My favourite movie since Mamma Mia (doesn’t say much about me or my tastes I suppose). A must for London-philes. I’m not sure how much of this film is really true and how much of it is a figment of a wild imagination, but even if it were complete fiction it’d still be very entertaining.

OK, so I meant to see this a long time ago. Watched it last night on Blu-ray. Uh-oh. Only the last five minutes is in full 1080p, the rest of it is in DVD 480p quality, having been originally recorded on a DV camera. I’m sure the apologists will say that the low resolution add to the gritty nature of the movie, but I feel totally, utterly, and completely ripped off when I could’ve bought the DVD for three quid instead and a fourteen quid Blu-ray.

The striy is, however good if you’re into Day-of-the-Triffid or Survivor type genres. Also interesting how the London streets and the motorways were empty during filming.

Let me indulge in a brief history of IT over the past couple of decades.

Take your minds back twenty years ago, when object oriented programming was starting to emerge. Lots of new words, like abstraction, objects, methods, polymorphism, overloading, inheritance. Many of them were words invented for mechanisms for things that we could already do in languages such as C, but maybe with a bit more work. Pointers to functions in C, for example, when used in data structures gives you run time binding methods. Let’s face it, in the early days of C++, source code was translated to C before compiling with a standard C compiler.

RAD (rapid application development) was the rage fifteen years ago. This turned out to be nothing more than a marketing TLA.

TCO and ROI have been the IT management buzz TLAs for the past ten years. But someone please tell me: once the management consultant has convinced the management that this great new system will result in a projected ROI of eighteen months and a 20% reduction in TCO, where exactly is that management consultant eighteen months later? That’s right, he’s buggered off to peddle the latest management consultant mantra somewhere else. And does anyone go back and check if ROI and TCO was on target? You bet they didn’t.

Change. That’s the last five year’s MBA word. Apparently change is good. Good for management consultants that’s for sure. Even branding consultants have jumped on the bandwagon: if you don’t have a company mission statement or motto with “Change” in it, you’re just not trendy. And for IT, that means Change Control, a way to procedurise common sense. Now Change Control is a necessity, but all to often it’s the whipping boy to blame when things go wrong, and the next thing you know there’s yet another procedure that’s been instigated because something else went wrong. Procedure’s all very well, but it dumbs down people. No-one has responsibility anymore because it’s the procedure’s fault. Or because there isn’t a procedure. Look, we all make mistakes, and we learn from mistakes. That’s what gives us “intelligence”. So don’t patronise us all by spoon feeding more and more procedures. Some of us have grey matter you know.

Back to IT. First it was Java, then it was C#. Extending on the object oriented mantra of layering technologies, obfuscating what’s going on under the hood, we now have two things that to me seem totally at odds with everything I grew up with: manage your limited resources with care and keep response times consistently quick.

Two things with Java and C# technologies will destroy deterministic behaviour in response times and resource usage, namely garbage collection and JIT compilation. No longer can you check your basic system counters for memory usage and know whether or not you have a resource leak of some kind. Oh, I forgot, the programming runtime environment deals with all that…

So, although garbage collection (a technology of the BASIC interpreters of the 1960’s) saves lazy programmers to some degree from memory management, it adds an additional level of indirection when addressing, makes apparent application memory usage go crazy, and, when a GC occurs seemingly at random, your system slows down.

JIT compilation’s another area that I just don’t get. Sure, CPU’s relatively cheap but if you happen to run some non-trivial application for the first time since rebooting, you’ll have to suffer a recompile, and that might take some time. I don’t get why the code can’t be JITted when it’s installed. And as almost all C# code is destined for WINTEL platforms, why is JIT needed at all? Oh, hang on, there might be some weird SSE instruction that might be needed. OK, but once in a blue moon I’d suggest. So make JITting occur at install time, not at runtime.

Indeterminism of resource usage and response times are difficult things to fix in a production environment, and lead to extensive end user angst. The application programmers are so high up the food chain that they have no clue how an app will perform in the real world. And what are the upsides of using Java and C# exactly? Do we see improved development time? Reduced costs? You bet we don’t.

I have Windows 7 Media Center build 7100 running fairly well now, even using the Extender.

But what about that simplest of Media Center functionality, playing music? How difficult can it be?

Media Center fails massively on its useless database that seems to need rebuilding at the drop of a hat. With thousands of tracks, that takes quite some time, and it’s certainly irritating. There seems to be some linkage with Windows Media Player 12 too, which also suffers from regular database rebuilding. It’s so unreliable, I’ve given up using it for all but a few dozen albums.

Using your Windows Mobile device as a remote control using Microsoft’s Sideshow is so mediocre that I gave up using it within minutes.

The plus side of Windows Media Center for music is the Extender functionality so I can play the tracks in other rooms of the house. Perhaps surprisingly for Microsoft, WMC also supports a standard, DLNA, allowing sharing of medoa libraries between devices. But DLNA implementations seem to be a bit of an afterthought, and again, like the integrated database problem, seems to have appalling performance problems with anything other than trivial libraries (the PS3 DLNA client also has this problem).

So I tried iTunes instead. This suffers none of the database issues that WMP/WMC does. That’s a massive plus. I know every time I want to access a song it’ll be there without having to wait hours for a database to be rebuilt.

On the downside iTunes doesn’t like WMA encoded music and insists of re-encoding it. Also iTunes isn’t DLNA compatible so you’re into the realms of proprietary technology for distributed media. And of course it won’t run through the WMC Extender.

But there are two extra plusses for iTunes. You can run the audio through a terminal services client (aka remote desktop). Then there’s the real deal killer - the Remote app that you can run on your iPhone or iPod and remotely control the system over your WiFi. You can even run Genius from the remote to come up with a playlist.

So, Microsoft, wake up and smell the coffee: Sideshow as a Media Center remote is useless. But the database behind WMC makes the music library really makes WMC a disaster for serious music use.

After many evenings, I finally have a way of generating 1080p video from Blu-ray disk (aka BD) and HD-DVD that works on Linksys DMA 2100 Media Center Extenders. I’ve done conversions under both Windows XP and Windows 7 RC. I’ve tried many different formats to try to get decent 1080p that you can pause, fast forward and rewind etc, but the method described here is the only one I’ve managed to get to work consistently well.

The basis is this:

• Decryption/copy protection removal
  • AnyDVD-HD - don’t leave home without it
• Identify correct audio & video streams
  • EVODemux for HD-DVD
  • BDInfo for Blu-ray
• Remux audio & video streams into a .TS container
  • Use TSMuxerGUI
    • remove any pulldown, convert to 24000/1001 fps if necessary
    • files are \HVDVD_TS\*.EVO for HD-DVD
    • files are \BDMV\STREAM\*.M2TS for Blu-ray
    • Windows XP will need a UDF 2.5 filesystem device driver to read the files from the BD: Google “udf 2.5 driver xp”
• Extract & convert audio to 640kbps 5.1 AC3 (if not already)
  • Use TSMuxerGUI to to demux the audio
  • EAC3ToGUI to convert to AC3
    • Sometimes LPCM > 4GB, so you’ll need to split into two AC3’s and re-join when remuxing
    • Set 640kbps, and use libav settings
• Convert video to 20Mbps CBR MPEG-2 (if not already MPEG-2)
  • Graphedit with Haali media splitter, ffdshow decoders, Sonic MPEG-2 encoder and File Writer (all DirectShow filters)
    • Set both Sonic MPEG-2 encoder settings to Progressive
    • Sonic MPEG-2 encoder is the only one I can get to work at 1080p
    • Sonic MPEG-2 encoder is part of Roxio Creator 2009 Ultimate
    • Ignore audio stream at this stage
• Remux converted audio & video into .TS container
  • TSMuxerGUI again
• Remux converted .TS to .DVR-MS
  • TSConverter
    • Under Vista or Windows 7, you’ll need to run this as administrator (find it in Program Files\DVBPortal, right click, Run As Administrator)

Typical size of .DVR-MS is between about 15GB and 22GB depending on size.

Speed tips

The slowest part is the video conversion (transcoding) from either VC-1 or H.264 to MPEG-2. With an i7 920 quad core hyperthreading box, I can do an H.264 to MPEG-2 conversion in 35 minutes. A VC-1 takes about 90 minutes. This is because H.264 currently has multithreaded decoders, VC-1 does not.

In comparison, my circa 2002 3.06GHz hyperthreading P4 takes about six hours to transcode! There are two reasons for this: firstly, there’s the lack of true multi core, and more importantly there’s the lack of the latest SSE instructions. My T7200 2GHz dual core laptop is about three times faster than that old P4 smoker.

When muxing/demuxing (as opposed to transcoding) the primary bottleneck is disk I/O. I know that in these days of SANs it’s not trendy to think of spndle management, but you’ll double your throughput if you read from one disk and write to another. On the i7 920 I can achieve a sustained 100MB/s using separate ESATA disks, muxing an entire BD in 3 to 4 minutes! My older PATA PCs (eg, 3.06GHz P4 HT) has a 40MB/s disk-disk thoughput. You will have big penalties (less than half the througput) if you try to do muxing/demuxing on a single disk. That is straight down to the disk contention due to the head movement that’s having to go on to support “simultaneous” reading and writing to the same disk. In contrast doing a disk to disk mux means that the disk head movement is going to be far less, in (hopefully) a much more sequential behaviour. (At this point, I may well have one or two of the serial disk defragmenter brigade getting on my case - but that, my friends, is whole other story).

Think direct attached storage (DAS) rather than NAS or USB. USB maxes out at about 20MB/s. Even gigabit NAS will be sluggish in comparison to DAS.

I’ve lived in the area for over fifteen years, and for all of those years I’ve been aware of the Enterprise, a pub that was converted into a restaurant some time ago. I don’t know why I’ve never been in, but I did last Sunday. Clientele are largely locals. Food covers a multitude of sins on a Sunday, from traditional roasts to scrambled eggs and smoked salmon brunch. I had a red mullet special that was served with roasted mediterranean style vegetabes. Superb. Finished off with an apple crumble and an ‘89 Suduiraut. Both to good stuff, but I got the match wrong, so I ended up with two desserts, the crumble and then the wine. I loved the whole thing.