By popular demand, Bill Gates' last day at the office video, courtesy of Channel 10.

Bonus points if you can name all the cameos and the song he's playing on Guitar Hero. ;)

Bill's Last Day: The CES Keynote video
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Learn to Fly--Foo Fighters

Things Have Changed--Dylan

This Is How a Heart Breaks--Rob Thomas

Runnin' Down a Dream--Petty

Someday Baby--Dylan

LA Woman--Doors

Locomotive Breath--Jethro Tull

Won't Get Fooled Again--The Who

You Can't Catch Me--Stones

Freebird--Skynard

China Grove--Doobie Bros.

Don't Fear the Reaper--Blue Oyster Cult

We're an American Band--Grand Funk Railroad

One of my favorite people in eHome, Charlie Owen notes, "I'm going to head up an effort here at Microsoft between the Media Center, XBox and Zune teams to give you a set of resources which help you put our products together and begin to realize the 'Connected Home' dream." 

An admirable start. As I've noted here, I would like to see the merging of Windows Home Server and Media Center, and perhaps a wireless home automation component, though I have yet to use it beyond my Logitech Harmony remote. 

I'd also like to see a, "Buy anywhere, Watch anywhere" merging of the Marketplaces in Xbox 360, Zune, and Media Center.

Give Charlie your feedback in comments on his blog here.

via eHomeUpgrade

I want to be more social.  I really do.  The problem is my trusty little Zune rarely has its WiFi radio turned on in order to save the battery when traveling.  There's nothing I like less than when my video ends abruptly for lack of juice.  So it's a personal sacrifice I make.

Here's a simple idea that would turn the social aspects of my little Zune. It's time for ZuneFinder.  ZuneFinder would be a small Sidebar gadget or systray app that notifies me when a Zune is found in general vicinity I'm in. This would be great in airports, where I often camp out between flights near an AC plug. The big question is whether a Zune can be uniquely identified via your WiFi adapter.  I have to imagine this is possible.

Then taking it a bit further, I could see ZuneFinder mashups- with a GPS, you could drive around and geomap all the Zunes you find in your area, automatically.  Of course, the snarky will retort, "You won't find any."  But being social should be passive, then active in nature.  This is the appeal of Facebook. 

Sadly, ZuneFinder doesn't exist (that I know of). Has anyone been able to uniquely identify Zune devices from an app?  Developers inquire within. :)

They've done this dance for a while, and with both seeing slowing subscriber rates, it's really no surprise.  I wonder what all the XM fanboys are going to say now?  I'm just happy I don't have to pay double for  my wife's "gift" of XM in her Honda,  and my Sirius subscription  in my car.   Pending shareholder approval, both companies expect the merger to be completed by end of this year.   Glad to see it- this is a situation where the consumer clearly wins.  More details at Orbitcast.

A good friend of mine is in charge of 3rd party accessories for Zune. That means all accessories not from Microsoft.  And now, he's blogging over at www.ZuneGuy.com.  And he's getting an enthusiastic response for his open inquiries for feedback.  Oh no, maybe the competition will hear a great idea too!  It doesn't matter - either way as consumers we win if he manages to adopt even a few of these ideas.  Send em his way!

For all the lip-service Apple gives to community creativity, where is the iPod blog?  Don't send them your ideas, they don't want them, especially if you're in the third-grade. 

If Robert Scoble is even just a little bit right in his book, Zune will win the marathon. Why?  Time-released transparency is what I call it.  PR folks know that timing can be worth millions of dollars in perception.mSo time your details, your release of details, and then go transparent on that stage.  PR flaks? No.  Recognizing the blend of PR and community that optimizes your business goals - yes.

Cesar at Zune Insider has posted a video of the new Zune UI.  I think this is the same B-roll footage provided to the press, but it gives a good overview of some of the UI features.

Just the links and only the links for now:

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/zune 
(lots of pictures in here)

http://www.zuneinsider.com/

http://www.engadget.com/2006/09/14/microsoft-launc...

I'll chat more later.   

Like coke and pepsi, Windows or Mac, another heated debate is raging- XM or Sirius satellite radio. My wife wants a car that has XM, and already is talking about getting it because she thinks the playlist on Sirius' Broadway is too limited.  Of course, she never would have thought of this if not for my testing the Sirius S50.  I'm sheepishly admitting I'm a Howard Stern fan (for better or for worse- I'm from the NY area) so I like Sirius also for NPR, and Rolling Stones radio.  Fortunately for the rest of the unwashed masses, The Washington Post's Marc Fisher has a great, in-depth guide to picking between the two.  Now debate amongst yourselves :)

Long Zheng from Australia was excited to win my little giveaway a few weeks back and finally recieved one of the first iRiver Clix players in his country.  His thoughts are posted here as well as pictures of the swank jacket we created for the launch team which I included as a bonus.

Now comes more good news for our friends down under. The Clix is now available officially at Dick Smith Electronics.

Sorry, I don't have any additional details on Clix availability in other markets- please contact iRiver and/or your favorite retailer directly for your region.

Xbox Live's Major Nelson interviewed my VP, Amir Majidimehr for his podcast while I was out on vacation.  This is a frank and highly informative look at HD-DVD, Blu-Ray and DVD.  Even if you have no idea what I'm talking about, I still recommend you listen to this interview to learn more about why Microsoft got behind HD-DVD, and continues to supply technology that will ship in both formats.

Check out an interview with the On10 Team and learn more about what it's like to work on this sister-site to Channel9. 

You can also get a Sneak Peek at their upcoming site redesign.  What do you want to see more of on On10?  Let Jeff and the team know.

One thing to note on the upcoming site redesign is more discoverable support for downloadable versions of their videos formatted for iPod and PSP.  I think this is great- support what the people do en-masse.  Does this surprise you?  It shouldn't. I just hope my Toshiba PMC will also be supported. :)

Today the announcement was made that Bill Gates will be stepping down as Chief Software Architect and in two years will retire to his part-time position as Chairman of Microsoft. Instead he's going to focus on efforts such as battling tuberculosis, a topic near to our family. 

My "little" sister is a microbiologist for the CDC, running Tuberculosis projects around the world.  Yesterday she IM'ed me from Botswana-a surreal moment.  She was in Kazakhstan just a few months ago, it's amazing.  Regularly she talks about Bill Gates a reverence not seen (in my parts) in a while now.  Despite all the flak he received in years past, Bill is doing something incredibly worthy with his immense wealth.

I've had the opportunity to work with and talk with Bill on four separate occasions.  In each of these, he had the air of an elder statesman, on one occasion even sticking around for an extra hour to brainstorm a few ideas with a group of us.  It was energizing to have this kind of engagement with him, outside of a review, just like a group of friends and co-workers out of the office shooting bull about the industry.  He's human, we didn't necessarily share all the same ideals but could discuss and debate.  I enjoyed our time in this capacity.

Bill is part of the reason I joined Microsoft- the mystique inspired me like many; the desire to meet him "one day" was strong (checkbox filled plus pictures).  But in actuality his is just one person.  Microsoft is filled with bright and passionate people I learn from every day. He's not the only one.  The transition is bittersweet, but now it is perhaps my sister's turn.  I know she (like many other scientists) would like to one day work at the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation.  Perhaps she'll get her opportunity one day to meet Bill and the two of us can compare.

For now, we can all joke about how Bill is following Robert Scoble's lead :).

(Ed. Note: Fixed the image reference)

Now this is cool.  Charlie posted screenshots of the SDK sample for Media Center (Vista-style) for a Podcast Client. Pretty rockin if you ask me.

I've been out the past 3 out of 4 weeks on the road, little time for blogging, meeting with partners and customers.  It's been a whirlwind trip and lots of learnings and few fun happenings along the way. More on that later.  What did I miss?  Well, Mix06 for one. That sounded like a blast from what I'm hearing from folks who attended.  Charlie showed a sample app that handles RSS/Podcasting in the 10' Media Center experience built on Vista from what I hear.  Unfortunately a few folks got a little overzealous in thinking this was a different announcement.

Either way, I think it's great that Microsoft continues to refer to "Podcasting" by the term, etymological arguments aside. I'll see what I can do about a few screen shots when Charlie is ready.

ExtremeTech just posted results of their tests comparing CPU utilization across recent ATI (Radeon X1800 XT) and nVidia (GeForce 7800 GTX) cards for three codecs: DivX, H.264, and WMV9.  The results?

For 720p content WMV 9 plays back at typically 25-40% CPU utilization for the clips tested.  H.264 on the other hand takes 80% (using ATI's acceleration) and on other systems even spike to 100%.  Note however these are different clips than those used for WMV 9 testing. Playing back 720p DivX clips results in 50% or so CPU utilization

To quote:

"H.264 acceleration has a long way to go before it's ready for prime time. Even with ATI's hardware acceleration, it's way too CPU intensive. What's more, ATI needs to work to offer acceleration on basically all popular H.264 decoders, the same way their DVD acceleration works with DVD decoders."

Also interesting to note DivX playback performance of DivX player vs. WMP:

"The performance of the GeForce 7800 GTX when using the DivX Player is atrocious, at 75-80% CPU utilization. Under Windows Media Player 10, it's right around 50%."

One thing's for sure, there's still a lot of work to be done in this area. 

"The video landscape on the PC is still far too big a mess. There are too many codecs, and sometimes too many software providers making decoders (we found a dozen H.264 decoders and at least as many DVD decoders in 10 minutes of Google searching). Some are accelerated, some are not."

I have some ideas on how to fix this (that don't involve "destroying" the competition thank you) but I'm interested in your thoughts first?

There's been a bit of speculation over the past few weeks about what Microsoft's recent reorgs both company-wide and within Robbie Bach's org mean to the company's entertainment efforts.  While I certainly don't speak officially for anyone other than myself, I did want to share my perspective:

Reorgs happen at Microsoft.  They happen more often across the company than gets reported (or speculated upon).  Reorgs in my experience bring more focus.

So what does this mean for me in particular?  Not much really.  I'm as strongly committed to my job and my partners as ever.  More and more devices are supporting our technologies and PlaysforSure and they're getting better (look at my prior CES scorecard post).  Partnerships like those with MTV with Urge and Verizon Wireless's V-Cast are the result of significant investments on both sides.  What matters isn't speculation, but proof.

Mano Clement has a great roundup here thanks to Robert Scoble. Items of interest to Digital Media enthusiasts:

- Many times the perf on Networking stack (and USB stack too BTW) ;)

- All new Audio stack with per-app audio and more.

- FAST search through tens of thousands to millions of tracks in WMP11 (I can't go back)

- Other features I just can't talk about yet...

I talked to Robert last week and we're going to line up a bunch of videos for Channel 9 on digital media efforts in Windows Vista in the coming month.  Stay tuned for more.  And congrats to Robert and Shel on their book- sorry I missed the party- had another party last night!

CNet has posted their Best of CES award winners and Creative has done it again with the Zen Vision:M. I've been playing with a Zen Vision:M for a few weeks now and I love it.  It has twice the video playback of the video iPod (4hrs vs. iPod's 2hrs) and frankly, I'll exhange a bit of thickness for being able to watch a full movie on a charge any day of the week.  The UI is familiar and friendly.  My only major complaint so far is the adapter needed for USB/charging and it has too many controls (4 discrete buttons + 2 rocker positions + touchpad.

So, this got me thinking about how Windows Media might have fared this year at CES. Here's a rundown of my report card:

• Best in Show: Creative Zen Vision:M - does WMV, WMA, and is PlaysforSure
• People's Voice: Pioneer Inno (aka Samsung Helix) - it does 50 hours of XM Radio recording, WMA and cool bookmarking feature for Napster so it's going to be PlaysforSure. Not bad- not bad at all.
  
• Cameras and Camcorders: Sanyo Xacti HD1 - a slick little HD (720p) camcorder/digital still camera that records to 1GB SD cards. Though no direct support for WMV, it records into MPEG-4 which Microsoft is a member of the patent pool.
• Home Audio: Denon AVR-2807 - supports playback of multiple formats including HDCD owned by Microsoft, but what's really stellar is the built-in WM Connect digital audio receiver in it's older sibling product, also called out in the article.
• Car tech: Pioneer AVIC-Z1 - This double-din unit is a multimedia powerhouse w/ 30 GB HDD, GPS, bluetooth built-in all atop Windows Automotive so it should be able to support WMA as well. iPod connector support coming too.
• Home Video: Pioneer BDP-HD1 Blu-ray player - noted to be around $1800 vs. $499 HD DVD players, this is still a win because Blu-Ray requires the SMPTE-standard submitted Microsoft VC-1 codec.

So how did Microsoft do? Both of the grand prizes support PlaysforSure services and WMA and 6 out of 8 winning products (in eligible categories) for awards include Microsoft digital media technologies.  Not a bad roundup at the end of the show and there's still a ton of work to be done.

I also just learned that all 3 nominees in the Best of CES: MP3 and Digital Video category support PlaysforSure and WMA (or WMV), including Windows Media Player 11 :).

I had the rare opportunity to lounge in the grass picnic-style with Thomas Hawk, Ian Dixon and his wife and blather on about digital media in general.  Thomas has a good recap of our conversation over on his site not to mention some stunning pictures.  Thomas has inspired me to re-engage on Flickr and I've posted my own pics from the show here.

Back by popular demand, I've fixed the links for the Podcasting Auto Playlists for WMP download and updated the HowTo article slightly. I should also note that this solution also works great with Xbox 360 using the Windows Media Connect option for streaming playlists and music from any Windows XP PC ;). 

Link to How To: AutoSync Podcasts in WMP10
Download: MP10_Podcast_AutoPlaylists.zip (.97 KB)
Download: MP10_Podcast_AutoPlaylists.exe (30 KB)

Also of note is Doppler's new Beta 2 of DopplerMobile (pictured right) - a great podcasting and RSS feed client for Windows Mobile 5.0 devices.  It's a shame that it requires .Net Compact Framework which takes up 2MB on my phone, a key reason I'm not running it full-time yet until I figure out how to free up more space on my SP5m.

DopplerMobile runs on devices with Windows Mobile for Pocket PC 2003, and Windows Mobile 5.0 (both Pocket PCs and Smartphones). A nice touch is the ability to sync your feeds with your NewsGator Online account.  Learn more here.  More to come on this one I expect.  Enjoy.

I was so excited after reading the Forbes article on the Sirius S50 a few weeks ago that I snapped one up.  Then the backorder delays started.  Then reports of RIAA-hobbling started to drift in.  After using the device for nearly a week, I have to say my friend and neighbor Lance was right- it's a big disappointment.

The design is by PortalPlayer- the same company that reportedly makes parts of that um.. other popular portable music (and now video) player. The package includes a complete installation kit, a standard cigarette lighter power adapter, an FM adapter (for installation into your line), and the docking cradle.  The first thing that hit me was the cheap plastic feel of the cradle. I expected it to be more substantive; the dial used for tuning felt loose. The weight of the device also leaves it feeling cheap- I had to check the box twice to make sure the battery wasn't floating around.

Speaking of the battery, a cryptic sheet in the install kit tells you to remove the plastic sheathing over the contacts on the device, but fails to mention you have to pry the backplate off the device, remove the battery, and then remove the plastic.

Next I activated the service and did a quick install in my car.  The packaging was thoughtfully put together, but not at the vaunted Apple level. I put the antenna on my roof strung out the window and got a signal pretty easily.  Activation was simple.  The device has an announcement voice that announces station names as you switch, and a nice, easily readable display.  They should however have put more thought into their UI design.  From the time you first power on the device, the overloaded animation at boot creates a "tearing" effect on the screen as its hardware tries to keep up.  Not a good sign on "second read". Nor is the cheesy heart icon used to designate favorites presets-er no... It's for recording. Overall the UI feels a bit 2002 for a device of this price.

Speaking of the recording feature.  A big selling point is the ability to play/pause live record and schedule record your favorite programs. But unfortunately you cannot listen to one station and record another- ala TiVo or Media Center w/ dual tuners.  So basically if you want to record a live program and not listen (defeating the purpose), you have to switch to another input. Apparently these and series of RIAA-induced changes are getting folks in an uproar.  Here's a list  of the hobbled features from Orbitcast:

Unfortunately due to some other commitments (and getting a nasty cold),  I/we won't be able to host a Seattle geek dinner on the 8th. The good news is that Peter Rojas and the Engadget crew are hosting a get-together in Seattle tonight so we're suggesting you join our friends over at:

Neumo’s
925 E Pike St
Seattle, WA 98122

December 8th, 2005
7pm - 9pm

Sorry about the late notice! We promise to do another one to make it up early in 2006.