Brian's Brain

It's Friday, which likely means another weekend full of Olympics watching is in the offing. If you've got a Windows Vista-based system with Media Center capabilities (i.e. Home Premium or Ultimate) but you forgot to program a particular broadcast timeslot in the Guide to record, don't fret. There's another way to access event archives in a time- and location-shifted manner, but learn from my mistake; make sure you either override the default settings for more space-stringent options or have a much bigger HDD than my system does.

The free application is Olympics On the Go, an event-tailored version of TVTonic from Wavexpress. After you install it on your Windows Vista-based system, it's also accessible from Media Center Extender devices such as the Xbox 360. Pick your favorite events, and the program will automatically download full-length standard- and high-definition event recordings for you to watch at your leisure. However, don't go overboard.

The other day, the Media Center application warned me that insufficient HDD space existed to complete a 3-hour broadcast recording I'd previously set up. That was odd; granted, highest-quality recordings take up ~6 GBytes per hour, but I only had one not-yet-viewed (and short) episode already recorded. Then I remembered TVTonic, and a quick inspection revealed that over 50 GBytes' worth of its clips were also sitting on the hard drive.

And what if you don't have a Media Center-equipped PC? Or even a PC, for that matter? For the solution to that question, I'll take you back to January, and to one of the at-the-time least reported (but, I at-the-time thought, most significant) aspects of Bill Gates' final Consumer Electronics Show keynote. The competition between reigning web browser plug-in champion Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Flash and 'new kid on the block' Microsoft Silverlight has received lots of media attention ever since Microsoft launched the technology at the 2007 NAB show. How would Microsoft surmount Adobe's substantial market lead…that is, without doing some 'embrace and extend' forced-bundling deal that would run afoul of the FTC?

The answer came when Gates revealed at CES that, reflective of Microsoft's long partnership with NBC, the broadcaster would be using Silverlight to deliver Olympics content through its website. No Silverlight installation = no Olympics video. Specifically, you need Silverlight v2, which is currently in Beta 2 form. For being a Microsoft product, it's surprisingly cross-platform cognizant, though there are some holes. Owners of Power PC-based Macs (like myself) are restricted to Silverlight v1, which won't work. And, although the development team is hard at work, Linux-based Mono doesn't (yet) work, either. But Intel-based Mac owners are good to go, as are (obviously) Windows users…in Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari. And the slick Skyfire browser for Windows Mobile and Nokia cellphones reportedly works, too.

The success stats so far are pretty mind-blowing; through Monday, 16.9 million unique users have watched 13.5 million video streams on NBC's website. Here's some behind-the-scenes video commentary, captured by Robert Scoble, on the formidable infrastructure that NBC has amassed to handle all of the video-and-other content demand:

In closing, I'll return to Media Center for a moment. The other day, I mentioned that I was using Orb to access my Media Center system's content from another computer. In doing so, I'd forgotten about WebGuide (purchased by Microsoft a year back), which I've actually switched to. The two programs are different in a number of ways:

• WebGuide is only for Media Center systems, whereas Orb runs on any Windows XP or Vista machine.
• WebGuide won't let you watch live television, or for that matter access your computer's built-in webcam, whereas Orb enables both, and
• With WebGuide, you directly access the target system (via a firewall hole in your router, if you want to want to extend the program's reach beyond your LAN to the Internet), whereas Orb works via a firewall-dodging website intermediary.

But here's the kicker; with Orb, I could only access music files stored on the local machine, and Zune Marketplace material was also off-limits. Conversely, since (presumably) WebGuide directly interfaces with the Windows Media Connect service, Zune DRM'd tracks are kosher, as is material loaded up in the Windows Media Player database but physically residing on network-based storage (this workaround-free capability is new to Windows Vista, as far as I can tell). Pretty slick!

Happy 21^st century Olympics viewing, folks!