Content tagged with [Zune] on DuncanMackenzie.net

The new Zune software rocks!

Duncan Mackenzie — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 06:31:00 GMT

Great UI, podcast support, music video downloads... and a firmware that works on my 'original' Zune.

Xbox 360 Arcade System announced

Duncan Mackenzie — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 10:24:00 GMT

For the price of $280, you can now get a new edition of the Xbox 360 console. This one is similar to the original core system, but with HDMI output, a 256mb memory card (so you can play and save your games right out of the box), a wireless controller, and five full arcade games. Perfect if you are more of a casual gamer or if:

you have an existing 360 with a hard drive and would like one with a HDMI output
you need a DVD player and/or a Media Center Extender (play all your Zune and Windows Media Center or Windows Media Player content in the living room!

For that price, you can pick up this system instead of a DVD player with HDMI out and you get the network connectivity and media streaming features along with an amazing system for playing a ton of great games. Sure the name says Arcade, but you can fire up Halo 3, Gears of War or Lego Star Wars II...

Crazy stuff, and perfect for you family focused Xbox gamers... and perhaps soon to be a second 360 for my house, since I now have a TV with HDMI in and nothing to hook into it... and it would be great to have the ability to play my music, TV and movies on our second TV as well...

More info on Xbox.com

Zune for Dummies hits the bookstores

Duncan Mackenzie — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 08:29:00 GMT

Brian was in town a few days ago and we ended up at a local bookstore... of course, since Brian hadn't even seen our new book, we looked around and found a copy... :)

Have you tried Amazon Unbox?

Duncan Mackenzie — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 16:48:00 GMT

I was interested, and I guess I still am, but I'm not sure yet...

For one, they seem to be WMV files... protected with our standard DRM, but yet they don't use Windows Media Player to play them back? I'm not sure why this is, but if they supported playback in a normal video player then I'm pretty sure these videos would work through Media Center (and therefore my Xbox 360) without any hassle. As is, I think I'd be limited to watching them on my computer screen (which holds absolutely no interest to me) or perhaps on my iRiver portable media center (which they list as compatible, but yet it doesn't support any other DRM'd video content that I know of, unlike newer PMC's like the Toshiba Gigabeat).

My second concern is the price... $14.99 for a digital download of Casino Royale when I can get the DVD for $15.99 ... and (despite the complexity and questionable legality of this process), I can rip that DVD to a WMV that will play everywhere (including my Zune). It seems to me that a digital download that is limited to a certain number of devices and doesn't include any of the packaging of the DVD should be a lot more than just one dollar off the DVD price.

Your thoughts?

Zune Guest Hack, no more 'guest mode'

Duncan Mackenzie — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 18:26:00 GMT

Marshillboy from Zuneboards.com has posted a utility that lets you connect your Zune up to multiple PCs as if they were all the 'home' PC. Personally I like the idea, although the main benefit for me would be if it didn't show any UI... right now, the 'hack' pops up its own dialog in place of the Zune one... so I have to click 'Next' either way. Why would I want that?

Zune Background Pack 2 up on 360 Style.net

Duncan Mackenzie — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 07:56:00 GMT

Including backgrounds from Gears, Alien Hominid, Bullet Witch and more... grab them now!

Get great video for your Zune, courtesy of Sony

Duncan Mackenzie — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 17:39:00 GMT

I stumbled upon the PSP Connect site a few weeks ago, and I've been really enjoying it as a source of video for my Zune. This site, since it is aimed at the PSP, has a ton of great 320x240 MP4 content, including a lot of popular viral videos, movie trailers (of all the upcoming Sony movies for sure) and even ongoing series such as the 'Spartan' and 'Borg' series of machinima. Lots of this content is available elsewhere, but on this site you can download good quality versions without having to hack out some flash video (like YouTube or Soapbox) and your Zune software can understand the MP4 file format as is. Of course, the Zune software will need to convert it to a WMV on the way into your device, but it runs through these little videos fairly quickly and with great results.

Hotness... I've pulled down all the Ghost Rider trailers I can handle...

Nike+ actually makes me consider an iPod

Duncan Mackenzie — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 21:44:00 GMT

If you know me, or read my blog much, you'll probably gather that I've fully bought into the WMA/WMV world. I've always been a bit annoyed at the iPod model of things as well... I mean, seriously, you can only use iTunes with iPods and iPods with iTunes... talk about crazy... people need choice, who wants to be locked into one music player or one music store?!?

Of course, I don't get to rant about that anymore, now that we are doing the exact same thing with Zune... I don't like it any better just because we are doing it, but I've decided that I must be in the minority and that most consumers must not really care about being locked into a single store/brand.

Anyway, the long and short of this is that I would never consider an iPod, all of my media is firmly sitting in the Windows Media world. I have an Xbox 360, a Media Center PC, a Portable Media Center device, a Zune, an iRiver Clix and my wife has a Napster-to-go subscription. Yep, I'm in the Windows Media world alright.

But then I see this, and I really want it. I've been writing down my run distances and times onto a piece of paper for the past two weeks, and now I was going to find some form of online log to input them into... and my search brought me to the very fancy NikeRunning.com site. And from there, I ended up viewing NikePlus.com ... bugger!

I don't think I can do it, it would end up being just for running, and that is an expensive package just to run with... but it is very tempting.

Zune version of SNL's digital short: A Dick in a Box

Duncan Mackenzie — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 18:56:00 GMT

Grab it here if you'd like, A Special Christmas

Using your Zune as a Hard Drive

Duncan Mackenzie — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 19:22:00 GMT

If you are following Zune news, then I'm sure you've seen this 'hack' to let you see your Zune as a read-only hard drive.

There are additional steps to make it so you can write to your Zune, but it seems so odd that you do it by starting a sync (a long sync I guess) that I haven't tried it myself. I honestly haven't thought of any reason I'd need to write to the device at this point either, but reading off of the Zune works fine and I've already found it useful to snag some converted videos files that I'd like to store on my PC instead of the originals.

Lets say you've sync'd 40 episodes of Geek Brief onto your Zune (downloaded as MP4 before I noticed they have a WMV feed!), well the next time you try to sync those files (because you've deleted them from your Zune or whatever, or perhaps you have more than one Zune) then most of them will have to be converted again (maybe some will still be in your transcoding cache). What I did with this (very unsupported) hack is to copy all the videos back onto my machine and then delete the originals... anytime I want to copy them onto my Zune again it will be quick!

If you are, like many folks I've talked to, worried about losing some of the pre-loaded music and video that ships with your Zune (it is possible to lose it in some of the 'auto-sync' scenarios), then you could use this hack to pull those files off and add them to your Zune library on the PC.

Is XPS another Microsoft Reader?

Duncan Mackenzie — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 18:18:00 GMT

I loved Microsoft Reader, I had a ton of .lit files on my Pocket PC and I would save Word docs out as Reader files so I could read them while travelling or even just at home away from my main machine. Other than email, Reader was the 'killer app' for me on the Pocket PC. But Reader was never given the love it needed, the Reader plug-in wasn't available for some versions of Office (at least not right away), you couldn't find all that many downloads in .lit format. And their DRM/authorizing system was horrible...

Now lately I've been thinking about portable documents again... I'd like to pull down a variety of content to a portable device and read it when I'm offline. Reader is still available, but it certainly seems like a 'dead' product to me (let me know if you feel different). Now we have XPS, which looks great... but where is the Mobile support? I'm sure it will show up at some point, but I don't even see a note on the XPS web site like "Windows Mobile X.Y will include XPS support". Nothing to make me think it is coming. No beta/alpha XPS viewer for my Q, no beta/alpha viewer for the Mac or any other platform.... Are they wating on WPF/E? Well it is out in CTP form and I'm sure the XPS team could have found an earlier build if they wanted to... so...what's up?

In my perfect view of the world, there would be a viewer out already... we are all one company after all ... but the minimum I'd expect to see is some sort of roadmap that tells me that it is coming and coming soon. While I'm on that topic... I have the same comment about the Zune folks and podcast support... I understand that it couldn't get into v 1.0 in time to ship... but, assuming someone is working on it, maybe we could see a screenshot just to make us feel like it is coming. By the way, I have no idea if anyone is working on podcast support for the Zune or if they aren't ... that is my whole point... why not just tease us a bit with some pictures, at least then we can feel confident waiting...

Some news agencies are calling XPS a 'PDF killer', and it may become that, but at the moment it is less portable than a Microsoft Word document... and much less portable than a PDF file...

Creating backgrounds for your Zune

Duncan Mackenzie — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 09:36:00 GMT

On the Zune, any picture on the device can be set as the background for all of the menus, providing a great way to customize the look of your Zune. The screen on your Zune is 240 pixels wide and 320 pixels high (holding it in 'portrait mode', with the navigation pad at the bottom), so that is the proportions you want to shoot for as a background, but if you are making your own background images, then there are few things you should be aware of.

First, the image you choose will be cropped and displayed differently when your Zune is hooked up to output to a TV than it does when you are using the Zune normally.
Second, whenever you leave the main page the image is zoomed in a bit on all four sides.

Given a 320 x 320 square photo, here is what happens when it is displayed in the four different ways (device screen home page, device screen zoomed in, TV home page and TV zoomed in). The outermost red rectangle is what you end up seeing on the Zune's screen when you are on the home page. This is the standard 240x320 image you'd expect, taken from the middle of the picture. The next smaller red rectangle is the slightly zoomed in image you'll see when you navigate to any page other than the home menu page.

When you hook up to a TV though, you may be surprised by the result. We expected the image, (given that it is 320x320 originally) to be zoomed into an area that is 320 wide by 240 high... but instead, the home page screen displayed only the outer blue rectangle's worth of the image. This is an area of approximately 225px x 170px and even less (see the inner blue rectangle) when you navigate to another page while hooked up to the TV.

If you decide that the first issue matters to you (and it might not, TV output is not the main usage scenario for a Zune), then you need to make sure that a centered horizontal slice approximately two thirds the size of the image will still make a good background. If you don't care about TV out, then you can focus only on how the image looks at 240x320, which is what we did when making the Halo image shown below, but you still run into issues when the Zune zooms into your image on secondary menu pages.

With only a 240x320 image, you may see distortion when zoomed in; you can avoid this affect by creating your images at a slightly higher resolution while still maintaining a perfect ratio of 3:4 for the width and height. Following this plan, we created another copy of that same Halo image that works zoomed out as a background, looks good zoomed in, but doesn't look good at all when hooked up to a TV. This second background is 400px by 533px, but you could experiment with various resolutions to see which ones scale down the best on your Zune.

(both Halo images are cropped versions of a wallpaper from 360Style.net)

Once you have a picture (or pictures) created that you'd like to use as a background, put those pictures into one of the folders that your Zune software is monitoring (such as your My Pictures folder) then, when they appear in the library you can drag them onto the synclist and click "Start Sync" to get them onto your Zune. Disconnect your Zune after you've sync'd and browse to the picture and select it so that you are viewing it on your Zune. Click the center navigation button to bring up a menu listing what you can do with this image and pick the "apply as background" option. Hold down the back button to jump back to the home page and check out your creation!

Zune Crazy on 10

Duncan Mackenzie — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 18:52:00 GMT

So you may have already seen the videos, but now we've been going a bit crazy and you find an on10.net background for your Zune along with a link to 12 great 360-themed backgrounds... and I went and made my own which you can grab from here

Pre-ordered a Zune today at EB Games

Duncan Mackenzie — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 22:31:00 GMT

I went with Black :) ... I picked up Gears too, but that wasn't for me, it was for Rory... So now I wait until Tuesday/Wednesday to go and pick up my Zune!

Adventures in Zune Land

Duncan Mackenzie — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 04:47:00 GMT

Visited the Zune buildings today to film an interview for on10.net... I'd show you a few screen captures from the tape, but I had nothing to do with the camera work so I don't have anything to grab from yet. Since I'm a bit of an Zune enthusiast, Laura and Jesse ran camera and I handled asking the questions of Matt Jubelirer, the Zune team member who was there to show me the device (three devices, he had one of each color with him!) and walkthrough some of the features. I'd expect to see the video up on 10 in the next day or so!