Category: home entertainment

UKNova without Torrents

UKNova has always been a interesting place for a clue about the future (specially when they use to share the data of how many people were downloading what, and from which country). Its existed way before bbc iplayer, 4od and all the ondemand services we all use now. It also has a very interesting stance on what content it does allow to be shared. But despite all that, they have always been on the wrong side of the fence for many in the industry.

UKNova is being forced to change. We have been issued with a “cease and desist” order by FACT (The Federation Against Copyright Theft).

Despite our efforts to cooperate with the UK media companies, FACT have stated: “ALL links or access to content provided by UKNova are infringing, unless it can be proven that explicit permission from the copyright holder for that content has been obtained”.

Whilst we believe that they are wrong both legally and morally on account of the strong ‘no commercial content’ stance that we have always taken, we are not in a position to be able to risk lengthy and costly court battles to prove this. Therefore we have no other option but to close down the trackers. It has not been an easy decision to take, but it is apparently our only option.

The argument by FACT sounds wrong too from what I know about UK copyright law but would I state my flat on it? Not a chance… I expect moving to Magnet links won’t help their dilemma either? Such a shame and a great loss, people will just seek their TV from elsewhere now, somewhere with less rules.

I remember UKnova was once asked to come into the BBC to meet content producers and defend their position as part of a BBC Backstage outreach (one of many engagement with the darknet/undernet, etc). The guys behind UKnova at the time were scared of arrest but they did come in and that discussion was one of the best discussions I’d seen. Thanks to Jem Stone and Ben Metcalfe for setting that up by the way…

Remember what I said about chilling effects?

Torrrentfreak just published about it before I did as I wasnt’ sure if I should, so I left it in the drafts for 12hours… thanks Mark Boas.

Ultra High Definition Olympics

BBC Super HiVision showcase in Bradford

I had the pleasure to experience the BBC Ultra hight definition and NHK’s Super Hi-Vision again today.

There has been enough wrote about about Super Hi-Vision on the R&D Blog but I wanted to give my view on it.

16 times the density of 1080p, and it looks like it. Each clip we saw was crisp and full of depth. Interestingly on the depth side is the lack of need for 3D. The actual density seems to increase the illusion of depth a lot. Unlike that crappy add-on 3D effect you see too much of, it feels completely natural. Well I guess it would feel totally natural as it as such….?

BBC Super HiVision showcase in Bradford

22.2 channels of 3D surround sound, yes it felt and sounded amazing. People will say it sounded loud but the reason it sounds loud is because if you go to the real thing (like I went to the womans semi-final football a couple days ago) then it is loud around you. It feels like your in the Olympic stadium in London.

BBC Super HiVision showcase in Bradford

The clips we saw was the opening of the London 2012 Olympics (parts cut together). The mens 100 meters final and some cycling events from the velodrome. Each one had plenty to see and watch. Not only could you see the audience but you could see which camera phone they were using to take pictures! During the 100meters I watched to see where that bottle got thrown from, and although I didn’t see exactly the person. I saw a number of potential people who it could have come from. Thats how rich the density of the picture. Likewise I was able to hear the chain of the bikes as they switched into high gear. Clapping from the crowd urged you to look around to check if someone in the audience was actual clapping as it sounded like it.

The swing of the camera wasn’t too bad but I can imagine it being pretty intense if it swings and pans too much.  The framerate was great and made everything look super real (as said almost 3D like)

BBC Super HiVision showcase in Bradford

Its fascinating and if you can experience it, do go you won’t be disappointed. Its still going on daily till the end of the London 2012 Olympics. What you waiting for…?

Amahi and Ubuntu at long last…

Amahi and Ubuntu

Some of you may know the struggle I’ve had over years to find a home media server solution. I’ve tried many things but in the end I just run Ubuntu LTS because I know it well.

Over time, I tried Amahi but being Fedora or was it Redhat based meant screwing about with the format of my hard drives and to be honest I didn’t like the way Amahi wanted to be the centre of everything (or maybe that was ebox?)

Anyway I might have to give it a shot again and see whats changed now its using Ubuntu as a base.

Nexus Q + XBMC = Yum yum…

Google Nexus Q

I have not mentioned much about Google IO 2012 and there is lots I could talk about. However I found the Nexus Q a strange device. However while most people are slagging it off, my ears picked up when they said they wanted people to play with it. Well in the usual way, it was hacked in 24hours.

Yes its running android but there is a effort to do a Android version of XBMC too. However because Android and therefore the Q is linux based, it shouldn’t be too hard to get it running? (I say with a massive respect for the hardwork it takes to hack on unknown hardware)

All I’m saying is the multi colour ring could fit with XBMC’s LCD option. Right?

Boxee & Plex go for the cloud

In the old days it was kind of clear…

  • XBMC was the original and was a lovely but a little rough around the edges, maybe the kind of person you have to explain before taking him home to meet the parents.
  • Boxee was XBMC’s social and flirty younger sister who wanted to settle down and become famous.
  • Plex was the good younger brother who acted older than he was and went to oxford to hang around talking to hipsters.

Ok thats the way I think about it at least…

But its interesting that Boxee has started to slice of ties with the original XBMC community (too famous too fast?) and also started to making in-roads on Plex with there new cloud system called cloudee.

I stick with XBMC because I like the rough around the edges style. But I will be the first to say, I’ve got nothing against the cloud for home entertainment, just doesn’t really feature in my life right now.

Imagine XBMC with Leap…

Ever since the microsoft kinect was hacked to work with non xbox machines, xbmc hackers have been messing or modifying there setups to support gesture control. So popular was the idea of controlling media with gestures, even the BBC adopted this in the Xbox version of iplayer. However the limits of the kinect was being discovered by the XBMC hackers.

After the first rush for controlling media using your whole body, came the idea of using just your arm then finally just the hand. But the Microsoft kinect didn’t have the density to support this. Now leap motion have brought out their own kinect style solution.

XBMC users should love Leapmotion specially with driver support for windows, mac and Linux.

Supporting not only fingers but even pencils and pens too. all the things needed to really make the xbmc interface amazing.

Plex media server ups the media server game

plex media server screenshot

Plex has always been on my horizon as its part of the future change in home entertainment, however Technicalfault shared a link to a blog post from the Plex media server team.

In this aint your grandfathers DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance), the Plex media server team (PMS) outline why the inclusion of Plutinosoft’s fabulous DLNA SDK, makes PMS the best DLNA server.

The result (besides a lingering scent of cologne and flowers) is the world’s best DLNA server. No, really. I’m not prone to hyperbole. This DLNA server can do things that no other DLNA server on the planet can do. And the coolest part is that with this new release, all the content served up by your Plex Media Server is now accessible by an insane amount of new devices, including ones that may already be in your homes (your LG washing machine doesn’t have DLNA? Send it back!)

So somewhere between all the hype and banging of chests, there might be something interesting…

I’ve never bought into the Plex way of doing things mainly because XBMC works for me. Plex although based on XBMC favors a ecosystem which seems to be about streaming from the server to their client. But reading the news about the PMS beta, I thought maybe I could use it on my server instead of using UPnP servers like Ushare and Mediatomb. I had just build my new server and had not yet installed a UPnP server yet. So after twelve47 sent me a link to the ubuntu beta, I installed it and tried it out.

My first thoughts is it won’t change much of the way I do things at home. I haven’t created a Plex account and frankly the ability to do transcoding is pretty much lost on my setup. I tend to watch 99% of things on my XBMC box in the living room. I do have another XBMC box in my bedroom room but I tend not to use it much (although this changed recently when I replaced my desktop machine with the XBMC box). So now I listen to my podcasts in the morning using XBMC…

XBMC does actually have a DLNA server built in, so I was interested to see which one is most standard complaint or works with devices around the flat?

UPnP and DLNA from a early time years ago has always captured the imagination. When I had my Nokia N80 work phone, I tried to get DLNA working, and for the most part it didn’t quite work. You could see the devices, but for the most part the services wouldn’t be compatible. When Microsoft added DLNA to the Xbox 360, things started looking up. Interestingly the Playstation3 has always had it.

This is also why I find the whole Apple Airplay such a joke because as usual, apple make it simpler (as they do own the ecosystem and the products) then claim it as there own (or at least there fanboys do). Funny enough XBMC now even supports AirPlay.

You could see the XBMC UPnP server but not actually stream anything, or even browse. So I was interested to see if this would be be any different with PMS?

For music… I can tell you its better than the XBMC UPnP server, as I was able to stream music without too much of a problem. This has never quite worked with XBMC UPnP server but PMS handled everything just fine.

However for Video what surprised me was the fact XBMC UPnP server and Plex Media Server could both stream my whole movie and TV collection without too much hassle. Obviously work had been done on XBMC UPnP since I last looked at it. I guess Plex does have the upper hand on the Xbox 360 because of the transcoding, but as default it down samples my glorious multichannel audio down to stereo, which seriously sucks for me. Couldn’t see at a glance where to turn on AC3/DTS comparability in Plex. Pictures is another area which XBMC UPnP server seems to fall short, while Plex was able to handle my complete collection without breaking a sweat.

So with the Xbox 360 sorted… I tried the other device which I’ve been playing with, the Wifi UPnP enabled Picture frame I picked up very cheap a while ago. Unfortunately although it did see the Plex server, it couldn’t do anything with it…

Although it didn’t work, the interesting part of the Plex Media Server is the ability to get down and nasty with DLNA and a XML config.

DLNA is a rather broad and flexible standard, and different devices interpret the standard in different ways. Some by design, some due to device bugs accident. This makes it impossible for a media server that supports DLNA to provide a one-size-fits-all implementation of the standard. Instead, the server must adapt to different clients by recognizing them and changing its behavior accordingly. A client profile is the basic unit of information that Plex Media Server uses for this purpose.

And this is where it gets very interesting… I’ll attempt to reverse engineer my picture frame’s DLNA support so I can share pictures with it and hopefully be able push forward with the conversation I had with Jas about extending my digital artifacts out into the real world.

Anything I buy now pretty much must have support for DLNA and the ability to hack Plex to get it working with the different devices is a very good thing.

Android has some great DLNA clients and I’m already thinking about hooking up my Archos Tablet (which I’m using as a desktop alarm clock, thanks to the kick stand and my Samsung Tablet 7+) to other things around the flat. Even thinking once I get my HTC 1x (yes I ordered one) instead of selling my HTC desire, maybe I could hook it up into different parts of my flat? This is why I find the Google Open Accessory API (ADK) really interesting and a certain nod to the future…

For now I’m keeping Plex Media Server on the server, and it may find more use in the future but generally right now I’m using Samba and NFS to stream media around the flat. My hope is XBMC now on version 11 (eden) will spend a little time on their UPnP server, as it was the best for a long time.

The weight or attention of media

Talking to Adrian late last night… He mentioned something to do with weight and video.

Then today, I started thinking wouldn’t it be interesting to apply a weight model to films/media based on their attention required?

For example: Tinker tailor soldier spy

I have this ready to watch at a touch of a button but everytime I see it pop up, I think well I’m busy doing all this other stuff, I can’t really spare the attention right now. This is also the same for most of the subtitled media I own.

I actually had decided to watch it on my Tablet on the way into work but I’m still busy reading kindle most times.

So attention is actually the metric but its displayed in a form of weight. I know there will be a debate about the weighting of certainly films for example is Donnie Darko a heavy weight or actually quite light? I remember having debates with Sarah about the depth of the film. She couldn’t understand where me and Dave were getting all this additional detail from but sitting down and watching it again and pointing out certain parts got the points across.

Another perfect example is Primer. You could watch the film and think, oh interesting but not all that. Then someone clues you into the Primer Timeline (spoiler alert!) So how would you weight that film? Very heavy or medium? I guess the same would apply to Fight Club?

I’m assuming something like the crowd based rating system would solve the problem, plus its only a guide. The weighting could also clue you into the fact theres more to a film than you may have first spotted. But likewise the opposite is true?

Once again, you heard it hear first, go use but attribution back here please.

Will I move to Ubuntu TV?

Ubuntu TV was launched at CES yesterday and frankly I wasn’t that surprised by the move (rumors for a while) but to see it actually live with Unity was actually quite impressive. There is no doubt Ubuntu really has thought about the design of it all much more than even I’d expect. And for all manufacturers its totally free as beer/as software, which will tempt some… Although I do worry about a patent showdown in the near future.

Unity remember came originally from the Netbook Remix, so it actually works well from the start. Specially if you look at some of the Lens being built for Ubuntu.

Although I do praise the idea of Ubuntu TV, I’ll be sticking with XBMC simply because its a much better interface, cleverly crafted and has the development momentum. Bring on Eden… Worth noting I installed Ubuntu TV on a PC at work for a quick demo.