Category: Uncategorized

Seems channels such as E4, UKTV and Discovery will be coming back to Freeview sooner than expected in the form of TopUpTV. I would say eight pounds a month isnt too bad for 10 extra channels. However I would prefer to pay something like one pound per channel. Basicly the channel line up is E4, UKTV Gold, Discovery, Cartoon network, Discover H&L, TCM, UKTV food, Bloomberg, Boomerang and UKTV style. So a real mix bag of channels. I'm only interested in E4 and the Discoverys. Anyway there doing a trial run soon, so I may consider it, would be better if I had the twinview PVR box really.

Kevins been chipping his xbox today, some guy at the local computer fair which is really nice to know as I now know where to send people. Costs 60 pounds chip and install, includes rom i believe but cant see why the guy would bother taking the risk. Anyway, kev dropped me a ftp site with the latest xbmc. And I started doing more research into xbmc.

There seems to be a new looking skin not based on windows media centre as its got copyright issues. However the alternative looks pretty good too, its based on the dell media centre.

The xbmc team have finally put a load of screenshots online too. Which brings up lots of questions for me. Where can I download that project mayhem skin? I didnt know xbmc can copy and manage files?
Good to see the imdb and it looks like cddb feature works well. Theres an on screen keyboard for the xbmc? Does a usb keyboard also work, as that would be really cool. Thank goodness shoutcast streaming is still supported, any chance of icecast streaming? Super large icons for all sections, very nice… Not sure what this is, too short for a movie and too long for trailers
. I'm wondering if xbmc allows for natrual categories like years, timing, etc? Could be right? There must be somekind of plugin arctecture, my weather? I'm hoping this will mean a return of xmltv listings and some new cutting edge features like streaming from xbox to xbox using xbconnect. Its also good to see new visual effects, as groom was kind of boring, plus theres a competition for more visualization. Screensavers? and this is stupid nuts.

On a whole its all too much to take in… I cant wait to see what happens next…
By the way theres a poll for what should be the default skin.

Ok I've installed xbmc and it does pretty much eveything seen in the preview and more…
First thing, the web front end is now working, its really shabby but it works. You can browse through the shares and click on the piece of media you want and the xbmc will play it a couple of seconds later. You can also pause and stop. I dont see anyway to setup a playlist but there is a skip forward and back button. Ideal skipping adverts while watching Hollyoaks from the sofa with my tabletpc on my lap.
So anyway that works well, even though I have yet to try it on my ipaq or smartphone. Imagine with port forwarding I could control xbmc from any where I can get the Internet. Home automation is almost there.

Screensaver works well, also has the option to auto shutdown after a set period. Visuals not too good, same as xbmp. Weather works but not too amazing, can wait to see what other webservice clients they build, or if its easy enough for me to build one. Can just imagine RSS readers, etc. Anyway the other thing which is also very interesting is the intergration of imdb, cddb, etc. You can look up films, tv shows, tunes and games. Then use them for thumbnails on folders as well as files. Theres also a auto scan option which will scan and create thumbnails and info for all folders and files under the current folder. Trust me it takes a while to do. The keyboard feature is also very cool, it allows you to rename files, search through files, etc. I tried out the usb keyboard and it didnt work, which was a shame.

The thing which i find really amazing is the natrual categories. Basicly when you add metadata to your files and folders via the scan option you can then look at all media through a selection of categories. Genres, Actors, Year, Title in the movie section and Albums, Artist, Genres, Top100, Songs in the Tune section. And flicking between the filesystems and categories is so easy, i cant help but do it. Makes me want to put all my movies on a couple of Huge RAID arrays rather than CD. With the right kind of money… Anyway that aside, I'm going to start using xbmc more now because its more stable than it use to be and the features are so rich and useful. Thumbs up from me…

Had a quick look around my xbox bookmarks and found out that the Dreamix project is now dead. I was quite shocked at this because it had so much going for it a while back. Oh well we shall see if Xbox media centre moves into the area of PVR's.

I am however very interested in Xlink messager which creates a tunnel between two or more? xboxes so they can play games together or share media?

Also found Xbox tribe and xbins today which is useful for finding compiled versions of xbmp and xbmc. And I've been following a thread about HD Windows media on the Xbox. I tried to get the Matrix revolutions high defination version working on my xbox along time ago and I also had huge syncing and fps problems. But as some one said what do you expect for a 733mhz machine. Not even my 1.33mhz laptop can play it correctly, saying that the xbox has a much beefer graphics card. Also reminds me to look for a Matroska dll for xbmplayer.

Ah ha, great stuff – just what I need to setup MythTV. A happy MythTV user shows the way where he walks people through his trials and tribulations in getting MythTV up and running in his entertainment setup.

One of my friends gave a *.MKV file, and I had no idea what on earth it was till now. It really does look quite interesting as its a direct rivial to Mov, Rm, Ogg and Avi, so it can contain xvid, divx and what ever codec you like. It was also built out of the really nice EBML open standard The filter is available here or better still here and its GNU. Nice…

Well actually Europe.
Euro1080 was launched on January 1st 2004 and is the first channel to broadcast exclusively in High Definition throughout Europe. HDTV uses more pixels and lines to produce a high-quality image. Euro1080 also offers high-quality content: sports, music, shows and cultural events are being broadcasted by satellite with best quality surround sound, in HDTV format.

Finally got a machine setup for Smoothwall 2.0. The Machine is a Pentium 2 233mmx with all of 64meg of 100mhz memory and a 3 gig hard drive. Unfortually I've run out of video cards so I'm using a FireGL 1000 pro which orginally thought was a powerful 32meg FireGL 1 card. But it seems it wont be so wasted as its only a 8 meg card and wouldnt be a good idea to swap with my 64meg ATI Radion card. Specially seeing how the Smoothwall server has no display, keyboard or mouse now. I however did put in two 3Com network cards and my ADSL PCI modem card in the hope smoothwall would pick it up, it seems it didnt and I'm now stick using the Green frog usb modem till I sort it out.

So tomorrow when i get up, I will take down the current server and change my network setup till i get it all working behind smoothwall. Better hope google caches this before it goes down later today…

If you can see this post, then i'm now sitting behind a linux firewall and everything is working well… love it when a plan comes together.

Still thinking about what I should do with the linux box I currently have. Its too much machine to be a smoothwall firewall and its not quite good enough to be a full on server. See I'm thinking once I get to the point of running a linux server I could easily convert the current server. So why not turn the current box into a PVR? Just a thought and a link right now. MythTV

More useful links…from a guy who built his own Linux PVR box.

Watched High Definition NBA basketball on ESPN HD via DirectTV while in Chicago. Part of my wifes family are well into technology and own multiple Hard drive recorders and a High-Definition Television setup. It was super crystal clear, more like a monitor picture than a television picture. It was ever-so very vivid too, almost too slick to watch. The picture was at long last in widescreen format which is still odd because no one owns a widescreen set only 4:3. When will we get HDTV in the uk? maybe 2008 on sky and 2010 on Digital TV. At least the new settop boxes now support 5.1 surrond sound through optical or coxial outputs now as standard.

Oh by the way, i am now thinking about not buying a cheap digital tv box and instead getting one of the previously mentioned PVRs because there getting much cheaper now. The Humax pvr is going for 190 pounds on Empire direct. Even the Pace twin view is going for around the same price now. Swap the hard drives out for something more like 120 gig and I'm laughing.

Dreamix crew doing a session on IRC tonight, so I'll try and stay up and listen in. More info at xbox scene. Will try and keep a log of all what happens.

Oh also reading this – Beyond hacking the xbox, while i wait for the modderated chat at midnight.

I was blogging it live, and poped open the avi they gave us while watching tv and computer crashed so i lost my log! Sorry guys…will ask some one for there log later. Should have used mirc rather than chatzilla.
http://www.dreamix.tv/DreamixTeaser.avi

The Dreamix project began with the goal of bringing PVR features to the Microsoft Xbox. Due to the magnitude of the project, we have slightly veered off course from this goal, however we have not totally abandoned the idea. Dreamix in its current form is a standalone set-top box, which runs the Linux based Dreamix Embedded OS, an operating system specially engineered for multimedia applications. Our goal is to create the next generation set-top box, including 3D support, MPEG-4, and future HDTV support. In our second generation product, we plan to unofficial support the Microsoft Xbox. The reason support for the Xbox was excluded from the first generation design is because of difficulties in producing a viable product, which would be limited to modified Xboxes, as well as technical difficulties in implementing such features using the information currently available on the Xbox hardware.

What the xbox scene forums have to say about it – OW! now that hurts!

Some one did get all the questions however, I've downloaded just incase it gets taken down. Heres my copy

While looking for interesting storys for next tuesdays lecture, seen this xboxmediaplayer
TSReader is an MPEG-2 transport stream analyzer PC application for Windows9x/2000/XP. Normaly this would not be so interesting for many XBMP users but the thing here is that TSReader has a build-in XNS server, which when enabled can stream live digital TV (broadcasted over satellite, cable and terrestrial) to XBMP on demand. TSReader is compatible with many Digital Video PCI-cards that provide the actual transport stream from DVB, DVB-T, ATSC or Digicipher.

Going to try this out once I setup the xbox keyboard for linux… Yep got the USB to Xbox cable today too.

Oh and Tuesdays lecture is now online for those students who are reading my blog.

I am now a proud owner of a xbox running gentoox 3 home edition. Seems I forgot to full wipe the CD-RW I was using and that was causing the errors. Anyway, I choose XFCE over KDE because its easier to use on a Xpad and much quicker on a xbox. I configured SSH which works nicely, FTP, Samba and VNC which I havent tested out yet. Also changed the Xbox from DHCP to a static IP.
I'm quite happy with it but would like to get a usb connection for it soon, so I can plugin a keyboard as the xpad is frustrating. Now i'll be spending lots of time around the gentoox tutorial section.

You've got to love opensource software…

Ok i tried to install Gentoox 3 home editon after reading about it awhile ago. And I came back today to find the xbox on 95 percent complete. Some kind of error to do with the actual rewriterable disc i think. Anyway I will try it again tonight see if i get better results.

Been meaning to put Linux of somekind on my xbox for a while now, when GentooX 3 home edition comes out I'll install it. So this serves as a reminder to keep an eye open for it on my feeds and the GentooX site

Its been along time since i bought anything in the consumer electronics category. And worst than that, i haven't done much with my existing setup.

I keep looking for a another freeview box but cant find one going cheap enough to add to my current setup. remember i only need it for recording digital tv completely independent of my old freeview box. saying that i haven't looked through loot or ebay recently.

I have this itch for buying, and it might have something to do with the stuff show today. Seems I'm mistaken about the prices of Freeview boxes, because I looked on ebay again. Maybe I will treat myself to a box very soon

I finally had a real try out on panasonic's sdav20, better known for its role in tomb raider as d-snap. and the believe it or not the quality is better than i expected. I put the d-snap sd card in my ipaq and tried to play it in philips platform 4 player. but nothing came up! so i went to file explorer and it had windows media icons. so after clicking on it, windows media 9 started and played it. i thought nothing more about it.

Till on the tube home from olympia exhibition hall, i analyzed the mpeg4 file i had copied off there sd card. It turned out to be a *.asf file.
Yes that means the dsnap doesn't do real standard mpeg4 at all. it does the mpeg4 codec inside the windows media advanced streaming format container. What a con! how dare panasonic sell this fantastic device, which even i was thinking of buying on the fact it does mpeg4 when it doesn't. i'm going to investigate more into this.

But if its true, Panasonic may be laughing but I'm not!

Another interesing thing I saw at the stuff show, well actually it was the What hifi 2003 show, which is usually in the Bristol Broadmead Marriot hotel around Febuary time. Toshiba are launching a projector for the budget end of the home cinema market. Yep sub one grand! 999 pounds. No details on the web as of yet, I kind of wish I took down the model number of the projector. All I kind of remember is that its round, white and contains speaks and scart, which is very odd for a projector.


All the details I can find about it right now.
Toshiba's new Home Cinema projector created the biggest impact at this years IFA. It's show-time! Toshiba presents its new, outstanding, visually unmistakable home-cinema projector. This innovative projector does not just impress by its design, but particularly by its technical features, geared mainly for home use. Thus a Faroudja video-scaler, integrated into the LCD-projector, allows for outstanding picture quality. Three different video modes (standard, movie, and sport) round off the picture presentation (in genuine 16:9 format, of course). The ET1 projector is extreme quiet: ventilation produces merely 28 db, further reduceable by means of a bulb-saving ECO mode. Additionally, the ET1 excels with user-friendly controls and numerous plug-ins, like a scart connection, for instance. Due to its excellent price-performance-ratio, the ET1 is the perfect projector for the first-time buyer.

If I could understand German language, the word document would be useful. Did get some specs out of the word doc though.

• Widescreen 858 x 480
• Format: 16:9
• Contrast ratio: 600:1
• 130 Watt lamp
• Intergrated surround sound (2 x 5W)
• 32,0 width x 13,1 height x 32,0 length
• Supports 16.7 million colours
• VGA, SVGA / XGA-emulated i guess
• Supports RGB ( D-sub15 x 1 ), Component (YPbPr) Video, S-Video, Composite Video (RCA x 1), SCART, Audio (RCA x 2 (L/R)
• 3.4 Kilograms