So I bought an HD-DVD player. I know, I know, HD-DVD lost the war, stopped production and all the movie studios dropped out, but… it was $50, came with 6 free movies (5 of them after a mail-in), the remote control for the XBox360, and it functions as a bootable USB optical drive for most computers. How could I say no?

Seriously though, I will go Blu eventually, but right now the players cost way too much, the spec implementation hasn’t matured, and neither of those huge problems is looking to be solved this year. I’m frankly surprised and dismayed that HD-DVD lost. Every decision Toshiba made was pro-consumer: they drove the price down fast, they had a solid and stable spec, they had good hardware from good partners, and… well, they’re not Sony.

At any rate, I’ll enjoy my 6 HD movies, and maybe pick up a couple more when the media goes on clearance, just to tide me over until Blu-ray gets affordable and functional. Personally I’m a big supporter of VoD, having had good experiences with iTunes and the XBox Live Marketplace, but realistically downloaded “HD” isn’t quite as nice as what comes off a physical disc — not yet anyway.

What a horrible mess!
I’m trying to setup a VM to share my media with my XBox, so I’ve got Windows Media Center 2005 running smoothly, all updated in VMWare. Then I try to connect the XBox… So far I’ve discovered that:

• Just because you can connect long enough to pair the XBox with Windows doesn’t mean Windows can share with it. I’ve had no luck getting past the initial setup.
• If you want to skip the Media Center Extender, you’ll need upgrade to WMP 11
• Even with that, you can’t share video. You also need to install the crashy Zune software and re-add your media library to it.
• None of the above matters because none of it will work unless you have “Windows Certified” router.

On my Mac I have one app for music (iTunes), one for photos (iPhoto), and a folder for video. Connect360 knows all of them, because the APIs are standard across the platform, so it can share all of them with ONE click after the 30 second install.

Windows is a steaming pile of poo at sharing media…

Update: Some progress — it turns out Media Center Extenders use some derivation of Terminal Services, so if you don’t have that service, plus Fast User Switching, enabled, it will refuse to work (and also refuse to tell you why)

Update 2: Finally got it to browse my videos. Unfortunately, Media Center doesn’t use the same set of codecs as WMP. I’m not prepared to put another n hours into figuring out how to get codec support into Media Center. Screw this Windows crap, I’m going back to my transcoded Mac solution…

This thing solves all of RAID’s problems, while maintain all the redundancy. If it had built-in NAS, instead of the add-on module that works by disabling local access, I’d buy one today. Even with that caveat, Drobo is how external disc storage should work.

• Watch the demo to see all its features.

Have trouble remembering which RAID does which? I sure do! I mean, really a numeric naming system doesn’t suggest that much information about which type does what?

Fortunately, iBeast provides this handy RAID Calculator.

Redhat’s online documentation provides a good refresher as well.