Category: home entertainment

I have decided to make the switch from my old but decent Compaq Pentium 4 machine to a brand new Lenovo Dual core machine. Main reason is to get flawless 720p playback and better support for 1080p video. My LCD only handles 720p/1080i but its good to know that the box can playback anything smoothly.

I choose the Lenovo because of the 1.8ghz dual core processor and full size PCI slots. Other machines I have looked at have had half size or low profile PCI slots and to be honest after all the hassle getting the graphics card for the last one, I'm not willing to do it again. The Lenovo has intel graphics (which seem to be accelerated and are open source) which play well with Ubuntu but I was worried about the OpenGL 2.0 support. So far it all seems to be ok. I also gave the new machine a serious upgrade in memory and space. From half a gig of DDR to 2 gig of DDR3 memory.

Upgrading has been a pain. I took the 5.1 PCI sound card out of the old machine and switched it into the new one. Installed Ubuntu 7.10 (didn't have 8.04 cd) and upgraded to 8.04 over the internet before installing XBMC 9.11 alpha. I had to fight to get the display working correctly when the display defaulted to 1360×768 by 60Hz instead of the 1280×720 I wanted. Rather just living with it, I decided to mess with it and got to a point where the display wouldn't show anything. Unlike a normal computer monitor, LCD TV's tend to throw a message up saying not valid signal, which is no use when your trying to work out whats happening. Anyway I got it working and before long was installing XBMC and Boxee. I had previously backed up my XBMC, so once I SSH'ed in and moved things back I was up and running. Next step was the audio which is fiddly because of my setup using the Onyko Cinema Amp. After a long while I setup Ubuntu to output audio over my Cmedia PCI/DNA card, disabled Pulseaudio from starting by changing /usr/bin/pulseaudio to non executing and trial/error in XBMC till it worked. Now I can play Dolby Digital and DTS without a problem. Oh and here was nice bits and bobs which might help with getting a better xbmc experience.

I did some tests with some 720p content I own, and I was shocked at the cpu usage. One CPU core bearly touched 40% and the other one was almost idiling at about 5-10%. When pushed into sub 1080p content (1440×1080) the 1st core touched 50% but never went over it, likewise the 2nd core almost sat idle. All my 1080p content seems to wrapped in a MKV container right now, which currently seems to crash XBMC at the moment. Quicktime also seems to have the same effect currently. I'm sure upgrading to the beta will solve the problem. So far, I'm impressed but my next step is to file some bug reports around MKV files, get XBMC to launch from login like I use to have it an finally autostart with the wiimote

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

From the Boxee Blog some news I've been waiting for.

We launched our public alpha for Mac/Linux in January at CES. During the show we met with several device manufactures interested in embedding Boxee into their existing devices or building a dedicated Boxee device.

I am very happy to announce we have signed our first partnership with a CE company. At this point we can not say more about the partner or the specs of the device, but we can tell you we are working closely with them to make sure we deliver a great Boxee experience on it.

Details will leak out on the 7th December at the launch of the beta in New York. There's a promise that a new user interface is coming too. Which honestly is needed badly, boxee has become xbmc's ugly but gifted little sister as of late. But the news of a move to a CE box is very good news, although I'm worried it won't be all it could have been if they had done the same last year.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

XBMC on a low-powered ARM platform ? Yes but its still very early days. Currently XBMC runs best on x86 processors but with ARM and RISC support slowly bubbling up, who knows where else we may see it in the near future. Your phone? Your watch? Those electonic billboards? That digital photoframe? Who knows?

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

When people come to my flat there usually amazed by my mediacentre setup. They never knew XBMC could look so beautiful. Problem is I can describe the experience but its never the same as when you see it in action. So here's a video speeded up of XBMC in my living room.

So people keep asking what's the specs of the machine I'm running XBMC on? Well its pretty simple, so I'll do a detailed spec sheet.

Software wise I'm running Ubuntu Linux 8.04 on the 2.6.24-24-generic kernel. XBMC runs as the default option when Ubuntu logs in under the under-privileged user xbox. So the Gnome or KDE backend is not loaded. I would upgrade to 9.04 but there's issues with Pulseaudio which I know have been solved but I don't really mess with my XBMC box too muc

Hardware wise, I'm using a slightly under powered Compaq EVO D510 which is a Intel Pentium 4 with 512meg of Memory and 13gig of hard drive space. I tried to switch to using just a Flash drive but found it was actually much slower that using the hard drive (maybe obvious now). I use Samba Shares (SMB) for everything, so the box does nothing but play back media. Other boxes take care of the downloading and storing of media. I'm holding close to 4.25 Terrabytes across my network. Inside the XBMC box, I'm using a standard PC with a old 5x speed creative (no-region) PC DVD drive and GeForce 6200 128meg AGP card. The DVD drive plays everything pretty much and believe it or not is almost 10 years old, the AGP card is simply because the machine doesn't support PCI-Express and XBMC requires a card which supports OpenGL 2.0. The GeForce card can handle most things but doesn't really like 1080p.but 720p and 1080i isn't a problem. The whole thing is hooked up to my Samsung 40inch TV using a DVI to HDMI connection and the sound to my Onkyo 7.1 Surround sound reciever from a Trust 5.1 soundcard using a single optical cable. I have gotten Dolby Digital, DTS, Dolby Digital EX and DTS ES 6.1 out of XBMC, without too much problem. Finally I use a Bluetooth dongle with a wii-remote to control the whole thing. It looks impressive but requires little fiddling if none at all.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Following the iTunes9 announcement, someone who wants to stay anonymous pointed out to me that Banshee has had a solution for the home syncing for months now. If you click on the shared music sources, you get what you expect streaming access to all the music and video on that system. But if you right click you can import everything or subsets of the remote music source. You can then setup a rule to automatically do this with mobile devices like the Gphones, ipod, windows mobile, MPD or any mass storage device. Its not quite syncing but its not far off

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

I remembered yesterday about midnight that Apple had announced something, mainly because a couple of my friends were talking about iTunes9 on twitter. So I had a quick look through the Engadget entry. And to be honest (not bashing apple again) most of it is a yawn. Steve Jobs is back, some tweaks to ipods, don't really care. Ah iTunes, maybe something interesting? As Stowe Boyd writes, would Apple really transform iTunes into a truly social experience for media, something on a par with what Last.fm did years ago? Well it sounds like Stowe is right, Last.fm of yesteryear. Also whats the massive excitement about home sharing? Didn't itunes always have Bonjour/Zeroconf sharing? I personally use Banshee on all my machines at home and turn on sharing, that works as expected. Ok yes you can move and copy files that way too, but outside the novice market, would anyone use this? XBMC has the ability to move/copy/delete files but how many times have I ever used it? ummmmm once in a very blue moon. Maybe I'm missing something, because my music isn't _controlled_ by iTunes or any media player but I don't see the point beyond sharing/streaming. I'm keeping quiet about iTunesLP, till I see a specification.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

I downloaded the first episode of this new show and to be honest I was surprised how addictive it was to watch. Its a very simple concept, do a task which most people could do then put it in the cube, crank up the pressure with large sums of money with a large drop to zero if your limited number of tries/lives end.

What makes the cube even more impressive to watch is the use of high definition and high speed footage with 360 degrees of views. So one of the tasks was to drop a ball into a tube and catch it at the other end before it hits the floor. Seeing how close it gets in HD on a super highspeed camera is something else. Its not just close, its nail biting eerily close. Another aspect of the cube is the lateral thinking which goes into beating the cube. So in the task mentioned earlier the guy knocked the ball up in the air with one hand then got into a position to catch it on the way down. In the most recent one, a guy striped down to his pants to complete a task which involved walking over two barriers without being able to see anything.

If this came straight from the production of ITV then I'm sure this format will appear in other countries very soon. Its also got legs for a gameshow, so you can imagine a celeb version at Christmas and New Years then even a doubles version further down the line. There's also a almost unlimited amount of games you can play in the cube. Everything from Basketball with a square box to flicking a ball into a small glass of water. You can even have the same game with different levels. So the flicking the ball into a glass of water means at 2k a bucket of water, while at 100k its a pint glass and at 250k it could be a large test tube. Clever stuff, although I would love for the voice of the cube to be a little more like the computer in Portal. The Body also looks like something out of Ghost in the Shell, nice move.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

There was a interesting post from some of the XBMC developers recently. It was a tip of the hat to some secret things they have been working towards.

• Webkit integration (motd2k)
• DirectX port (elisemory from Boxee)
• ARM port (mcgeagh)
• PVR integration (alcoheca and alwinus)
• Video library redesign (jmarshall)

So Webkit integration is pretty obvious, like Boxee's cloning Mozilla into there later builds. Having a browser built in means access to a lot more the web's resources including things which are trapped inside a Flash container. The DirectX port will just be a version which takes advantage of Windows APIs for display. Makes sense seeing how there is already a Mac only port called Plex which takes advantage of that hardware. Its also worth noting Plex already has Webkit build in. The ARM port is something I wouldn't have imagined, but it makes a lot of sense. There's a lot of ARM based systems out there including smartphones and other electronic devices outside of the usual circles. This also means you could make a really cheap XBMC box with basic functionality. I assume PVR intergration will pick up the effort which was spotty in the past. There has been support for TIVO and a couple other boxes in the past but no real long term effort. The video library redesign is also a welcomed change, don't get me wrong its good but it can be much better and there's talk about mixing it with some kind of supplemental tool to control the media better. I had considered writing a XSL to generate a list of what movies I own and there ratings, etc via conduit sync manager.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

I should do movie reviews but I watch so many, that my blog would be full of them. I'm actually thinking about setting up a microblog or something like it for my film reviews. I did use the hash tag film while twittering them but it seems twitter doesn't save past a certain point in the past. Anyway, Miss Geeky did a proper review and I totally agree with her final thought.

The Fall is a beautiful movie that deserves to be watched on a screen as large as possible. Even though the story isn’t completely up to scratch, the gorgeous visuals are well worth sitting down for an hour of two.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Who has the best coverage of E3? The Coop guys.
CO-OP @ E3 2009: Microsoft and
E3 Special 02, Nintendo + Sony has all the special stuff from E3 including Project Natal, the controller less interface Microsoft R&D has been working on for a while. Also worth checking out Peter Molyneux's impressive demo of an interactive AI, Milo which is capable of voice, face, and motion recognition through the Xbox Natal stereoscopic camera. Certainly a uncanny Valley moment (explained in text). Sony also launched a new PSP (PSP-GO) which doesn't use those nasty UMD disks, instead its all download only and is pocket size because of this. Sony's montion control lost out to Natal but reminded me of afterglow. However Sony really showed some impressive graphics in the last guardian which actually reminded me of Milo but much less creepy.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]