Windows Media Serivces PVR plugin

Have you ever wanted to just sit and cry?
I remember part of a pretty old song, the main verse was something like so close, but so far away....

Few days ago, I decided to write WMS PVR plugin. Idea was beautiful in its utter simplicity, single WMS plugin will be configured to acquire normal live WM stream, and will provide support for pause, seek, jump etc from few secconds in past to few months.

Of course it will be optimised for thousands of concurent users, using hdd and in memory buffer optimisations on large scale (at least some 64 bit atvantage) etc etc. Everything sounded a real deal, everything fitted perfectly.

It actually worked, the prototype, almost completely. Except the fact it will never work in real life, I simply can't solve ASF indexing problems for now. In any other combination, it works like a charm, using other container, it works perfectly, but it wont be compatible with generic media player clients, so no mobile phones, no PDA's no media center pcs, no....

What are the options?

Actually there are just two:
1. Employ in Microsoft and make sufficient changes in WM Services to natively support PVR.
2. Create custom Media Server and Player for every target platform.

So, if you are Bill and just maybe you last name is Gates, I would like to apply for job. I will work for free, 3 months are all I need, just give me access to WM team, and you will have excellent PVR platform for live content with one click away from administrators.

When MS is not big enough...

Microsoft is pure monopolist, we all know.
Punished for enjoying it status many times, as we all know...

But of course, truth is sometimes little different. If you read this blog, you know my enthusiasm about new WM Photo, then HD Photo and finally JPEG XR format.

So what about it, who cares about new JPEG when we already have JPEG? If you are photographer for example, you should care very much, because it solves JPEG problem - fixed limited color bit depth, problem who is killing JPEG for photographers.

And now MS despite all The Monopolists Powers can't introduce excellent new open format to mass market.

Instead of reanalyzing well known reasons for this mass market ignoring that already happened to Adobe Digital Negative DNG format, also beautifull open specs solution,

we can all, politely ask for one more time to all major players on the market,
Get serious, put behind all small personal interests, and embrace open formats.

I'm generally against open code, it doesn't make any sense, but I'm all for open formats politics.

So repeat after me:
1. I want all my apps to have open formats native support
2. I want all my electronics devices to use USB for power and data transfer
3. I want all my....
...

BDA Sample

And of course I've forgot to mention, there are some very nice BDA examples out there, and there isn't much to add.

If you need one, and even better, if you need it in c#, look few posts under Lazy for C++.

There is good BDA sample with c# imported directshow interfaces.

J.

DVB trough graphedit Journey Part 2

And you thought I would forget to finish journey :)

Well actually there isn't any journey, configuring DVB-T is trivial.

There is just one thing, if you are in Croatia, trust no one :) TV station actually miss configured broadcast, that instead of 522 000 kHz is 522 900 kHz effectively avoiding direct configuration.

Everything else is plain and boring stuff, I've putted screenshot of graph as a sample, it is usually the best help for me.

Any case, just email for questions any time...

To lazy for C++?

Well, here is the answer from open source community:

Do it all in .NET
http://directshownet.sourceforge.net/

Nice clean work, nice clean code, nice samples...

VC-1 SDK Faq

By Alex Zambelli

Mobile Silverlight?

Yes, Yes and Yes...
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9884398-7.html?tag=nefd.top

for Nokia series 60 (expected) and 40 !!! (not really expected).
Others will follow, I'm sure.