Interesting news that Boxee will be going Hardware only from this year…
To be honest I never really used Boxee on my TV except for BBC iPlayer.
Interesting news about Plex on Google TV too
Boxee goes hardware only…
Category: home entertainment
Piracy is the future of television
Nice little paper written by Abigail DeKosnik of the University of California, Berkeley. Its also formed a part of my talk at BarCampMediaCity.
One of the headings is the Advantages of Pirating TV and the subpoints are…
- Single Search
- Simple Indexing
- Uniform Software and Interface
- File Portability
- Access to Global TV
- Freedom from Preempting in the U.S
- Personal Archives
- Low-Cost and Commercial-Free
Lastly theres a section on Recommendations to Legal Services under which theres…
- Standardise
- Offer Downloading and Streaming
- Strategize for Global Audiences
- Offer a Premium Services for Personal Archivists
- Eliminate the TV Set
- Charge Subscription Fees Based on Volume of Usage
In the Appendix, theres recommended reading
- How to Turn Pirates into Loyalists: The Moral Economy and an Alternative Response to File Sharing by Alex Austin
- It’s (Not) The End of TV As We Know It: Understanding Online Television and Its Audience by Sheila Seles
- If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Dead: Creating Value in a Spreadable Marketplace by Henry Jenkins, Xiaochang Li and Ana Domb
The paper is a good one and for most of the people reading it, its maybe really good but it spells out quite a few things which you would already know if you were an avid read of torrentfreak, darknet, etc…
TV Tracking done correctly
At last the almost perfect TV tracker has been realised by the guys behind Trak.tv.
I say almost perfect because it doesn’t seem to support the social aspect of what tioti was planning. Trak.tv isn’t far off and i’m not totally sure if it doesn’t have it yet. I don’t have any friends on Trak.tv yet, so that might be the thing holding it all back. Time to ping my friends, I think.
The other thing which I think is a little painful is having to select that you watched previous episodes. You could assume that if I watched episode 3 of season 4 of Breakin Bad. It could assume I’d seen the previous ones but then again I guess it would be wrong to assume.
Anyhow, its excellent to see this being developed in the background and xbmc getting really into the quantified self movement…
XBMC and Fan Art romps onwards
Found via the latest XBMC blog post.
…Joins the already amazing… The TVDB and The Movie DB, as great places to collect FanArt and add them to the already amazing XBMC experiences. Literary the XBMC guys and community are innovating like crazy and it doesn’t look like stopping anytime soon. Total Kudos to this amazing project, I can’t imagine consuming media without it.
These additional features would be dramatically less useful if not for fanart.tv. Fanart.tv is a crowd-sourced website, much like thetvdb and TMDb, designed to provide all the additional little features that we each would have to spend hours amassing on our own. Kode, the fanart.tv developer, is always appreciative of additional art or art requests, and asks only that you follow the rules that may be found here.
Its also worth metioning from the other end of the scale, the amazing Trak.tv and Sharethe.tv. Think of them as the last.FM of Films and TV.
When you look at other media centres, they just look plain and boring in comparison… There’s certainly something about making customising simple and easy which is very compelling…
The end of the road for Windows Home Server?
Just read about the changes to the Windows Home Server on my Kindle via Ars Technica.
Microsoft’s Windows Home Server is a funny little product. The company’s ambition when developing the product was to have us all run little home servers: small, low-power, appliance-like machines with some network connectivity and gobs of storage. We’d use these home servers as a place to back up our PCs, share files and printers across our home networks, stream media to our Xboxes, and gain remote access to our files when away from home.
In practice, most of these things can be done perfectly well with a normal desktop version of Windows. Windows Home Server does have some advantages—it had a management front-end that let the server be easily controlled remotely, and it is based on Windows Server 2003 to slim down its own hardware demands—but for the most part, it isn’t doing anything too unusual. As a result, Windows Home Server has remained a niche product. Much loved by its users, but never really making it as a mass-market success.
It does, however, have one special feature, a feature without any real equivalent in any other version of Windows, whether for desktop or for server. That feature is called Drive Extender. Conceptually, Drive Extender is quite simple: it allows multiple hard disks (regardless of interface or size) to be aggregated to provide a single large pool of storage. Folders on the pooled storage could also be selectively replicated, meaning that Drive Extender would ensure that copies of the files were found on multiple physical disks.
It goes on to say HP (one of the biggest supporters of WHS) will no longer be supporting WHS, instead they will be developing there own WebOS.
Engadget is reporting that many of the HP staff previously working on MediaSmart have been redeployed to focus on webOS devices, though any direct webOS-powered equivalent to the MediaSmart systems seems unlikely.
So much for Microsoft Windows Home Server… I got a feeling it was released too early and I do stand by the idea that most people will have a Home Server in there home in the very near future, even with the deluge of online backup services and streaming services.
Broadcasters Block Google TV…
…but they can’t block the future.
It was no big surprise that broadcasters like ABC, CBS and NBC would block Google TV devices from accessing their content online — or at least, it shouldn’t have been. What’s at stake, of course, is the $80 billion TV advertising business that fuels the creation and distribution of prime time TV.
Just like Boxee earlier in the year, there starting to block the networked TV devices. Boxee CEO says it all.
“We think that it makes much more sense for the business model to be based on the content and not on the device or the screen size. If someone paid for a video (or is watching the video with ads) it should not matter which device (or) browser he is using.”
Exactly…
The official XBMC android remote control
I downloaded the official Android XBMC remote a little while after using another android remote control for quite a while.
When I first saw it I thought whats so special about this remote which makes it the official xbmc remote?
Well that was before one day I was watching Breaking Bad catching up with the seasons and my phone rang but not only that the show paused and a little xbmc popup came up saying exactly who was ringing with a little icon. I was so shocked I actually missed the call. This was followed with a text message from my voicemail service saying I had a new message. It was so seamless and I had no idea the android remote had this built in, so I looked through the settings and found these interesting options.
- Statusbar notification
- Show incoming SMS
- Show incoming calls
If that wasn’t impressive enough, the check list for features is something out of a dream. Here’s a couple of the most interesting ones.
- Control XBMC’s volume directly with your device’s volume buttons
- Manage multiple XBMC instances
- On incoming call, display who’s calling on TV screen and pause video until call is over
- On incoming message, display on TV screen
- Setting that prevents your phone locking the screen. You can apply it either for remote control only or all screens (or disable it completely)
- Cover art is shown where available
- Play and queue albums, songs, genre selections and much more directly without having to turn on your TV. For instance it’s possible to queue/play all songs from an artist but of a certain genre.
- Displays movie poster and actor thumbs where available.
- Play trailer from details page where available.
- Coming soon theres also some more really interesting features…
- Boxee compatibility
- Download media locally to device’s SD card
- Stream media to device
- Rating support in Now playing
- Last.FM integration
All this functionality has really made me give up the wii-mote as the preferred method of controlling XBMC. I’d suggest a couple more things like trans-coding (so you can take away a copy which isn’t multiple gigabytes), send to xbmc (bit like send to xbmc or xbmcfox), a locale plug-in (might be handy), a proximity sensor option (if you walk out the room for example it will pause or even stop after a while xbmc) and the ability to see additional media or even fansubs on the device its self.
Ikea hacker, turn your studio flat into a one bedroom apartment
I saw this on Ikea Hacker the other day while reading my Kindle.
A guy converted his studio flat into a one bedroom flat using the PAX sliding cupboard. The exact same one I got at home in my new place.
I can’t imagine anyone wanting to have their bed in their living room, so we started to brainstorm. We discussed ever type of foldaway bed and room divider. Then we found IKEA’s PAX sliding cupboard doors.
I wish I was better at the DIY but I’m rubbish. I had to pay a guy to put up my shelves in the kitchen the other day. But hey we can’t be good at everything…
Boxee the box – Nov 10th
What a dilemma.
I really like the idea of the boxee box and hearing its going worldwide from the November 10th fills me with a lot of joy. However I can’t really put down the money (£199) to buy one specially because my current XBMC/Boxee box is doing the job just fine.
In actual fact, what I’d really like is just the remote at this moment, because my wii-mote seems to have been damaged in the move and although I like the official XBMC android remote. Its a bit of a pain when my phone goes to sleep or powers down (Even though I do use locale to automatically turn off the lock screen when I’m at home).
Oh well at least I got the choice…
Inception on Triple play, buy or not buy?
So everyone knows I loved Inception but as it moves out of the cinema, I had a problem. A problem which will effect more and more people in the future. (This is certainly early adopter tertiary I admit)
On the 6th December Inception hits the shops on blu ray and dvd.
But I don’t own a blu-ray drive, neither do any of my friends and I either really want the dvd because its too low quality. I would like to contribute to the director and the actors in the film by buying a copy but I don’t want to own a copy on physical media. I usually do buy a copy of my favorite films on dvd so I can share them with friends who don’t have a decent home cinema setup like mine.
However I’m somewhat happy to hear Inception will come out on Triple Play (Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy) My worry is that there is little information on what the digital copy is…?
Ideally I’d like it to be a drm less Hd MKV or H.264 formatted file which I can play on my XBMC and Boxee home entertainment system. It sounds like going on the Iron man 2 triple play…
Contains a digital copy of the feature and the feature in standard-definition
…That it will be a standard definition and still a drm’ed affair. What a shame if it is.
I actually quite like the idea of a triple play disc (I actually don’t mind paying extra for them too) if the media takes advantage of what the pirates have perfected for almost a decade now.
No worries, I expect I’ll buy the disc and take it as fair game to rip the Blu-ray into a format which makes sense for me. Now if we can get the publishing industry to something similar this with ebooks and physical books…