OzCableguy

For as long as I can remember, whenever I receive a Facebook notification email in either my Outlook 2003 or Windows Live Mail, when I click on it to preview the message, the program hangs for a minute or two and sometimes crashes completely.

Extensive googling turns up plenty of people suffering the same problem but no solution is ever given short of reading all emails in plain text (which isn’t really a solution at all). Finally I stumbled onto this forum post from Incredimail blaming a background sound attached to Facebook Notification emails. Still no solution is given but it did give me something to look into.

Checking the message source of a few Facebook emails did indeed show a “.mid” file embedded into html code. Aha! My PC is set to open all midi music files using Windows Media Player, and so playing on a hunch that could be the problem this is what I did:

• If you don’t already have it installed, get VLC Media Player.
• Next, open My Computer and select Tools > Folder Options (this is for Windows XP. Other Windows versions may vary).
• Go to the “File Types” tab and find “MID” in the list. (Click on the first thing in the list then type “MID” to get to it quickly if you like).
• Click the “Change” button (beside “Opens with”) and find VLC Media Player in the list. If you can’t find it click the “Browse” button and find your way to C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC, then double click on vlc.exe
• Make sure “Always use the selected program to open this type of file” is ticked. Then click ok.
  The Files Types tab should now show “Opens with: VLC Media Player”.
• Do the same as above with MIDI File.

That’s it. Ever since I did this a week ago I haven’t had any troubles at all with Facebook Notification emails causing hanging or crashes.

Note: VLC Media Player is a very groovy piece of kit that will often play media files better than other programs. For example, if you’ve ever had a movie with the sound slightly out of sync you can delay or advance the audio to the video track so that it plays properly. I also find it does a much better job with MP4s and MKVs that are often jerky in Windows Media Player or Quicktime.

A customer reported an interesting problem this week which had us all scratching our heads for a while. He upgraded to a new Draytek 2830Vn+ from a Billion router and suddenly found that a Windows 7 PC could no longer access his Netgear ReadyNAS after the change over. Other XP PCs were fine.

The issue turned out to be having the Jumbo Frames feature enabled on the ReadyNAS and the way Windows 7 and the Draytek processed this data. The solution was to enable Jumbo Frames on the Draytek which is done via Telnet using the following commands:

>port jumbo on

>port jumbo size “___”  (size range is from 1537 to 0922 bytes).

Thanks to Erick at Draytek and Lachlan for getting to the bottom of this one.

See also Draytek’s Knowlede Base Article here.

Also available is Draytek’s GlobalView subscription service to make things easier. Click here for prices and details at the online shop.

With 16 digital channels here in Brissie at the moment and the TV channels’ annoying habit of running over time (which is apparently illegal in some countries. Ahh… to live in those countries…) I often found I had 3 or more channels I needed to record & watch simultaneously. Luckily my Media Centre is just a PC at heart so it’s a dead easy job to add another dual tuner card (in this case a cheap and cheerful Leadtek PCI DTV2000DS to my existing Hauppauge Nova-T-500 MCE).

Unfortunately it’s not that easy though. For some strange reason Microsoft never considered that anyone would need or want to record and watch more than 2 different channels so they only designed Media Centre to work with 2 tuners. The Media Centre application can see all 4 tuners easy enough in its setup wizard but it only allows you to choose 2. 

Thankfully the hard work has already been done and I found the bulk of the “how to” in the forums at XPMediaCentre, in particular this thread. Each installation is unique though so I thought it was worth summarising my particular technique which went as follows: 

1. After performing a clean installation of MCE 2005, install both tuners then download and install Rollup 2 for Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005.
   Note: You can save previous record settings such as series recordings etc by backing up the \WINDOWS\Application Data\Microsoft\Ehome\recording folder then restoring it to the same location on the clean installation. Don’t forget to backup any programs you’ve recorded too if you want to keep them. These can be found in \Documents and Settings\All Users\Shared Documents\Recorded TV.
2. Run the MCE setup wizard choosing the first 2 tuners.
3. Setup the guide and add listing to channels as per usual.
4. Close the media centre application.
5. Download and run MCE Tuner Config utility.
6. Ensure the box to enable each tuner for MCE is ticked and each tuner has a unique name.
7. Open regedit and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\Media Centre\Service\Video\TunersKey.
8. The 4 keys for all 4 tuners should be obvious at this point and each will have values listed for Record Order, Record Pref, Watch Order and Watch Pref.
   Set the values as follows:

Now test by attempting to record and watch 4 different channels.

Problems:

• If you find more than 4 tuners listed in the registry, delete them all, reboot and start over from point 2 above. (Windows will automatically recreate the keys on reboot). This sometimes happens apparently due to Windows being confused with all of the PCI to USB controllers that most of these TV cards employ. For more information and other workarounds to this problem search the XPMediaCentre forums for ghost or phantom tuners.
• If a channel scan reveals no channels or there’s several missing when previous scans picked them up without issue, then delete the EPG data found in \WINDOWS\Application Data\Microsoft\Ehome\EPG and try the scan again.

For more help try the forums at XPMediaCentre and TheGreenButton.