Memorial Day

Over the years the meaning of Memorial Day has faded too much from the public consciousness. From a solemn day of mourning, rememberance, and honor to our departed loved ones, it has degenerated into a weekend of Bar B Q's, shopping bargains and beaches where only token nods toward our honored dead is given, if at all. Too many don't know what the day stands for.

Memorial Day used to be a sacred day that was reserved for the remembrance of those who paid the ultimate price for our freedoms. Businesses closed for the day. Towns held parades honoring the fallen, the parade routes often times ending at a local cemetery, where Memorial Day speeches were then given. People took the time that day to clean and decorate with flowers and flags the graves of those the fell in service to their country.

It is human nature to avoid the unpleasant. But we need to remember the cost of war, we need to remember the price paid for our freedoms, we need to not let those who died, die forgotten and in vain.

When Congress made the day into a three-day weekend in with the National Holiday Act of 1971 (P.L. 90 - 363), it made it all the easier for us to be distracted from the spirit and meaning of the day.

We need to teach our children the day's meaning. Show others by our actions that we will not forget. You don't have to believe in war to honor our family, friends and neighbors who died in service to their country.

Have a safe weekend with your families.

DVD Library in Vista Media Center

I have been looking around for a integrated way to store movies on the server and allow all of the computers in the house to access those movies. I think I found a good solution in this Microsoft Knowledge Base Article.

It details how to enable the built in DVD Library support in Vista Media Center. All of the movies are stored in individual folders located in a shared folder on the server in the VIDEO_TS format.

Then on each of the client Vista machines, open regedit and navigate to the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Settings\DvdSettings subkey.
Locate the ShowGallery key and modify the value from Play to Gallery.

Then launch Media Center and you should see DVD Library under TV & Movies.



This worked fine on my rig but when I tried it for my wife the registry setting did not change the GUI and the DVD Library did not show up.
I fixed this by giving her account temporary local admin, made the registry change, made sure it worked , and then removed her from the local admin group.

Once the DVD Library shows up in the gui click on it and then right click and select add a shared folder from another computer and then select the share with the movies.

The movies should start appearing in the Library. There are still a few issues for me to sort out. One is that the information such as the cover art and meta data is not cached and it needs to be looked up every time. As the number of movies increases this can take a bit of time. You can place an image called folder.jpg in each movies folder and that will take precedence over the download. Another issue is the dvdid.xml, and I have been doing a bit of reading and cam across this site that appears rather interesting.

Vista DRM Issue

Never one to pass up a good deal, I was able to get a new Q9650 Quad Core processor at a good price. I replaced the E8400 Dual Core in my main Rig, updated the bios and fired her up. I am running Vista Ultimate x64 in this machine and it started right up and I just had to open Task Manager and see all four cores looking good.

After the obligatory re-activation, I ran the Vista performance benchmark for the experience Index and I am now 5.9 across the board with 8 Gig RAM, 8800GTS video, and a WD Raptor 150 Gig Drive.

Then I opened up Media Center and I encountered the first of my issues. Error windows popped up about the receiver service not working and Digital Cable device registration application stopped working errors started opening up.

As it turns out Vista DRM is tied to the CPU so you need to delete the DRM cache. Open up an explorer window and go to the tools menu on the toolbar. If you do not see the toolbar, hit the alt key and it should appear. Go to folder options and choose the "view" tab.

Select the show hidden folders and unselect the Hide Protected Operating System Files. Then go to C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\DRM. Make sure it is the correct DRM folder, there is another DRM folder one level up and it is empty. If I am feeling cynical I think it is a decoy to confuse people. Inside the correct DRM folder there should be some files like this.





Now delete all of the file inside of the DRM folder but not the DRM folder itself. Then log off and reboot for good measure. You may want to reset the folder view options back to their default options. Now the annoying errors should be gone Media Center should be working fine again.