It’s official, Vista Media Center is so much better than Ti. Vo « Ben Drawbaugh. Before I get into the good stuff that backs up my opinion, let me give you some background. I’ve used Windows my entire life and although I preferred DOS to Windows 3. I’ve always been comfortable with Windows. ![]() ![]() TheINQUIRER publishes daily news, reviews on the latest gadgets and devices, and INQdepth articles for tech buffs and hobbyists. Simply put, Windows 7 is much faster, safer and better than any OS out there including its predecessor Vista. Apart from all the changes that we have mentioned in the. ![]() When I really started getting into computers around 2. I started to explore Linux and in the process of using Linux on my laptop (Gentoo) for years, I started to despise many things about the way Microsoft conducted its business and because of the fact that the UI didn’t seem to keep up with the times — ie, Vista has almost the same task bar as Windows 9. The irony of course is that I earn my living as an MCSE, so while I still don’t prefer Windows on my computers, I recognize that there are a few problems, like corporate email, that Microsoft simply has the best solution for. As for Ti. Vo, my first DVR was a Replay. TV, but after I discovered HDTV 2. I was quick to pick up a Direc. Ti. Vo HD for the low low price of $1. So having been anti- Microsoft for a few years and a Ti. ![]() Vo fanboy for almost five, enjoying a MS product so much more than Ti. Vo, feels very backward to me. Price. Believe it or not, Ti. Vo cost me much more than my Vista Media Center PC with Cable. CARD. Of course this isn’t apples to apples, and I owned the more expensive version of the HD Ti. Vo, but looking back I had $2. GB of storage over 2 years. While at the same time VMC cost me $1. Blu- ray drive and software. Of course if you were willing to settle for the two Ti. Vo HDs, then you could get a two room setup for $1. The big difference between the two in price is the service, Ti. Vo gets $3. 00, per box, for three years, Microsoft doesn’t charge for guide data at all, no matter how many TVs you have. Multiroom. The multiroom capabilities of Vista Media Center are easily the biggest upgrade for me over Ti. Vo. The up front cost to add a room is $2. ![]() Ti. Vo will cost you an additional $3. But price isn’t everything and the reason why VMC still out paces Ti. Vo is because Ti. Vo can’t stream shows between units and it can’t combine the tuners from all the Ti. Vos in the house to automatically resolve recording conflicts. Of course with the Ti. Vo you get another two tuners for every one you add, but I don’t think most people need as many tuners as they need ways to watch enjoy content, so the added $7 a month, plus Cable. CARD rental fees, just aren’t worth it. Pictures and Music. Over the past few years I’ve had about four devices that would allow me to look at my photos and listen to my music collection on my HDTV, and while they’ve all been pretty good at music, pictures seem to be tricky. The Ti. Vo isn’t bad at pictures, but it isn’t great — the worst part is the super small thumbnails and the Ti.
![]() ![]() InformationWeek.com connects the business technology community. Award-winning news and analysis for enterprise IT. ![]() ![]() Vo Desktop that must run on your computer and who’s OS X version won’t serve up HD pictures. The VMC picture and music experience isn’t perfect, but it’s the best I’ve tried. All I had to do was copy my i. Photo Originals and i. Tunes Library folders over to corresponding folders on the VMC, and I was enjoying my content. The biggest bummer is that a lot of metadata doesn’t make it over, but if you really want a truely seamless experience, you can pick up MCE Tunes. But even without it, I find myself listening to music and browsing through my pictures more than ever and that includes with my Apple TV — but I will say that the music experience on the ATV is better, but without the rest of the cool stuff on one box it isn’t worth switching inputs. Bonus. If I wanted to list all the things that VMC could do with add- ons and registry hacks that Ti. Vo can’t — like play Blu- ray movies — I’d never have time to do anything else. Seriously, the sky is the limit and as hard as it might be for some to believe, Microsoft’s open architecture and development kit, really makes it easy for anyone to make VMC do whatever you want. Of course when you consider the amount of time it takes to set everything up — assuming you don’t buy a Nieveus or the like — all the bonus features you forfiet on the Ti. Vo, you can almost be made up for with ease of setup. DVRFor me at least, the main purpose of switching was to have a better DVR expereince, and while there are some die hard Ti. Vo fans who will refuse to believe this, Vista Media Center offers the best DVR exerience availble today. But I don’t mean to say it is perfect, in fact there are few things that Microsoft can learn from Ti. Vo, but there are more things Ti. Vo can learn. The Good The list of recorded shows is so much more enjoyable than Ti. Vo, sure thumbnails aren’t super useful, but the vertical view is nice, and the grid of show thumbnails is just so cool. Combine this with the smooth transitions and you have a UI that makes you really notice how old and unresponsive the Ti. Vo UI is. I really love the fact that you can watch a recorded program or live TV while you work in the menus or the guide, but for those times when you don’t want to watch anything, the stop button comes in handy. As if having the ability to watch TV while taking care of a few DVR housekeeping tasks isn’t cool enough, the fact that the UI is transparent in many cases, is just so cool it’s hard to explain. The scrub bar includes the time, so you can hit one button to see how much longer the show is and the current time. I really have to say, mini guide rocks. Why Ti. Vo doesn’t have a mini guide, I’ll never understand, I guess it’s for the same reason as Ti. Vo doesn’t show you what is set to record (or not) in the guide. The conflict resolution is really cool, it’s hard to explain exactly why it’s better than Ti. Vo, but I just find it’s much easier to choose which shows I want to record — also, there are not many conflicts when you have four tuners. Default recording preferences, seriously, how can Ti. Vo not have this? How did I get by configuring that I wanted to keep all recordings until I delete, on every single season pass for the past 5 years of my life? Being able to set defaults, combined with one touch recording (seriously, one press) makes the task of scheduling recordings so drop dead simple that maybe I won’t have to setup all my wife’s shows for her anymore — yeah I know, I’m dreaming. It’s nice to be able to preview each channel when you’re editing which channels will be in the guide, but you should be able to turn it off, ’cause it it can really slow it down. You should be able to direct dial a channel, finding channel 8. Movie info is really cool, too bad it isn’t easier to use with non- VOB movies. If watching a program live that will eventually be interrupted by a recording, there is an ! Repeats are very clearly marked in the guide, no need to dig through and find the original air date like Ti. Vo. Ability to customize just about anything, like how long the scrub bar stays up for example. The Bad Clear should delete the selected item anywhere in the UI, like in the “series” menu. ![]() There should be a deleted items instead of confirming to delete all the time. When you cancel a series in the “series” menu, it should return you to the closest series of the one you just deleted instead of taking you to the top again. It is annoying to delete series number 2. There should be a preference that allows you to disable the fact that when navigating menus and you hit the bottom of a list, your selection becomes the current playing window — but you do get used to this. Haven’t figured out how to only keyword search one channel and HD needs to be a category. Don’t seem to be able to change the size of the current playing window? Seems small on my TV. Should be able to create your own guide “categories” so my wife and I could have our favorite channels listed. I miss skip to tick on my Ti. Vo, but the super fast forward is an okay replacement. If you exit VMC completely before stopping the playback of a recording, it doesn’t remember where you left off on the recording that is playing. VMC takes longer to launch Live TV from the main menu, this is something Ti. Vo does almost instantly. VMC also takes longer to start playing back a recording, luckily almost all of the UI elements are more responsive than Ti. Vo. MS should consider adding a DVR mode that would record all the tuners all the time and prioritize Live TV etc, to speed this up and to keep a buffer of all the channels. Can’t edit much about a single recording in a series, only . No resolution pass through, so all video is converted to say 1. Grid guide should be able to take up the entire screen. Info should just show info instead of a menu, but it doesn’t take long to get used to hitting an arrow button instead to access the awesome mini guide. Can’t go back and view what you missed in the guide. No list view guide. Chris told me how to access the list guide. Should be able to control the buffer when switching tuners, unlike Ti. Vo you sometimes — not sure why it’s not always — lose it on one tuner. Thumbnails should be 1. Other than the defective ATI tuner I received (which was replace 3 days later by Dell) I think that the setup will be overwhelming for most. Even if you don’t connect the VMC directly to your HDTV, there is still a considerable amount of setup that I wonder if less experienced computers users would be able to accomplish. That being said, if you’ve ever built your own computer, then you won’t have any problems — or if you aren’t scared to call support — for me this isn’t a problem, as I find this tinkering very enjoyable. In fact one of my biggest problems is that I can’t stop tinkering, which has led me to break my setup in a few cases. Now that I have everything setup, I plan to leave things be, create an image and enjoy. To anyone out there dealing with a cable DVR, or find that you wish you could do more on your HDTV than Ti. Vo allows, I wouldn’t hesitate to upgrade to Vista Media Center. The Media Center product has come a long way over the past few years, but I can honestly say it is ready for prime time and am confident it will only get better. Using The Biggest Virtual Machine in Microsoft Azure's Cloud. When you hear about some giant server with crazy memory or processors, or a SAN that supports immense amounts of flash storage, you’ll most likely think to yourself, “I’ll never see one of those, let alone have the chance to play with one.”The great thing about having access to a public cloud like Azure is that you have access to anything, and you only pay for it by the minute while you use it. That gives you a chance you play with the big stuff for a very short amount of time! I decided to deploy the largest possible virtual machine that you can in any of the “big three clouds” according to Microsoft, a GS5. I’ll explain what I got from this machine, how it performed when stressed, and how much it cost me. The Microsoft Azure GS5 Virtual Machine. At the moment, the GS5 is the premium virtual machine in Azure. The GS- Series is based on the G- Series machines, based on hosts with the 2. GHz Intel Xeon E5- 2. B v. 3 CPU. The G- and GS- Series virtual machines offer much more RAM per core than any of the other Azure virtual machine specifications. The GS1 starts with two cores and 2. GB RAM, which is much more than the DS2, which has two cores and 7 GB RAM. The workloads that you run in these machines are intended to be extremely memory intensive, possibly using RAM to cache data instead of disk. The GS- Series gives you the option to deploy the OS and data disks on HDD- based Standard Storage or SSD- based Premium Storage. The temporary disk is based on a host- local SSD drive. You can have up to 6. IOPS with a transfer rate of 2,0. MB per second. So, let’s think about that for a second. This is a machine with: 3. Xeon processor cores. GB RAM. Up to 6. 4 x 1. GB data disks, running at SSD speeds and transfer rates. How often would you ever get to fire that machine up, and what would it cost you? I decided to deploy such a machine in Azure on my spare MSDN Premium subscription, which includes a nice Azure credit benefit. Note that Windows virtual machines are charged at Linux rates for MSDN customers because the Windows license is covered by MSDN benefits, terms, and conditions. To speed up deployment and clean up, I deployed a V2 virtual machine using Azure Resource Manager, containing all of the dependent resources in a single resource group. Next, I used Azure Resource Manager and Power. Shell to create and assign 6. GB P3. 0 data disks, with caching disabled, to the virtual machine. In theory, the GS5 can support up to 8. IOPS without caching. The machine had 6. P3. 0 data drives, and each of those drives can offer up to 5,0. IOPS. I installed Microsoft’s free tool, Dsk. Spd, and started to run my tests: Start stressing the disks with 4. K reads, with eight overlapping IOs on two threads. Increase the load by reconfiguring the tests. The only problem was that: The virtual machine was costing around . I managed to hit 5. IOPS before I ran out of time and money. It’s not 8. 0,0. 00 IOPS, but it’s more than I’d hit before. I did observe some spikes to 7. IOPS, so I probably wasn’t far from the optimal test configuration before Azure shut the subscription down due to lack of credit. The best disk IOPS results I had before I ran out of credit. I could have boosted performance, perhaps by around 2. How Much Did This Test Cost? I normally deploy Azure resources in either the East US 2 or North Europe regions. I deployed this machine in West Europe (Amsterdam) because the GS5 spec was available here, and I could also isolate the billing to see how much the test would cost. The machine wasn’t running for very long, so it . However, the Premium Storage capacity cost me much, much more. The machine was deployed in the evening, and that’s when I ran my first tests. I planned to run more tests the following day, but Azure shut down the subscription due to lack of credit remaining. Overnight, the storage consumed ! Note that the test file in the data LUN was just 5,0. MB. A breakdown of the GS5 virtual machine costs. With it, I ran the biggest machine in Microsoft Azure’s cloud, and, yes, it was big. I wish I had more time to stress the disks, RAM, and CPU, but playtime was ended by Azure before I was ready. This leads me to another point. All too often, newbies to the cloud assume that service, and therefore machine, designs should be the same in the cloud as they would be on- premises. Public clouds are designed and priced to suit smaller machines. Services should be designed to scale out, ideally on the fly, based on demand using small machines. This gives you cost efficiencies by using smaller machines, as well as availing of the per- minute billing that Azure offers. Crazy- big machines should be a rarity in the cloud, for genuinely crazy- big workloads that justify the costs. As you can see above, those costs can be high. But for nerds like me, accruing those costs can be fun — while it lasts. Tagged with Azure, Cloud, GS- Series, GS5, Iaa. S, Microsoft Azure, Premium Storage, Virtual Machiens.
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