with us and take our technical support. If our technical support team fail to resolve your issue in that case I will refund the full amount.
Software is not meant for only one time recovery, it carries a lifetime license which would certainly help you in future along with that we provide unlimited technical support to all our valued customers.

Hoping for your kind co-operation.

Thanks,
Pritee
Stellar Information Systems Limited

It was at this point that I started to get cross. In a fury, I sent the following.

From: Tom Salinsky [mailto:tom@the-spontaneity-shop.com]
Sent: 09 November 2010 12:07
To: Dispatch/Orders
Subject: Re: Outlook pst repair won’t activate. [ ref:00D9HfSr.5009rpYA:ref ]

If you truly want to help me in “any way” then give me a refund.

I cannot trust this software and would never use it.

Your attitude over providing a refund has only made matters worse. If you had given me a refund promptly I might have looked at other software you provide. As a result of your behaviour I now cannot trust you at all. I will never use any software you ever make.

PLEASE REFUND MY MONEY before I start publishing these emails all over the Internet.

Tom Salinsky

As of the time of writing, no reply has been forthcoming, nor has any refund been received.

Stellar, if you are reading this – you have not the first fucking idea how to deal with customers, you have not the first fucking idea how to manage your reputation in the social networking age, and your misleading advertising for your worthless software as well as your absurd terms-and-conditions are borderline illegal.

If you don’t like having these emails published here, then give me my fucking refund and I will take them down at my first opportunity. Your call.

To summarise (and for the benefit of search engines)…

Don’t use Stellar Information Systems. Don’t trust Stellar Information Systems. Don’t use PST Repair Tool. PST Repair Tool does not work. Stellar Information Systems aka Stellar Phoenix are crooks. Don’t trust PST Repair Tool from Stellar Information Systems.

Two more cheerful chaps from Currys turned up with my lovely 42″ telly – took one look at my plasterboard walls and were about to slope off again, when at the last minute, one of them thought to look in the van for some of the special rawl plugs that this requires. Once found, the whole process of nailing the awesome beast to the wall took less than half an hour, and they departed with a generous tip.

I’ve moreoreless got the Harmony remote doing all the things I want it to, and both Blu-rays and Sky HD look fantastic on this giant screen. What’s amazing is how poor some SD content looks. Frasier on the Paramount Comedy channel looks worse than YouTube.

And I woke up yesterday to discover that the Sky box was actually taping what was meant to be my dummy recording. This was accompanied by a message informing me that my box’s software had been upgraded. A bit of tinkering later and I discovered that they’ve finally made Single Feed Mode work sensibly. Now if I’m watching BBC1 and a recording is due to start on BBC2, I will see a warning, and if I do nothing, it will flick over to BBC2 and make the recording correctly. This also seems to survive turning on “Anytime”. I believe that Single Feed Mode was introduced over a year ago. Good timing for me but appallingly slow for Sky’s other customers.

So, I’ve decided to postpone both the expensive SCR installation and the free, but unsightly, dish installation and just see how I rock with Single Feed for now. This completes the upgrade process. I hope you had as much fun as I did.

Now.

Where can I get a stash of good Blu-ray movies for under a tenner each?

Yesterday was Sky+ day, and a cheerful engineer turned up at the time he said he would, fiddled with my satellite cable, bunged a box under my telly and mooched off. I played with it for a while, and then popped off to Currys to buy a Logitech Harmony 300i remote, satisfied that all seemed to be well. I was even able to take the digital sound from the Sky box and use my PC as an amp (albeit it stereo only, not Dolby 5.1). This means that I have to switch the Sky box off in order to shut off the sound when I want to use the media centre (which was actually one of the issues I was trying to avoid) but it does mean that one sound control works for everything which is convenient, especially if you’re trying to control everything with one remote.

The Logitech remote works very well for a £30 device. There’s a very convenient web/PC interface for programming it, which has loads of remotes already in its database, and you can drag-and-drop to move different commands to different buttons if it doesn’t get it right first time. You can’t program single buttons to perform sequences of actions, and there’s no feature for switching TV inputs automatically when you switch devices, but overall I’m happy.

What I’m less happy with is the profoundly weird behaviour of the Sky+ system and the near-total cluelessness of the telephone advisors.

If you pore over the Sky website, somewhere on there you will find a warning that you require two connections from your dish to your box for Sky+ to work properly. Fine if your dish is on your roof, balcony or in your back garden. But I’m in a block of flats with a communal dish, and my personal access to it is through a faceplate in the living room, which only has a single connector.

However, the latest generation of Sky + software has been updated to deal with this very issue. An engineer can set the box to “single feed mode” which means that you won’t be able to watch one channel while recording another, but also means that the Sky box won’t try and do this either. Although I think Sky could do more – considerably more – to flag this up to potential subscribers, I was aware of it and I wasn’t bothered. After all, I’m used to having only one tuner and I’m used to not being able to watch one channel while recording another. No big deal. Right? Wrong.

You see, the Sky + box really does take quite some convincing that it only has one tuner available. Deep in the core of its essential being, it is built around the fact that it will have two input feeds to choose from and its behaviour, even on single feed mode, is nothing short of bizarre.

With two feeds, if you are watching one channel while recording another, and at that moment, a second recording is triggered, you will – quite sensibly – be offered a choice: do you want to keep watching what you’re watching and cancel one of these recordings, or shall I start recording the new programme? If you do nothing, the box – perfectly correctly – assumes that it is unattended and prioritises the recording. My old Media Centre solution, with its noisy images and Heath Robinson IR blaster, unable to tune into more than one channel at once, would likewise warn me that it was going to change the channel to effect a recording if I was watching another channel when a recording was due.

But the new box, if I’m watching BBC 1 and a recording is due on BBC 2, simply IGNORES the recording and stays tuned to BBC1!! This is madness. Some Sky advisors advised that setting the box to standby cured this insane behaviour, but I couldn’t get this to work. There is a work-around, which I’m trying at the moment, but before I get to that here are some other possible options.

1. There is a second satellite feed in the bedroom, but getting that connection to my digibox means trailing a wire out the bedroom window and back in again, or drilling holes in the walls. Neither is ideal.
2. I could (if I could get permission from the landlord) stick a dish on the balcony and do things my own way, but we’d still have to drill (a small) hole in the wall and we’d have a fucking dish on the balcony. Sky would do this for free however.
3. The technology exists to take two inputs from the dish, pump them down a single wire at different frequencies, and then separate them back out again at the digibox end. These boxes are called a “stacker” and a “destacker” and cost about £100, but they’d have to be fitted directly to the dish which means involving the landlord and/or the managing agents. Sky might or might not do this for free. Who knows? EDITED TO ADD: The terms “stacker” and “destacker” seem to refer to older technology which was very dependent on the quality of the wiring. The proper solution is called a Single Cable Router or SCR. My building managers can fit this for me for around £250, or if I buy the box for £100, Sky may be able to fit it for free. Chapter 4 will reveal the outcome.

Here’s the work around.

Before Sky implemented this single feed setting, tech savvy Sky users sharing communal dishes and only able to access one feed would set up “dummy recordings” which would fail but which would tie up the “second” feed. This would force the box to use the first feed for the new recording, the one you wanted, instead of using that feed for watching live TV. A version of this can still be used with the new software. Here’s how, courtesy of forum member utterepicicity on digitalspy.co.uk.

Step 1: Ensure feed is on input 1.

Step 2: Turn Single feed mode ON.

Step 3: Turn Anytime back ON.

Step 4: Ensure you are tuned into a channel (eg BBC1) and it’s on the mini-tv

Step 5: Set a manual recording on a channel you never watch starting in 2 minutes time (so if its 9:00PM, set it to start at 9:02PM), have it finish at 04:00AM in the morning (assuming you never watch anything at that time of the morning). This ensures that Input 2 is tied up til 4am.

Step 6: Set up another manual recording on the same channel from 04:02AM until 04:00AM. Set the frequency to daily. This will tie up input 2 all day every day.

Step 7: Set up another manual recording on a channel you never watch from 03:58AM to 04:04AM. Set the frequency to daily. This ensures that the dummy recording never takes up Input 1.

Ensure you turn your box to Standby whenever you’re not watching it. It doesn’t matter if you forget now and then but try and get into the habit of it.

The whole thread is here. So far this seems to be working, but it’s not ideal. Tomorrow I’ll try running a satellite cable out the window.

UPDATED TO ADD: Couldn’t face running a satellite cable out of the window and with two windows needing to be permanently open, albeit just a crack, it’s going to be a lousy, lousy solution come the winter. This evening, the Sky box was displaying only “no satellite signal” when I got in from work. I turned off  ”Anytime” and it sprang back into life, so maybe my box prefers Anytime to be off. Later tonight, it got in a paddy trying to record Dragon’s Den and I had to do a planner rebuild to get it to record anything at all. Finally, with the “dummy recording” in place, I watched it obediently flick over from BBC HD to Channel 4+1 when Him and Her ended and Jamie Oliver Tells Rural Americans They’re All Too Fat To Live was about to begin. Success! But the real solution is clearly the SCR. Since another tenant is also having this done, we may be able to effect a saving by doing two at once. By which I mean it might be £200 instead of £250. Jesus. 13/9/10.

Sound card and Blu-ray drive arrived today and I whipped off the back of the Media Centre PC and quickly installed both. Windows 7 recognised the sound card straight away but had it outputting two channel stereo until I downloaded and installed a Windows 7 Creative driver, whereupon it all worked beautifully.

The supplied Cyberlink PowerDVD software for playing Blu-rays baulked at my having mapped the Windows video folder to my network attached storage device, but this was worked-around by using a new Windows user with administrative powers but no mapped folders which I created for the purpose. Media Centre recognised old-fashioned DVDs placed in the new drive with no problem at all, but trying to play new-fangled Blu-rays rudely dumped me out of the Media Centre environment and into the Cyberlink software. This to be fair was what I expected, but I hadn’t expected that the Cyberlink software would then insist on downloading an update which took the best part of an hour to laboriously suck down at the feeble rate of 35Kb/s. God knows what was happening with Cyberlink’s servers.

When this was finally done, and installed, and after just a touch more screwing around, the system sprang into life and the Blu-ray copy of Inglourious Basterds which I mistakenly put on my Amazon wish list and got given for Christmas was happily playing, and looking very sharp and clear even on my 26” TV. Win! The copy of Speed which I picked up on Blu-ray also looked and sounded great with lots of atmospheric sound effects during the elevator sequence reverberating around the room as all six of my little speakers worked their socks off to provide me with sonic enjoyment.

Next question – will upgrading to Cyberlink PowerDVD v10 provide better integration with Media Centre? This meant downloading the trial version (which probably meant overwriting the free version 8 I’d finally got working, but anyway…) and again this meant making use of my new user account. 15 minutes later… Big win! Integration with Windows 7 Media Centre is pretty much seamless. This is going to cost me another fifty quid but it’s going to be worth it. *opens wallet*. At least there’s 20% off at the moment because of Labor Day or something.

Tomorrow it’s Sky+HD day, when we shall face the interesting challenge of how to connect up a digibox which favours HDMI to a TV with no HDMI sockets, and only one DVI socket which is already in use. I fear we shall be falling back on to SCART. How 1997! Then we shall also see if sound from the said digibox can be made to travel into the SPDIF in on my new sound card and then out to my 5.1 speakers, thus effectively using the PC as an amp when watching TV and harmonising (hah!) all of my audio needs.

For about five years now, my audio visual entertainment has revolved around Windows Media Centre. This week, I’m doing a major upgrade to pretty much everything, and what’s a blog for if not to document this kind of thing in fairly tedious detail?

The process has already been slightly screwed up however. The impetus to improve my broadcast TV and DVD picture quality was motivated by the decision to get a new TV set, and this, which we got for £399 in the bank holiday sale, was due to be delivered by Currys yesterday. Currys being Currys it seems they simply forgot. It’s now not coming until next Wednesday. Meanwhile more components are arriving in the next few days, none of which are going to live up to the hype on the old TV. Anyway.

So, before all of these new bits-and-pieces get installed, I thought I’d write about what I’ve got at the moment and where I’m starting from. But before I do any of that, let me just review what I’m trying to achieve.

So, here’s what I want to happen at this end of my living room.

• Watching broadcast TV
• Recording broadcast TV and watching those recordings
• Watching DVDs
• Watching downloaded movies and TV shows (all legal, of course)
• Access to my music collection and photos

Now, a cheap PC hooked up to a flat screen TV and running Windows Media Centre software (which is free with Windows 7 Home Premium or better) means I can do all of these things very easily, and has two other advantages to boot. One is that I can hook up a very cheap-and-cheerful set of PC speakers to said computer and get 5.1 surround sound for a fraction of the usual cost and without having to screw around with complicated AV receivers. The other is I can do everything with one remote control, because everything goes through the Media Centre software.

So, here’s my setup. I have a computer which I’ve build myself out of various bits-and-pieces and which gets upgraded as needed. About three months ago, it got a new motherboard and processor because like a clumsy idiot I managed to bust the old (very old) processor while trying to change the fan for a quieter model. Last week, it got a new graphics card because the on-board graphics were struggling with HD content.

This gets a wired connection to my router, which in turn gets a wired connection to a 1Tb Network Attached Storage Device – a big hard drive which holds all my (perfectly legal) downloaded movies and TV shows, my music, my pictures and so on. A good-old-fashioned VGA cable goes into the DVI connection on the back of my 26” TV and bingo, I can check off the bottom two items on my list. Sound, as mentioned, is provided by these PC speakers and since there’s a DVD drive in the PC, and the Media Centre Software handles DVDs just fine, that’s the third element too.

Here’s where it gets a little complicated.

From my point of view, if you want to watch broadcast TV in the United Kingdom, you really want Sky. Virgin and BT’s offerings have improved in recent years but Sky is still the daddy. If you want to watch the Oscars live, for example, Sky is the only game in town.

Now, if I were content with digital terrestrial TV, my system would work great. I would put a TV tuner into my PC (an internal card or a USB dongle, either works) and this would receive the digital signals through the air, and feed them into my computer for display on the TV. And since the signal is being received digitally into the PC, the Windows Media Centre software can record shows for me, having downloaded a suitable EPG (Electronic Programme Guide), not to mention pausing and rewinding live TV and all those other things that seemed like magic when we first read about Tivo in the United States.

Sky doesn’t make it quite so simple.

Even though Sky broadcasts have been digital for years, the problem is that Sky regards the decryption of its broadcasts as very much its own concern. The little card you shove in the front of your Sky box authorises it to decrypt only the channels you’ve paid for and how it does this is Sky’s business and nobody else’s. So, the only way¹ to insert Sky TV broadcasts into the Windows Media Centre environment is as follows. Sky box receives pristine digital signal from dish and decodes it. Sky box outputs audio and video signal via old-fashioned analogue SCART lead. This gets converted to composite video and stereo audio (three RCA or “phono” plugs) and is then fed into the analogue TV tuner in the PC. This takes the analogue signal and redigitises it so that Media Centre can work with it.

The picture doesn’t look quite as bad as you’re maybe imagining. But HD it ain’t.

Changing channels on the Sky box is fun too. Remember, the Sky remote plays no part in this set up. One simple remote control is a big feature of my audio-visual life and using the Sky remote would be hopeless for timed recordings. What’s the Media Centre PC going to do? Pick up the Sky remote and change the channel to BBC1 two minutes before Doctor Who starts? Well, almost.

What actually happens is that when a channel-change is required (either by me pressing a button or because a timed recording is nearing), the Media Centre machine has to send a duplicate of the required infra-red pulses down a wire, to a little “button” which I’ve stuck to the IR receiver of the Sky box. Of course, there’s no feedback from the Sky box to the computer after one of these events, so if – as occasionally happens – the Sky box fails to correctly interpret one of the pulses, the Media Centre computer has no way of knowing and so just records whatever is coming down the SCART lead.

Clearly this is less than perfect. But, you may be saying, Tom, you complete fucking idiot,² you may be saying, don’t you realise that Sky has their own solution to recording live TV!? It’s called Sky+. Yes, I’m well aware of this. But you know what Sky+ would mean don’t you? Two remotes. Probably three remotes since I’d also need to switch the TV between the Sky+ box (live and recorded TV shows) and the Media Centre PC (everything else). So I’ve strongly resisted the urge to go the Sky+ route for some time.

But while I can get away with this double-conversion of TV pictures on a 26” TV, they aren’t going to cut it on the new 42” beauty, and furthermore, I am increasingly discomfited at not being able to receive the HD broadcasts trumpeted on every station. Then there’s Blu-ray…

So here’s the plan…

1. Have new TV delivered and nailed to the wall.
2. Add Blu-ray DVD drive to PC and hope that I can find the necessary software to make it all work properly – Microsoft have been slow to provide proper support for Blu-ray, Xboxes excepted.
3. While I’m about it, upgrade the onboard audio which has never worked properly on this new motherboard.
4. Have Sky+ HD installed and regrettably bypass the Media Centre for watching and recording broadcast TV.

This will leave two problems unsolved. One is audio. I want to avoid having to blow £200 or more on a “proper” home theatre audio system, giving me yet another box and yet another remote control to worry about. But if I simply run separate HDMI cables from the Sky box and the PC to the television, I’ll get stereo sound out of the TV speakers when I’m watching TV, but 5.1 sound out of the Media Centre when watching (legally) downloaded movies or DVDs. It would be better to have 5.1 sound for everything.

The second problem is the profusion of remotes. I’ll probably need three – TV, Sky and Media Centre. It may be that the Sky remote can be used to control the TV, or it may be that a universal remote will be required, in which case I think I favour something like this which is fairly inexpensive, can be configured through the computer (nice) and doesn’t need its own docking station to stay powered up.

As mentioned however, Currys sudden attack of amnesia regarding my order means that things are not going to work out exactly like that, so here’s the new revised plan.

1. Upgrade Media Centre with Blu-ray and decent audio. Listlessly watch Blu-ray discs on old telly’s 1280×768 display.
2. Have Sky+ HD installed and try to figure out how to connect it to a TV with no HDMI socket.
3. After Sky engineer has gone, have new TV installed and nailed to the wall and have to connect up Sky box myself.

All of this, and no doubt more will be lovingly documented right here, starting tomorrow with the PC upgrade. See you then.