Half of the reason I wanted an Xbox 360 was because it plays back video from a networked PC, which is awesome. Only a few complaints about the Xbox 360’s media playing capabilities: I feel like it probably could, if it wanted to, play video off of any Windows / Samba share. It doesn’t. It requires Windows Media Player 11, which I have a feeling it requires because WMP11 requires authentic XP. I don’t think it’s doing anything too complicated (no transcoding), but if you let anyone come to that party, people will be streaming video from Macs, and we couldn’t have that. (It could also be that WMP 11 is the first to really work with the video capabilities of the Zune, and before that they didn’t really care about video portability, so there were technical problems holding it up.)

It is far more fussy than my old DVD player in the user-interface department. There is a configuration option for “Configure a Windows Media Center Something”, but your XP machine with WMP11 is not a Windows Media Center. There is another option for “connect to a PC”, but I couldn’t get that to work. No, I had to go to “Video”, then change my “video source” to the XP machine I’d installed WMP11 on. I’d also dragged a few things into the “library” so they’d be available, and… they weren’t.

I had two options: Desktop or Shared Videos. It took me six days to figure out that dragging files to WMP didn’t add things to the library - you have to add folders to the library, and the files in those folders will show up on your Xbox.

But enough about library confusion. It will play H.264 in AVI containers. My old DVD player would not. It won’t play MPG files, for some reason. I think my old DVD player does this - I’m not positive.

Big win for the Xbox - it plays all kinds of locked down WMVs, since it asks the PC for the keys. You don’t have to do anything to “authorize” that playback device.

If you’ve burned multiple files to a disc or have a collection of shorter videos you want to watch, the 360 is not a great choice. Videos don’t queue up or play in order (you have to individually select them), and they can’t be added to playlists. So that’s two annoyances: no playlists and no MPGs.

But even for my enthusiam for iTunes, the 360 does a very nice job of grabbing music off the network and playing it. The interface is better than it has to be, and some game developers have even thought to check if the 360 is playing music, refraining from playing the game’s soundtrack if there’s something else on. Sweet!

I can’t connect my iPod touch to the 360, though the shuffle works fine. (It doesn’t do much more than read the files’ metadata, and iPhones/touches have their file systems extra-locked down.) You can rip CDs to the 360, I think, but there’s not really enough disk space on the default 360 to seriously think about that.

Anyway, I’m totally stoked about being able to watch video on my TV without burning / copying / etc. It’s mostly great.

In terms of kid-safe programming that doesn’t drive me crazy, American Idol has been pretty good to us this year. I’m not sure if they’re following it exactly, but they have an idea about “you’re going to Hollywood”, and how that’s somewhere near where Lightning needs to go at the beginning of Cars, and also that it’s warm there.

But yesterday Adam wanted to tell me how Simon talks, and he did two bits in this hilarious English accent that were a pretty fair approximation. I want to say that Simon is his first exposure to any English accent, but we do watch a ton of Mary Poppins and there’s plenty of English characters in things like Lion King, The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, and probably a ton of other stuff I’m forgetting.

So maybe he’s less interested in the English accent bit than he is in the character of Simon, which would be kind of interesting. Christie says “he has an ear…” but these are accents and impersonations - role playing and characters and personalities. He’s four - he can’t be smart enough to figure that out yet. I don’t know.

Since that was probably better experienced first-hand than related on a blog, I’ll list a few more things that Adam tells us.

• No, you’re in time out.
• No, you’re having a break from candy.
• No, you go sit on the stairs.
• You’re thrown out of this house.
• You’re thrown to the sky.

The Daily Show, which has never had a musical guest, will host the White Stripes on December 1.  Does anyone know why?  I enjoy that band, and I’m probably even interested to see them live, but I don’t see why the finest comedy show on TV is feeling any pressure to become a variety / talk show.  It kind of bothers me.

I first complained about this on the internet (Prodigy, actually) in 1992, when Animaniacs had non-funny musical interludes that I despised.  I don’t get it on Letterman, or SNL, or "house bands" in comedy clubs…
 

My Monday ritual (for the past few months, anyway) has been folding laundry and watching some TV.  It’s about the only night of the week dedicated to TV, which puts me in the fifth percentile, but it still seems like a lot.

We had the pleasure last night of being able to watch "The Office" (BBC) and "The Office" (NBC) back-to-back.  I’d heard really good things about the American version, but the tone feels way wrong.  I really like Steve Carell, too, but every scene with him is just off.  Scenes without him actually maintain a lot of the charm of the original, but I’m not an expert on either series, so I think I’ll leave it at that.

"Tom Goes to the Mayor" is quite good.  I saw the bird sanctuary episode last week and loved it.  The alternative energy episode this week (with Michael Ian Black, again, who I usually enjoy) wasn’t quite as good, but if you’re a Mr. Show fan thinking "Bob Odenkirk is only a producer / writer, so is his oddball touch anywhere to be found?", you should check it out.  His oddball touch is golden.

And we added a new kids show to the TiVo, although I’m not sure how long it’s going to last in our lineup.  "LazyTown", produced entirely in Iceland, has a positive health-and-happiness message for kids, and fun music that makes Adam jump out of whoever’s lap he’s in at the moment and groove.  Also it looks like a fever dream on acid.  And the acid is on mushrooms.  It’s freaky as hell, but less freaky than Teletubbies, which is what I’m allegedly supposed to be exposing my children to.  Christie pointed out that "LazyTown" is probably most appropriate for six-to-nine year olds, but by that time there’ll be some incomprehensible ultraviolent Japanese CGI abomination on the McDonalds Walmart channel that makes "LazyTown" look like that show with the bearded guy who paints little happy trees. 

I can’t find the excellent Rolling Stone article that alerted me to what, exactly, it was that MTV2 was morphing into, so I’ll link to a weblog called Let it be known!, since they have the details right and an attitude not dissimilar to mine.

Let’s get this out of the way: MTV2 was a 24 hour music channel for maybe five years.  Of course, there were patented 6-minute commercial breaks in the mix, but other than that, it was all music videos.

I think I first noticed not-videos (what’s on?  NOT VIDEOS) when they started showing Beavis and Butthead reruns.  I wouldn’t complain about that, since I’m a huge Beavis fan from way back.  And there’s videos in each episode. 

Well, at the end of January, they announced a format change, and I’m not digging it so far.  They’ve focused the playlist, apparently, to straight-up hip hop and rock.  So you won’t see Maroon 5, or maybe you will… okay, no Kelly Clarkson.  (But that song is catchy.)

And they’ve added interstitials.  You know, MTV used to have little short / animated / interesting ads for itself before and after each break?  Well, now there are just two minute movies about, well, whatever, eating up valuable videos time.  Not videos, in other words.

Here’s the other thing, though: they’ve gone to a whole new aesthetic of information design.  You know the song/album/label/director info you’d get at the start and end of each video?  In tasteful white-on-black, in a pretty easy to read font?  It’s been replaced by three bars, which start by representing three of those four pieces of information, and then one of the bars changes to the information they hadn’t imparted, and the bar is pink, or yellow, and the text is something similarly high-contrast and annoying.  What’s the idea?  Do 12-24s really enjoy this kind of thing?

Oh, and the middle bar occasionally pops up with an inane random question or sentence blurt.  "What are hot dogs made of?"  "Magazines always tell the truth."  Over the center of the screen.  At the half-way point of a video’s playtime.  I can’t even describe how annoying it is: it tells the audience "are you paying attention to this video?  You shouldn’t."  It sends a signal about the artist, song and video: this is silly shit.  You’re watching MTV2.  That’s the important thing.

Tell you what it might be: it’s nearly impossible to fast-forward through (via TiVo) a two-hour block of MTV2 and tell what you have or haven’t seen.  The introduction text-info-bars are on screen for what seems about half the time the old white text was, so the distinction between videos and commercials is that much harder to make.

I might switch my 2-hours-of-TiVo recording over to MTV for a while (but from 4 to 6, I still caught a lot of Cribs, or game shows I couldn’t understand).  If that doesn’t get me my fix, I’m not beyond switching to Fuse or VH1, even though I’m not Canadian or 40.

I think the 60 minute block of Arrested Development they showed on Sunday (2005.03.06) might have been the funniest hour of television I’ve seen in a year.  Sure, you had a nice guest spot by Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, but the cameos by Jerry Minor and Jay Johnstone were great without being too Mr-Show-incestuous.  And cameos by Amazon.com and Google made it feel like it was slightly clued in to the rest of the world. 

Speaking of Mr. Show incest, I read something about Bob Odenkirk being involved with "Tom Goes to the Mayor", a new show on Adult Swim.  Since I almost never touch the TV anymore, I had been lazy about adding this and "Robot Chicken", but apparently I’m missing high comedy on both fronts.  I’ve added season passes for them, but I might keep missing out, since I watch about one hour of non-Blue’s-Clues television in a week.