Stone Soup Blu-Ray -- Part 3: Windows 7 rescues us from Vista

The second installation of Vista was attempted with a bit more clarity, aforethought of planning. The entire desired software stack was present and the end-goal of the system was understood.

It is important to know where you're going before you start out. Sure, you can just go for the journey, but some trips are better with a destination in mind. To wit, The Stone Soup Blu-Ray Player (SSBRP), after much mission creep, was determined to have to meet this RFP:

1. Vista Media Center
   
   • Netflix add-in
2. Blu-Ray Player
   
   • Being able to play Blu-Ray and HD disks with the sound through the HDMI connection
   • Being able to connect the PCM-optical output of the motherboard to the home theater system and have the Blu-Ray play through it.
   • 1080p, full-screen, w/o skipping, artifacts
3. 1080p Gaming (Steam Support)
   
   • Having a network connection that can sustain GB downloads of game content
   • Support for the Logitech Momo steering wheel setup (incl. drivers!)
   • Being able to play reasonably recent driving games: GTR, Race '07 at full-resolution and with the knobs turned up to 11 (e.g. 4xAA, 8XAF, water details, long-distance rendering, etc.)
4. Hulu, Adobe Media Player, et al.
   
   • Having a network connection that can stream HD w/o skipping or pausing.
   • Audio and Video capable of said-same.
   • Did I mention that the network connection was now wireless?
   • Something you wouldn't think you would have to mention is that this sometimes web-browsing involves typing. So the keyboard has to work.
     

   Modest goals, no? Well...it's Vista. So we'll see.
   

The networking was ably handled by Comcast, as described in a previous post. In this incarnation, the system was moved from the living room to the family room. Nominally, this was to make room for the Christmas Tree, but removing the boob tube from the calm social setting of our living room has turned out to be an important permanent change for the positive. For example, I'm spending my evening writing this for y'all rather than watching another episode of "That 70's Show".

The point about Comcast being that because most of the computing happens in the living room and adjacent bedrooms, I decided to leave the wireless router upstairs (erm, our house is on a hill, therefore topsy-turvy with the upstairs being the entry and living area and the downstairs is a family room and bedroom). This also leaves the antennas well-placed for wireless connection to the now-famous "Lamb Cam" (subject of a future post). But the SSBRP loses its hardwire 8-megabit/sec connection to the world. Theoretically, switching to a 802.11g network shouldn't slow it down any, but there's these walls and floors and air in-between now.

So the one update to the hardware of the system from Part 2 was the addition of an 802.11x card. I chose Linksys/Cisco because 1.) Their drivers are good 2.) The AirLink 300N I had didn't work with Vista64 in another computer and 3.) I was tired of saving a couple bucks on a 2nd tier brand only to burn that savings in hours and hours of configuration nightmares. True to form, the Linksys worked out of the box. QED.

So once again, armed this time with a Windows 7 Beta DVD, I moved the existing C:\Windows.old directory to C:\Windows.oldest to allow Windows 7 to do its non-destructive trick. Someday I may reclaim the couple hundred Gigs I have as a double-archive of a useless Vista x64 install, but for now, it's forward and damn the disk space!

I'm not going to recount how pleasantly uneventful the Win 7 install was. This is broadly known, now 5 weeks into the Microsoft Beta for the new Operating System. What you may not know is that this Beta has a Nexus-6 feature. It times out. In August of this year 2009, my fresh installation which I will undoubtedly become reliant if not completely dependent upon (despite warnings about "not using it for production purposes") will on promise from Microsoft, become inoperable. Aauugh! The sweet promise and the real sweetness ripped out of my hands in the heat of summer? Ah, but perhaps not. Here's something that I'm betting almost all of you don't know: according to a friend-of-a-friend who works for Microsoft, you will be able to purchase a copy of Windows 7 before this beta expires. So none of that "in 2010" stuff. That's just the MS PR machine trying to avoid a Vista version 2.0 catastrophe. You know, like how they promised us Vista in 2004 or something and it was a long time coming after that. This time they're playing their cards close to their chest. But I have to tell you that the way Windows 7 Beta is being installed all over the place, displacing Vista in almost all occasions, Microsoft could release this Beta as-is for money and it would be an improvement.

So proceeding carefully from my clean, clean install of Windows 7, I first installed the Asus motherboard drivers from their "all-in-one" CD that came in the Box. This includes the nVidia v15.11 southbridge driver and the v168.something Detonator. Several revs back from most recent. But tested with this board! So caution, caution this time around. I got the Hybrid SLI working and the HDMI Sound. The Linksys drivers went in as expected, slick. Updates were now possible from Microsoft and from the other vendors (though I already had everything in C:\windows.old\install). The LG Blu-Ray firmware was still the latest and the default cdrom.sys picked it out and the Cyberlink DVD 7 bundle hooked up.

The SSBRP was back in business! I went back to my Netflix queue and switched my default media back to Blu-Ray. I popped in my copy of The Fifth Element and enjoyed.

But there were still a couple of wrinkles. The Logitech MX keyboard was still, infuriatingly, sending an "open mail" shortcut every time the spacebar was pressed. Win 7 doesn't have bundled email though (thanks, EU!) and so it merely gripes about trying to launch a DLL. A modal dialog that requires dismissal and which will open multiple times and swallow follow-on spacebars, but marginally better. But it only feels good because the hurting is less than with Vista, not because it is gone.

I enabled the audio device (new in Win 7) and could send the audio out to both the HDMI and the S/PDIF optical out concurrently. Which you can't really do because there's about a 1/4 sec delay difference between the two channels and it sounds like you've enabled "hall echo". But you can turn one or the other device's output down and it sounds just fine. Optical for the Blu-Ray and HDMI for the video games. Sooo niiice.

So back to that Logitech keyboard. I got fed up, so I decided to install my Gear Head 2.4Ghz wireless keyboard. Purchased for another computer (the predecessor and antecedent of the SSBRP) I hadn't tried it before because the driver stack looked a little sketchy. Indeed I never tried it for Vista x64. But what the hell!! All the caution, caution went out the window (pun intended) with the hubris that came from a good soaking of audio/video streams by the Blu-Ray player. Dammit, I wanted to have it all and that meant a good keyboard, too!

Now I've shopped a lot of other keyboards, and they all come up short. Either they're Bluetooth and have good range but they're fru-fru or they're IR and have crummy range. Neither are cheap. But by "fru-fru" I mean with matte aluminum and other HTPC upscale presentation features and upwards of $100. For a friggen keyboard! I wanted the WebTV keyboard. Laptop compact but with Bluetooth for the range. And no more that $60. Less than $40 would be ideal. Guess what? Doesn't exist. Hear that Logitech? You can't win in the living room unless you have a plain wireless keyboard that doesn't belong in the MoMA but has the range to reach from the couch to the screen.

But I already had the GearHead keyboard, and I had the hubris working for (against) me, so I gave it a try. Worked fine. But, um, the Blu-Ray stopped working.

I mean, not at all. The device disappeared. Trying to load the cdrom.sys interactively, I could only get the "no appropriate hardware detected" message. Which was bull because it was just working with that driver!! Auugh! What had I done!!?

Lots of uninstalls and reinstalls and trying the Vista x64 version and trying to reinstall the LG software that came on the disk.....nothing.

One of the culprits here is the lack of an uninstall for default drivers. The guids come from MS and once they're in your registry, there's no way to back them out w/o going to manual methods. You can disable them in the device manager, but that doesn't remove their registry entries. So when you reinstall....you basically have the same thing over again. I understand why it is done this way--it has a high likelihood of success and is hard to break. But when the defaults don't work for you...well, you're kinda screwed.

Unless, that is, you happen to trip onto a solution via Google. I got onto a Win 7 board, and someone there posted a Vista solution link and that person remembered something he had done back in 2003 with there being "upper filters" and "lower filters" to the CD-ROM driver guid. Remove those, specifically, manually, and all will be right with the world. And I did, and it was and I really couldn't believe it for a while. Real shock that a one-liner edit in a number of profiles in the Registry really could revive the Blu-Ray.

So for now I'm back to the original Logitech. I tried another IR Logitech wireless on loan, but it didn't work any better. So I took my lumps, but I have my SSBRP back and as long as I don't try to use the keyboard for, I dunno...writing? I'm fine. I just have to remap the "Jump" key in a bunch of games to something different. Like "R", which is next to "E" for "Use". Run-Jump is still possible, if not easy, but the Reload has to be mapped to CTRL or something. I'll get it, eventually. Half-Life 2, Episode One was a fun do-over and even better w/everything turned up to 11.

The Logitech Momo wheel drivers installed w/o error and the force feedback on the wheel works fine. Over the holiday break I was able to turn four laps at the Nürburgring in GT/R and it was pretty damned cool doing it on the big screen with a proper wheel and pedals.

The Hulu and Adobe Media Player content work famously. The 3-cable 802.11n antenna that came with the Linksys adapter is excellent and there are no dropouts due to streaming faults.

The goals for the system are largely all met. With the exception of the keyboard (not a trivial problem but also without a trivial solution, but with a 90% workaround) every RFP item was met and mostly spectacularly.

The SSBRP is alive, I've watched a number of movies with Cyberlink 7, I've had no problems other than the aforementioned mouse-menu button interface and I was even able to do a fairly good (if I do say so myself) compare between the DVD version and the Blu-Ray version of Casablanca. So it really is in use. Confident? I picked up Boondock Saints director's cut and The "20th Anniversary Edition" (oof) Adventures of Baron Munchausen (sale: Fry's $12.99) DVD replacement. I've watched Wall-E and Wanted and the gluttony of HD movies from the Stone Soup Blu Ray Player can continue unabated.

Now if it only had some help booting faster and accessing programs faster. Like maybe a Phenom 2 chip and a SAS-RAID-10 system built on 15k rpm drives? But that would mean (for "reasonably" priced HDs) moving the installed software to the "warm store" SATA disk mapped to the "D:" drive. Naaaah! I'll keep it as it is for now. Maybe I'll add a Harmony Remote, but that's a different story altogether.