Sigh. Microsoft has announced the versions of Windows 8 that will be available later this year, and I am once again shaking my head trying to understand what on earth they were thinking about when they came up with the scheme.

Let me explain.

At the moment, there’s a component that ships as standard in most versions of Windows 7: Windows Media Center. Most people don’t even know it’s there, which is a pity, because it’s a pretty good piece of software for turning your PC into a combined Entertainment Center for TV, movies, music and photos, and also provides DVR functionality for record and playback of TV. I’ve used it to set up our HTPC, which uses our TV to display our digital media (movies, music and photos).

For the upcoming versions of Windows 8, Microsoft has done two things:

1. Removed Windows Media Center from being a standard component shipped with Windows, to being an Add-on component (the “Media Pack”) that will be charged for separately.
2. Prevented the Media Pack Add-on from being available to the consumer version of Windows 8, but only making it available for Windows 8 Pro.

Now, I can understand Microsoft’s rationale behind (1). There are third party licensing costs involved (e.g. Dolby Digital codecs) in Windows Media Center, and by spinning the Media Pack off to be a separately charged item means that Microsoft can reduce the cost of Windows 8 slightly.

But I really fail to understand why Microsoft are forcing those of us who are interested in buying the Media Pack to upgrade to Windows 8 Pro, instead of being able to continue with the consumer version of Windows 8. After all, Windows Media Center runs on Windows 7 Home Premium (the consumer product) today. It does not require Windows 7 Professional. Looking at the price differentials of Windows 7 Home Premium and Windows 7 Professional upgrades for XP and Vista today, I suspect I will have to pay almost twice as much for Windows 8 Pro as I would for Windows 8.

The seven additional features of Windows 8 Pro are of absolutely zero interest to me, and have no bearing (as far as I can see) on the running of the Media Pack. Yet I, and others like me, who would consider upgrading to the Windows 8 version of Windows Media Center are faced with double costs: first upgrade from Windows 7 Home Premium to Windows 8 Pro, and then acquire the Media Pack.

I think I’ll be seriously considering the zero-cost option of sticking with Windows Media Center running on Windows 7 Home Premium for as long as I possibly can, and I don’t think that I’ll be the only one.

It seems to me that Microsoft has killed the potential market for the Media Pack with this move. That may, of course, have been their real objective in coming up with this scheme.

Update 4 May 2012

Oh dearie me. Microsoft has issued another post to clarify the situation. Except it seems to me to have changed absolutely nothing.

The post contains a diagram showing the possible upgrade paths to a version of Windows 8 that will contain Windows Media Center:

So, let me understand this. Let’s look at the starting points; you have a choice between plain old Windows 8 or Windows 8 Pro. The difference between these two features was defined in Microsoft’s original announcement of the Windows 8 versions. Here’s a part of the Features Table from that post showing the seven additional features that are included in Windows 8 Pro:

The difference in cost between the two versions is likely to be in the region of $100, judging by the price differential between Windows 7 Home Premium and Windows 7 Professional.

Now, looking at the diagram of the upgrade paths again, it is clear that, just as the original announcement stated, it will not be possible to simply add Windows Media Center to Windows 8 via an add-on pack that just contains WMC. Oh no, you have to buy an add-on pack that contains WMC and the additional features of Windows 8 Pro. So I would still end up buying Windows 8 Pro features that I don’t want or need (at a likely $100 cost) along with a cost for the WMC component.

To add insult to injury, it appears that the version of WMC that will be available for Windows 8 is essentially the same old version as the one that we currently get for free in Windows 7.

I think that seals the deal for me: I’m sticking with my Windows 7 Home Premium (with its free WMC) as the operating system on my HTPC. I see no point in paying $100+ for a version of Windows 8 that gives me no advantages whatsoever.

Update 11 May 2012

I see that Microsoft has now closed the comments on both of their posts on the Building Windows 8 blog on this issue. Too many negative reactions, I suppose, and who can blame us?

Paul Thurrott has also now weighed in with a column in which he also vents about Microsoft’s media direction.

The thing is: Microsoft had something in WMC that was ahead of the curve, and they have dropped the ball. Their vision has failed – probably the original team got disbanded, and their executive sponsorship vanished. Much the same thing has happened with Windows Home Server.

It’s also true that streaming of content is on the rise; but there will always be a minority of users for whom streaming will never be the answer. I’m in the countryside, at the end of a piece of wet string – I depend on optical media for high quality content. I also depend on optical media for content that is otherwise not legally available in my market.

It’s all very well for Microsoft to say that I can get my DVD codecs from third parties, if I’m not prepared to pay top whack for Windows 8 Pro, with its features that I don’t want. But quite honestly, the sort of bloatware that third parties provide is something that I don’t want to be forced to accept.

We seem to be heading back to the old days, when we had to buy something like Nero in order to be able to burn a CD in Windows. Over the years, Nero ballooned into a software suite that was truly appalling. It was a relief to be able to dump it, and just use the features built-into newer versions of Windows to handle my optical media.

Now, with Windows 8, Microsoft seem to be turning the clock back to the bad old days. The bean-counters are in charge. The people with vision have left the company.

Update 7 June 2012

Microsoft has quietly removed two features from the version of Windows Media Center for Windows 8. These features are required for dedicated HTPCs. See this post at The Digital Media site for details. Two more reasons not to upgrade my HTPC, it would seem.

Update 3 July 2012

Well now, Microsoft has just thrown a curve ball. They’ve announced that the upgrade price from Windows 7 to Windows 8 Pro (note: the Pro version!) will be $39.99 up until 31 January 2013. That is a very attractive price, I have to say. It also includes a free upgrade to Windows Media Center. Now at that price, while I will certainly upgrade our other PCs with Windows 8 Pro, it is also going to make me think hard about whether I should not just take the plunge and upgrade our HTPC as well.

I find it interesting that the upgrade is for the Pro version of Windows 8, rather than simply the base Windows 8 version. Perhaps Microsoft has been stung by all the negative reactions from the technical press and blogs about Windows 8 and is making a gamble here to regain lost ground. Whatever the reason, I find it an attractive offer.

Don Norman is a well-respected consultant and author working in the field of product design and ergonomics. His classic “The Psychology of Everyday Things” (1988) – in his own words: part polemic, part science. Part serious, part fun – contains a critique of design and design principles that are still relevant today. And his later book “Turn Signals Are the Facial Expressions of Automobiles” (1992) carries that forward, with one chapter – the Teddy – being especially thought-provoking and prescient over how we seem to be developing a symbiotic/dependence relationship with our Smartphones.

So I was interested to read what Norman thinks about Windows 8. As I’ve written before, an awful lot of people seem to think it is a disaster (I’m not one of them). And it appears, like me, Donald Norman is a fan of Windows 8:

Windows 8 is brilliant, and its principles have been extended to phones, tablets, laptops, and desktop machines (and larger – for example, Surface), whether operated by gesture, mouse and keyboard, or stylus, but with appropriately changed interaction styles for the different sizes of devices and different input devices.

Of course, being the thorough observer that he is, he references some of the negative reviews of Windows 8 in his piece:

Here is a critical review by Troy Wolverton of Silicon Valley.com who used Windows 8 for awhile.  Nice dress, he says, but crappy fit. Multitasking is difficult or not even possible beyond two metro apps. Most work still requires the old (Windows 7) desktop, and switching between Metro and desktop is difficult. And he gives a simple example of quitting a Metro application that should send shivers down all of our backs

Perhaps, but I notice that Wolverton doesn’t exactly play fair. His example is not correctly reported. What he says is:

Take a simple example: closing programs. Since Windows 95, users have typically just clicked on the “x” in the upper right hand corner of the program’s window to close it. For those who prefer to use the menu bar, you can usually click on “File” and then “Exit.”

But with Metro-style apps, you won’t find a close-program “x.” You won’t even find a menu bar. Instead, to close a program you have to move your pointer to the top edge of the screen, click and hold until the app screen becomes a thumbnail and then drag that thumbnail image to the bottom of the screen. And you have to do all this without any clues: there’s nothing to “grab” at the top edge of the screen and the interface gives you no indication of what you should do with the thumbnail once you’ve grabbed it.

That’s merely one of many commands that are not only different but also hidden by the Metro interface.

Er, no, Mr Wolverton – you don’t need to “click and hold until the app screen becomes a thumbnail” – merely moving to the top of the screen turns the cursor into a thumbnail. At that point, there are two options open to the user. You can click and drag the cursor to the bottom of the screen to close the App; or you can click and drag it to the left or the right border of the screen to split the screen for multi-app working.

It’s true that the options are not spelled out. But on the other hand, neither are much of the workings of the current version of Windows. People learn about them over time. And, yes, some people never learn, despite good design. But let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Windows 8 is a radical rethinking. It has excellent design principles and it deserves a chance. What it does not deserve is lazy condemnation by people who don’t approach it with an open mind. 

Important Update 27th October 2012: The bug described below has been fixed in the final release of Windows 8.

Hoorah!

Update 24 October 2013: With the release of Windows 8.1, I found another issue with “Play to”. I posted it in a Microsoft forum, and got some useful feedback from Microsoft’s Gabe Frost. The issue is not resolved, but at least we now know what’s going on. See https://gcoupe.wordpress.com/2013/10/23/play-to-and-windows-8-1/

Original Post

Here we go again – one step forwards, two steps back… Something that was working under Windows 7 has stopped working in the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, and that is the “Play to” feature of Windows Media Player.

Almost three years ago, I wrote a post (Fun With Technology – Part IV) describing my trials and tribulations with this feature of Windows Media Player in an early version of Windows 7. Sometimes it would seem to work, and sometimes it didn’t. I eventually found out, and described in that post, what was going on. I also identified how to get “Play to” working very satisfactorily for the devices on my home network. And there matters have rested until now, when I’ve found that Windows 8 Consumer Preview has broken things again.

First, let me recapitulate some of the background terms and technology specification used by Microsoft in its implementation of “Play to” and how I’m using it at home. These come from the Digital Living Networking Alliance, or DLNA for short. Their specification defines how a variety of different types of digital devices can connect and share information. This I’ve summarised in the following table:

Table 1: Information drawn from the DLNA web site.

Windows 7 implements a number of these classes as shown here:

Table 2: Information drawn from the Engineering Windows 7 Blog.

At its simplest, just two devices can be involved: a Server and a Player. These can even be running on the same physical device, as in the case where your Windows Media Player on your Desktop PC is streaming music or video stored on the PC itself. The next step up is where the server and player are on separate physical devices. Two typical scenarios are shown in figure 1:

Figure 1: Typical scenarios of simple case of DMP devices accessing DMS devices.

I’ve used the Denon AVR3808 as an example, since this is what I have in my home network. My DMS is a headless (no monitor, keyboard or mouse) home-built PC running the Windows Home Server 2011 operating system.

In my particular case, both the two scenarios shown above will work, that is, the DMS that is part of WHS 2011 will stream audio to other PCs in the home network, and to the Denon AVR3808. Under the covers, there’s actually some negotiation of streaming formats going on. This is because I have stored all my music files on the WHS 2011 in Windows Media Audio Lossless (WMAL) format. This presents no problems for the PCs, since the Windows Media Players installed on them can handle WMAL. But while the Denon can handle standard Windows Media Audio, it can’t handle the Lossless variant. So when I use the Denon to browse my music library on the server and select a track to play, the DMS in WHS 2011 sees that the Denon can’t handle WMAL and transcodes the stream into a format that the Denon can handle on the fly.

The interesting scenarios are where there are three devices linked together: a Digital Media Server, a Digital Media Controller, and a Digital Media Renderer.

Figure 2: Typical scenarios of a three device link (DMS-DMC-DMR).

In my case, all flavours of scenario 3 will work. That is, I can stream from my Windows Home Server using the “Play To” feature of Windows Media Player running in either Windows 7 or Windows 8 Consumer Preview, and push the stream to PCs that are running Windows 7 or the Windows 8 Consumer Preview.

But while scenario 4 works if “Play to” is running in Windows 7, it does not work if “Play to” is running in Windows 8 Consumer Preview.

Here’s a screenshot of the “Play to” of Windows Media Player running in Windows 7, and streaming a WMA Lossless file to my Denon:

The WMA Lossless file is held on the WHS 2011 system, and is being transcoded into a different format on the fly so that the Denon can play it. I’m not sure whether the transcoding is being done on the Windows 7 PC (where the Windows Media Player is running), or whether it is being done at source on the WHS 2011 system. Either way, the Denon is being fed with a stream in a format that it understands, so it plays it without problem.

Now look at the following screenshot. It’s the very same music file that has been chosen from the Music Library held on the WHS 2011 system, but this time the “Play to” and the Windows Media Player are running on Windows 8 Consumer Preview:

As you can see, the Denon is reporting an error – it can’t play the file. I’m pretty sure that this is because no transcoding is being done – the WMA Lossless file is being sent straight to the Denon.

In Windows 8, the Windows Explorer also has the “Play to” feature, and the same error occurs:

So, to sum up; something has been broken in the “Play to” feature in Windows 8 Consumer Preview. Hopefully it will get fixed before Windows 8 is released

It’s been a month now since I, like probably over one million others, downloaded and installed Microsoft’s Windows 8 Consumer Preview. As I wrote at the time, people seemed to either love it or hate it.

The haters seem to hold that opinion because the user interface of Windows 8 is so very different from all the previous versions of Windows from Windows 95 onwards.

I think it’s worth remembering that when Windows 95 was introduced, its user interface was radically different from previous versions of Windows, and there was a similar outcry from people who hated the new interface. Over time, people accepted the change, and now, once again, it seems that many cannot conceive of Windows in any way other than what they are used to.

As for me, after a month of using Windows 8, I am very relaxed about the new user interface. It doesn’t bother me, and I seem to be accomplishing my tasks equally well, albeit in a different way. It is still the fact that, at the moment, I rarely use any of the new Metro applications (except to play the occasional game), but that’s simply because their functionality is not yet on a par with their traditional Desktop equivalents. The only Metro App I have permanently displayed alongside my desktop (using the tile function of Windows 8) is the Calendar App:

On the whole, I like what Microsoft has done to reimagine Windows. The past is another country, they do things differently there. I don’t want to live in the past, I want to look forward to the future.