Traveling towards VMworld 2008

I, along with thousands of others, wended my way through a vast dimly lit cavern of a place helped along by the strangely surreal sight of ushers in black waving wispy red flags to guide us not to the empty seats in front of us, but to the ones 50 yards on. (Ah Vegas, my feet hurt already.) Perhaps the point was to live in the moment, soak in the pre-rock concert atmosphere complete with a hip and cool soundtrack ripped off from Apple commercials. (Do they all use the same ad firm?) A better way to build the anticipation for, yes, the kickoff keynote session at VMworld 2008. (photo credit: lodev)

To the sounds of Hey Ya (Shake it like a Polaroid picture), we shifted forward in our uncomfortable temporary seating placed, as at all tech conferences, too close for all but the skinny girls. The moment was here – one of those videos started playing on the dozen or so huge monitors floating above the convention crowd. You know this video; you’ve probably seen it before from HP or someone like that. One of those videos with instrumental Coldplay music in the background with time lapse/speeded-up video of people in motion and floating captions dropping into the images that leave you with a slight smile on your face as you “get” the relationship between image and text. (Do they all use the same ad firm?)

And here he is, announced like a Vegas headliner, Paul Maritz, the new CEO of VMware. Hmm. After all that hype, I rather expected someone in a black turtleneck and jeans to come out. Instead here’s this guy with pleat-front pants and an admittedly cool accent (New Zealand?) who looks a little like Al from Home Improvement. Not that there’s anything wrong with that – everyone likes Al.

And then the real fun begins.

• 30 years ago, Paul Maritz started off his business career as a developer
• 10 years ago, VMware was founded by Diane Greene and Mendel Rosenblum (BTW, 10 seconds spent showing a slide with cartoon-ized images of the founders, “thanks for what you did for the company for the past 10 years”. 10 seconds after 10 years…but maybe more would have been hypocritical…)
• a retrospective of centralized vs. decentralized computing initiatives from the 1960’s to today
• of course VMware milestones from 1998 to today
• and then an analyst-ready diagram showing the product roadmap (to be delivered in 2009) with, you guessed it, finally a connection between VMware and cloud computing (remember Maritz’s cloud-computing company was bought by EMC just a couple of years ago and that’s the section he headed up at EMC before being brought into VMware).

Forward Looking

2008 (and probably much of 2009) will be a very busy year for VMware. If you believe the roadmap, VMware seems to be taking on the management of everything – from chargeback and capacity planning to virtual storage and virtual networking (more to come on just what the planned vStorage and vNetwork will deliver) – but all of it VMware-centric. As we said in an earlier post, they’ve moved away from “defending” the hypervisor business proposition to focusing on management services on top of their own hypervisor platform. Revenue pressures must be excruciating – who wants to be a public company these days?

The best part of that new “Virtual Data Center Operating System” diagram/roadmap was the addition (and I mean addition) of something called Cloud vServices. (Did anyone else find it odd that Cloud vServices is kind of on its own in the Infrastructure vServices area? AND, I’ll have to get the other version of the diagram/roadmap I actually saw at the show because that one shows an inexplicable 4^th box in the Application vServices area titled “…”. Really. Maybe to balance out the addition of Cloud vServices?)

What was clear is that the move from VirtualCenter to vCenter –and the new vServices for rolled-up management of virtualization components/capability to span multiple VirtualCenters (or future vCenters) for reporting, monitoring and management at scale – has been in the works for a bit (but in tech time, that could mean 6 months), but the cloud stuff…not so much.

Beyond the very high-level speak appropriate to a keynote (100+ service provider partners for off-premise cloud…suspended VM’s that you don’t have to pay for until you need it), the details are uber-fuzzy. There was a session that Dave went to which was supposed to shed more light, but when questions were asked about how it really works, the answers seemed to be TBD. Does anyone know more? If VMware really has figured out practical cloud computing for enterprises, kudos to them. But I fear they’re like everyone else (except maybe AT&T) and are still working out the details.

But hey, that’s why it’s still “Provisional”.

Bookmark to:

The service is enabled by JiWire, which has gradually transitioned itself from a site that developed a hotspot directory supplemented by editorial coverage and how-to's on wireless data, to one that's now hotspot directory plus hotspot advertising. The transition is interesting, as it reflects what I've seen on Wi-Fi Networking News: Wi-Fi is easier to use, as is cell data; costs for equipment is lower or you don't need to make a choice about equipment; and usage is up so far at hotspots that there's an audience there for commercial-based access.

MetroFi has famously declared free access to metro-scale services paid for by advertising to be unworkable; that may be so, given that they were the biggest proponent of it for a few years, and no other company followed them into that approach. However, metro-scale ad-supported Wi-Fi, in which residential and roaming users alike looked at banners and commercials in exchange for servcie is a far cry from the focused hotspot advertising market.

Hotspot ads involve a very open exchange between surfer and service, and JiWire pushes the watch-for-access model quite heavily. What's saving a few bucks worth to you? 15 seconds? 30 seconds? If so, we have a deal for you, they say, that also works for the advertiser and the service provider (and JiWire). It's not subtle; you have to watch the ad to gain access. But it seems like a reasonable exchange, with two hours' access up to a full day running $4 to $12 in the U.S. at paid locations. (Of course, I subscribe to Boingo Wireless's roaming service now, so I can bypass the ads in favor of paying $22 per month for unlimited usage, too. That's part of that tradeoff.)

(Disclosure: I own a very small number of share in JiWire as part of my early working relationship with them.)

However, as some of you may realize from my previous postings (Vista Media Center Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3), I have been a fan of Media Center as a potential alternative to the recently-downgraded (don't get me started, even my wife lost what she considered *basic* features with the "standard" Comcast DVR downgrade) Comcast DVR.

The event that kicks this story of begins with a Poker game.  Just after Microsoft announced the new Zune line-up in October, I won a charity poker event where the prize was a custom Zune 30.  It was basically a "pearl" Zune with a special logo on the back and pre-loaded with some poker theme music that we heard during the event.  I played with it a few days, loading it with some songs and even buying a couple of recent ones from the Zune marketplace.

Then ... I discovered the killer feature ... integration with my Windows Vista Media Center.   Now, technically, this feature was not actually enabled when I discovered it.  However, it took me all of 5 minutes to find the registry mod on the Internet and enable it.  That became moot a week or so ago when the recent Zune upgrade rectified that issue, so now everyone can enjoy this feature by default.  Here is the very simple set-up instructions:

1. Install the Zune software on your media center
2. Make sure you add your "Recorded TV" folder, if it is in an odd place (mine is on an external half-TByte drive).
3. Plug in your Zune device as a guest
4. Sync recorded TV shows to your heart's content

Now, let's see why this rocks...

iPod vs Zune TV Comparison

The Apple Way...

There was much ado when the Daily Show became available on iTunes for $1 per show or $9.99 for 16 episodes (roughly 3 weeks of shows).  I browsed over to http://www.apple.com/itunes/store/tvshows.html just now and found this blurb:

Be a watercooler hero.  For as little as $1.99, you can own the latest episode of your favorite show as early as one day after it airs, or purchase past episodes that you missed (or want to watch over and over). Choose a Season Pass and get a whole season of a TV show, past or present, at a discount. Or buy Multi-Passes for shows that air every day, like The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and enjoy a month’s worth of episodes downloaded automatically to your computer.

Well, yahoo, yipee!  Only $2 per show on your iPod, iPhone or Apple TV.

The Zune + Media Center Way ...

I record all of my favorite TV shows on my Windows Media Center.  In the evening, I plug in my Zune and choose which shows to sync for mobile watching.  For example, last night I chose the two latest episodes of Heroes which I had not gotten around to watching because of my recent Jury Duty and the holiday activities.  The Zune software automagically converts the show to 320x240 and syncs it to my Zune.

This morning on the Connector Bus to work, I watched Heroes Season 2, Episode 7, "Out of Time" and found out the surprising identity of "Adam Monroe."  I'll watch Episode 8 on the way home...

And My TV Movies Too...

And, it doesn't stop there.  As I described previously, I've been building up quite a library of TV Movies, cutting out commercials, compressing them and creating my own on-demand TV Movies library.  Since I got my Zune, I've switched to using MP4 compression with H.264 video and AAC3 audio, which gets added automatically to my Zune library and can be synced to the device... better together indeed!

With my Zune 30, this means I can load up about 50 kids movies and TV shows that I've previously recorded for those long road trips and vacations.  In fact, I can plug my Zune into the aux-video inputs in our mini-van and play directly on the integrated DVD video screen.

And it is all so easy...

Previous posts about building my Vista Media Center:

• Part 1 - The System
• Part 2 - The Tuner

I posted part 2 back in  June, so it has been a while, but I wanted to continue documenting my media center project and I can't help but talk about the MyMovies2 plug-in next. 

Create Your Own "Movies On Demand" Library

One of the key goals for my home media center was to be able to build up a library of children's programming that they could select and play "on demand."  Similarly, for myself, I wanted to capture all of those favorites of my own for replay on demand.  After a little research, I adopted the MyMovies2 plug-in, which has two main components:

1. Media Center plug-in which shows up in the menu next to "Recorded TV" as "My Movies".  There are some nice filtering and sorting features, parental control enforcement and visually it looks a lot like the movies listed under "Recorded TV", showing DVD covers, listing actors and descriptions.                                             
2. Collection Management - A back-end Windows application to manage your movie Library.  Again, this has a nice interface that lets you manage all of the information about movies you add - and it will help you search for the information online at its own online site and, as a backup, at imdb.org.                                                             

A Bit About Organization

I'm not going to duplicate the installation instructions, because they are easy.  However, though you can place Movies *anywhere* on your hard disk(s), you do need to put each movie in its own folder.  I recommend you set up a structure such as "C:\MyMovies\" and create subfolders under there (however, you can do it anyway you want).

Also, if you purchase an external hard drive for storage, I recommend you connect it via a different interface that your tuner (ie, don't have a USB2.0 tuner and a USB2.0 hard drive - put the hard drive on Fireware if you can).  This is not an issue if you are using an internal tuner card.

Movies Recorded from TV

The quickest and easiest way to build up your movie collection is to use the built-in capabilities of Media Center to record movies and then transfer them over to MyMovies for later use on demand.  Here are the basic steps you can use:

First, use the Movie Search option of Media Center to find upcoming movies you like and record them.  I tend to record them in "Best" quality, so that I am starting from the best position when I transcode them to a compressed format.  However, I've also used the lower level formats without problem. 

Simplest Method (I don't use this normally)

1. Record the movie in the lowest quality you are comfortable with - perhaps "Good".
2. Create a folder and move the .dvr-ms file over to the folder.
3. Use the Collection Management application to add the "online" movie to your database.  Search for the movie title and just a select a DVD version that represents you movie.

My Method

1. Record the movie in the highest quality, "Best"
2. (OPTIONALLY) Use comskip or showanalyzer to help you remove commercials from the show.  I won't detail this here, but it can also be combined and automated using the tool described in the next step.
3. Use a utility to transcode the move to a compressed format - this can be any format for which you've installed the appropriate codecs.  Note, that I use WMV because it facilitates streaming these movies to a Media Center Extender.  This process can be automated using DVRMSToolbox from www.thegreenbutton.com (or similar tools) 
4. Create a folder and move the transcoded file over to the folder.
5. Use the Collection Management application to add the "online" movie to your database.  Search for the movie title and just a select a DVD version that represents you movie.

Putting your DVDs "Online"

Another option that MyMovies give you is, when you are viewing a DVD, to copy the video files to a hard disk folder and include the movie in the database.  I have not used this option, largely because it consumes a lot of hard disk space.

Instead, I have compressed and transcoded some of the kids' DVDs that we have and placed the resulting movie file in a folder and added it to the database in a method similar to how I add recorded TV.

The downside of this, of course, is that my son now insists on watching Toy Story or Cars repeatedly ...