Matt Goyer 's blog - The completely egotistical storyline of my life

eHome 05 Holiday Party

[image] Last Thursday was the eHome Holiday party.

Here's a few of us leaving, left to right: Mark's date Tom, program manager Mark, designer Nishant, tester Katrina, writer Veronica, program manager Ryan, developer The night was actually a lot of fun.

We started with a pre-funk at the Chapel and after a drink headed down to the Science Fiction Museum for the official festivities.

While we were stymied by only two free drinks, the DJ this year was much better than last year's 80's cover band.

After gossiping with co-workers for three hours a substantial number of us headed off to Neighbors were we partied into the fee hours of the morning.

I think the last of us trickled out of Neighbors at 3am.

The next day we all took advantage of the 'free' morning off we got and some didn't even make it in at all (I made it in).

12/12/2005 - 11:19 am GMT - [guid]

A la carte TV on the way?

CNET, New FCC report advocates a la carte TV pricing: Martin told the forum that the FCC will soon release a report that concludes that offering TV programming a la carte is economically feasible and in the best interest of consumers.

Until we get true Internet TV downloads it would be great if we could get a la carte TV pricing.

Why pay for channels I don't want to watch? It just doesn't make any sense.

11/30/2005 - 10:48 am GMT - [guid]

What I work on

Since some of you were interested to find out I owned movies and DVD. I should disclose the other features I own.

So I am the program manager for the following features in Media Center: Accessibility support - High contrast skins, MSAA,...

Caller ID DVD playback UI LUA - Limited User Account interaction with MCE Media Discovery - How do you discover local media? Networked media? How does Media Center fit into your home networking setup? Messenger - And other communication/sharing scenarios Movies - Movies Portal, My DVDs, DVD changer connectivity, integration with VOD partners like Movielink Parental Controls Settings - So exciting.

Text input/IME - How do you enter text in Media Center? How do you triple tap in other countries? TweakMCE - Power toy that gets 10,000+ downloads a month (There are one or two other areas that should be on that list but I don't want to get your hopes up for Vista).

Each of those features has a feature team made up of a developer, a tester, a designer, a usability engineer, a product planner, a user assistance person, and finally a program manager.

As the program manager for those feature teams I drive the vision around the feature and we work together to pitch ideas to the larger team, get them approved, then get them built, tested and finally shipped.

11/29/2005 - 12:04 pm GMT - [guid]

Article full of tips for the HP z555

One of my Media Centers at home is an HP z555 and I recently was forwarded this article by David Powell, Making the switch: Tivo to Media Center and he's got lots of tips for optimizing things such as the video card, Extender and the z555's airflow: One last thing on cooling: a friend reversed the two fans (CPU fan and the side fan) inside the z555 and it now runs much, much cooler.

Since my z555 is in a fairly open space I don't have heat problems, but I imagine many of you might if your z555 is in a cabinet, so if you're the intrepid type you might want to try reversing your fans.

11/29/2005 - 10:27 am GMT - [guid]

Problems with DVD Idle Pro and My DVDs

FYI, someone I know ran into issues with DVDIdle Pro and My DVDs: Having DVDIdle Pro installed when you insert discs in to the changer causes the unique ID that’s generated to somehow be different than what is generated without the software installed/active.

Because of this, none of the discs show up with metadata (beyond the volume ID). Disabling the software and "watching" the disc will cause a new ID to be generated (and xml file created) but it never shows up in My DVDs.

The only way to have it show up is to eject the disc and re-insert it.

11/28/2005 - 4:23 pm GMT - [guid]

Off to Whistler for the weekend.

See you all on Monday.

11/23/2005 - 2:22 pm GMT - [guid]

Media Center Show Awards - Go vote!

Ian Dixon has launched The Media Center Show Awards 2005 with lots of interesting categories, including 'Best Microsoft Employee Media Center Blog', go vote :).

It's really great to see how far the community has come in the last year.

It wasn't too long ago that I could read every blog post that mentioned MCE, every article, every plugin, every forum.

But now there's so much going on that I can only dip in every once and a while and see what's going on.

The community has definitely taken off.

Keep up the good work folks!

11/16/2005 - 1:15 am GMT - [guid]

I'm off to Springs Lodge in Leavenworth, Washington for a corporate retreat for hot shot new college hires for the rest of the week.

Should be a grand old geeky time.

And yes, I will try very hard to resist the koolaid.

(Though I will be bringing a bottle of something to spike it with).

They tell us there's no Internet, so see yeah.

(I'm bringing my new iPod video and will report back on how watching the first episode of Lost on the bus ride works out).

11/16/2005 - 1:06 am GMT - [guid]

Questions about DVDs

I'm the program manager for DVDs and Movies so if you have questions, send them my way.

Two I got recently are...

Q: Is it possible for Media Center to remember the 'resume' position of multiple DVDs? A: No, Media Center only remembers where you left off of your most recent disc.

Yes, it would have been great if we could have improved this functionality when we introduced My DVDs so that Media Center would remember the position of any disc you stopped watching, but we had a tight schedule and limited resources and had to focus our attention elsewhere.

Q: Will My DVDs be available on the XBox 360? A: No. We did not implement the ability to remotely play back a DVD from a MCE to an XBox 360 Extender so it did not make sense to make My DVDs available.

I certainly understand how cool it would be if you could put your MCE and full loaded DVD changer in a closest and use XBox 360's to watch your DVD collection from any room wirelessly but this is something that's going to have to wait until a future release.

11/14/2005 - 4:48 pm GMT - [guid]

Boombox PC form factor

Strange case form factor of the day for your next home built Media Center, FIC's Piston (via mailing list at work).

[image] It's a computer boom box!

11/14/2005 - 4:42 pm GMT - [guid]

Disclaimer: The posts on this weblog are provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confer no rights. The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.