Thoughts and ideas of a dyslexic designer/developer
I was at a party yesterday and someone reminded me of the mini series – Ikea Heights.
Ikea Heights is a melodrama shot entirely in the Burbank California Ikea Store without the store knowing.
Wonderful and cleverly done… Not super compelling but good fun, if you’ve not checked it out yet go watch it.
Yatse my favourite xbmc remote just launched a new plugin, which makes streaming locally to the android device, super simple…
If you have enabled UPnp in your Xbmc installation and are Wifi connected to the same network as Xbmc you can stream your Xbmc media to your Android device.
And yes it also supports moving between devices with the resume button which will stop the currently playing media on you Media Center and continue it on your local device where it was stopped.
It was possible to do this before but Yaste just made it super easy…
I saw this while waiting in line at Booths today… and thought
The cord cutting group think is starting to take root… Of course i’d advise against it 🙂
Interesting to see the whole cord cutting thing is starting to come out into the mainstream.
As an early adopter this isn’t really news and many years ago I was doing this but of course paying the TV Licence. Because of the TV licence covers more than just the TV. Regardless, at least 90% of the media I watch on my TV screen is on demand. Live content is rare and if it is, its the backchannel of twitter which encourages me to even think about going for live media.
Thanks to @richard79d – for dropping me a little pointer to Yatse the xbmc remote. I’m thinking about paying for the complete version already and removing the official xbmc remote.
It has all the same features but its just well built and less clunky.
I couldn’t wait and I’m very glad I did, as the film is so complex and very true to the book. Everytime I see it I’m amazed in how rich the plot is and how amazingly gorgeous the each scene looks and feels.
As usual I want to see this in the cinema, ideally at the Manchester IMAX.
The Official UK Release date for Cloud Atlas is Friday 22nd Febuary.
I’m not certain it will be in the IMAX but I’m going to watch it on the Friday…
Who’s with me?
First up, its time to upgrade my XBMC box in the living room, to something more modern and smaller. Right now I’m using a Lenovo Thinkcentre A55 mini desktop machine to something smaller and can handle full HD without struggle (specially now I got my new full HD TV). A friend has suggested the Feteko MyGica EnjoyTV 510B, but what puts me off is the 10/100 networking and it runs Android.
My home network backbone is gigabit and most devices are gigabit including the Thinkcentre but after doing some recent reading and tests, I have concluded that the speed of reading data off the hard discs is slower than pushing it around the network. I was using NFS mounts for a while which seemed more efficient but I’ve switched back to Samba after not really understanding how NFS mounts work correctly and installing Plex Home server. Seems my Samba setup isn’t caching as much as I would have liked. This all in all means 10/100 device should be ok to receive media from around the network.
Android? My biggest issue with Android as the background operating system is I’m not certain its as flexible as Ubuntu and XBMC is still in beta on Android. Because this is my main XBMC box, it needs to be super reliable and play everything. I do want to get the live TV functionality in the Frodo release of XBMC working too.
On top of all that… I’m also looking to firmware of the Edimax BR-6574N router I have to the classic DD WRT firmware, mainly because I want to sort out a VPN into my home network.
Yes quite a few changes… luckily I got to use up my holidays before April
Theres a another interesting thing Gabe said in his interview about the steam box,
Do you envision a Steam Box connecting to other screens outside the living room?
The Steam Box will also be a server. Any PC can serve multiple monitors, so over time, the next-generation (post-Kepler) you can have one GPU that’s serving up eight simultaeneous game calls. So you could have one PC and eight televisions and eight controllers and everybody getting great performance out of it. We’re used to having one monitor, or two monitors — now we’re saying let’s expand that a little bit.
Well that certainly helps solve the surround video setups in the future.
This is something I was sniffing around Sony as a R&D project many years ago. I wonder if MHL could make almost any device surround video possible now? Still needs setting up, a projector and a massive parabolic mirror however…
I’ve been doing this type of list [1][2][3] for a while but when I saw filmstate’s Top 5 movies 2012 you may have missed. I was in total agreement with so much of the list, I felt 5 was too short.
This is the list…
Here’s my additional list…
I recently bought a Raspberry pi from RS and it actually came before Christmas, so during the holidays I hooked it up and installed OpenElec after reading about the different XBMC versions you could install.
I decided to replace my aging Compaq mini desktop in the bedroom with the Raspberry Pi, because I mainly use it for listening to podcasts and every once in a while I will watch a piece of media (usually podcasts) on the LCD TV screen. So I don’t really have to worry about the might of the Pi or it not beable to decode Mpeg2 smoothly. Its time has come…
So from this aging beastie…
To this lovely compact package on my desktop.
After hooking it up to my 15 inch LCD TV, I had to rearrange the audio to get output to the FM transmitter and to the local sound system (essentially to get audio in the shower, bedroom and kitchen). My hope is maybe to buy more Pi’s and hook them up around the flat to do local multicast streaming instead of FM.
I’m impressed with the Pi and I can certainly see many more uses for it personally. I think I might switch from OpenElec to XBian, as I want the ability to add stuff and maybe mess with the latest version of XBMC . Of course this is as simple as switching the SD card and reattaching the micro USB adapter.
Certainly thinking of attaching the whole pi to the bottom of my desk or behind the LCD TV, just because I can.
My Samsung LCD gave up the ghost recently and although its fixable with a soldering iron and new capacitor. I pretty much decided a while ago that its time for an upgrade. I bought the Samsung almost 6 years ago I think and it was one of those 720p/1080i LCDs.
I finally bought a Toshiba 40TL963B because it seemed to have most things I wanted.
Top of the list DLNA, Freeview HD, USB recording (well its useful now and then) and of course 1080p. You will notice I didn’t include 3D because frankly the idea and reality of 3D at home makes me break out in hives on the inside of my mouth. Funny thing is the Toshiba actually supports 3D but I won’t be using it ever. Worst still it has that turn 2D into 3D mode which makes me break into hives in places I’d rather not say.
I decided to stick to 40 inch because the next one up was 46 inch rather than 42 inch. It certainly looks smaller because the bezel is about 15mm deep around most of the frame.
To date I haven’t really drove the screen because my xbmc box is set to output 720p. The freeview HD tuner works well and I was pleased to be able to see the paralympics in HD. Things look great in HD and as the review says, SD content looks a bit smudgy. Its ok but noticeably bad. The review is right about that and also about the black level which looks like black ink (this is a good thing). Actually when I changed the Xbox 360 to 1080p and loaded up Geometry wars 2, it felt like I was play on a surface which was best described as the night sky.
Not even touched the Toshiba web TV crap except to get DLNA working, XBMC blows away everything Toshiba’s places item can do and will ever do.
So generally I’m happy with my purchase. I didn’t want 3D but the price difference meant I would only be paying an extra 30 pounds for 3D capability and I would also get higher refresh rates too. Yes it could be nicer about SD content but its only on Freeview SD content I notice it.