Seven days before the opening ceremony, I threw a fit about the non-availability of a 64-bit plugin to watch the 2008 Olympic events from NBC via Windows Media Center. Thankfully, the TVTonic team, responsible for the software, woke up and finally made the 64-bit client available for mass consumption. Now if Microsoft would follow suit with its Windows Live products…

Yesterday, I stumbled onto Betanews and discovered a freeware application hiding in the enormous list of shareware junk. What caught my eye was the phrase “Orca-replacement”. Readers, this is Pantaray Research Ltd.’s SuperOrca. Honey, these are my readers. Where are they? Oh, they’re imaginary. Play along.

One of the most irritating tasks to perform with Microsoft’s Orca tool, as everyone knows, is the extraction of a file from the Binary table. With Orca, you’re forced to double-click [Binary Data], which brings up a painfully un-intuitive Edit Binary Stream dialog. From this dialog, you then select Write binary to filename, click Browse, specify a location to save to, and finally click the myriad of Ok buttons. With SuperOrca, however, you simply right-click {Binary Data}, click Write binary to file, and specify a location to save to. Thank. God.

Microsoft Orca makes saving binary files a click-happy nightmare.

SuperOrca saves the day (and your fingers) with a simpler method of saving binary files.

Other nice features you won’t find in Microsoft’s Orca tool include cross-table keyword searching, MSI comparison, dialog previewing, and other advanced schema editing/validation tools. Now, I did mention it was almost perfect… Unfortunately, SuperOrca does not have any Transform generation tools, that I could find. When I’m not ripping files out for reverse engineering, I’m usually gluing them back in, generating Transforms as a kind of poor man’s patch.

Because of the gap in coverage, I’m forced to keep the Orca tool around. I emailed the gang to see if they could slip that functionality into their next version, if they’re still working on it. I promised them bacon chocolate-chip cookies in return.

Brandon LeBlanc made some interesting noises today regarding the availability of some fancy TVTonic-based plugin for Windows Vista Media Center users. Today was actually the first time I started Media Center on my Windows Vista Ultimate (x64) machine. Woo hoo! After clumsily moving about in the menu, I found the NBC Olympics tile and launched it.

Looks neat. After a few more clicks, I got the installer fired up.

It was then that I was greeted with The Error Message from 64-bit Hell that always manages to squeeze a “this is fuckin’ bullshit” out of the purest of souls, like myself. Cough.

Reading the forums, it appears 64-bit support was planned for TVTonic version 3.3 in Q4 of 2007then Q2 of 2008 then an undisclosed period, known only as the time of the "next release” (since 3.3 already came out). According to a TVTonic Team member, they have ”been attempting to tackle this for a couple versions” but “somehow keep running out of time and have to drop it”.

Sigh. The Olympics are in seven days guys. Come on.

Sidebar: Yes, it really isn’t compatible. They use a custom 32-bit component that can’t be loaded by the 64-bit Media Center process. There’s no workaround to this. Really.

As Engadget gobbled up, a response was generated by the Director of Marketing in HP’s Connected Entertainment group himself and shot over to a few of us. The relevant parts have been provided below.

The McAfee Total Protection Service must index all of the files stored on the Server in order to provide the protection against a virus attack. The PacketVideo PVConnect will, upon installation, create a database of all the media files such as photos, music and videos on the Server. When these two services are installed together, the combined ‘first run’ indexing by McAfee and database creation by PacketVideo, can use the majority of the resources on the Server. This may result in slow response times from the Server until those activities have been completed. If the user has also installed other add-ins or software packages on the Server there may be an additional lag in response time. It has also been reported that the Windows Home Server Console can become unresponsive during this time.

As a result, we recommend that users install each update one at a time, independently. Users should first install Windows Home Server Power Pack 1, then PVConnect followed by McAfee.

While I appreciate the response, I’m not sure this is an acceptable solution (for me). Waiting for these add-ons to finish, while my server is unresponsive, just isn’t going to work. I think I’ll just modify the add-ons to work in my favor…

A week ago, Paul Thurrott and I were chatting about the installation of Windows Home Server Power Pack 1, HP’s add-ons, and how he was having major issues with performance. Admittedly, I wrote it off as PE (Paul error) and went forward with the upgrade. Testing at every increment, everything seemed okay… until I installed the add-ons.

HP’s update (to be applied to PP1) comes with two additional add-ons:

1. McAfee’s Total Protection Service (anti-virus/anti-malware)
2. PacketVideo’s PVConnect Media Server (media sharing)

Let’s take a look at their minimum system requirements for each add-on.

McAfee’s Total Protection Service minimum system reqs. (snipped):

Intel® Pentium® processor or compatible
64MB RAM (512MB recommended for servers)

PacketVideo’s PVConnect Media Server minimum system reqs. (snipped):

Intel® Pentium® 4 processor or compatible (1.6ghz+)
512MB RAM

Oh, I’m good, right? Sure, ignoring the fact that the server, after a reboot and at rest, has only about 200MB of physical memory available. Installing the add-ons, turning a blind eye, resulted in several “side effects”. Damnit, I hate when Paul is right.

1. Disk performance plummeted. As a result of the Twonky Server’s (PVConnect) media indexing task, that conveniently runs after installation, compounded by McAfee’s on-access malware protection (per disk-read basis), the disks in the server were being thrashed non-stop. This brought the performance of the entire server down to a crawl. The Slowskys would be proud.
   

   Obligatory Process Monitor screen-shot showing TwonkyMediaServer.exe reading all the media on my server

2. Slow Console. By slow, I mean excruciatingly slow. Starting the Console, defined as the summary screen appears on-screen, takes an average of 1 minute, but isn’t functional for another minute+.
   

   Console's appearance while loading. You will have to get used to this.

3. Unstable Console. If you wait long enough for the Console to load, you’ll notice attempting to use the newly installed add-ons is a frustrating experience. This is because the Console, for no obvious reason, will sometimes completely disappear (crash) when clicking the add-on tabs. When using the client software to access the Console, you’ll receive a similar symptom of a nice white screen.

As I have anti-malware/anti-virus software on my client machines and have no device capable of receiving media (yet), I had no real need for these add-ons. To remove them, without using the Console which requires you restart it after each add-on uninstallation, I RDP’ed into the server and executed the following commands:

• msiexec -x d:\shares\software\add-ins\TopWHSaddin.msi
• msiexec -x d:\shares\software\add-ins\TwonkyMediaServer2.msi
• shutdown /r

If you would rather keep both add-ons installed, I strongly recommend you a) install them at night and let them dice up your disks while you sleep and pray it completes by the morning (mine didn’t after two days), b) install more RAM, and c) tweak your pagefile configuration afterwards.