How do you debug a movie? Before I get too old and forget, here is the story of one bug that I had to find when playing King Kong in the Xbox HD DVD player. It concludes with yet another reason I am so glad we’re not doing a Blu-ray player. The HD DVD team originally wrote the player software for ...

Following the recent success in using a Zune for the kids to watch movies in the family vehicle, I decided it was time to update the music system in my car. I was a very happy customer of a Kenwood Keg which had been professionally installed in my Boxster years ago, but frustrations with that system...

I haven’t posted a book review here before, but that’s because no-one has sent me a pre-release draft manuscript to review before! So here it is, a review of Essential C# 3.0 by Mark Michaelis. To skip to the chase, I like this book a lot. My personal C# level is Intermediate: although I was on ...

At last I have succeeded in getting ripped DVDs to play from my Xbox 360's Media Center Extender, and here is how I did it. First off let me explain my goals: I want to be able to play my kid's DVDs via my home network, so they can avoid trashing the shiny discs any more than they already have Playb...

My kids are 2 and 4 yrs old so have little concept of what Daddy does, though they do know the words DVD, Xbox, and Lightsaber. However in a decade or so they might be able to understand what Daddy did in the format war, so here’s how I plan on explaining the last three years of my work:   In...

Here are my personal highlights (and lowlights) of the format war, from down in the trenches of the HD DVD team at Microsoft. To make it a bit clearer, here is a graph of the peaks and troughs of the last three years: April 2005: I join the Profession Content Group. Immediately start work on iHD eng...

To save you the pain that I had recently, of trying to hook up simple support for the MCE remote control in your app, here is the important info that I found incredibly hard to locate via MSDN search: A C# article called "Using Alternate Input Devices in Your Smart Client Applications" (easily trans...