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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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US VOD site Hulu is now talking with British broadcasters about creating a UK version of the service, in the wake of failed Project Kangaroo. NBCU International president Peter Smith told me the NBC/News Corp (NYSE: NWS) venture is “talking with all the partners you’d expect”. Smith said the aim was “local partners with local content – put that rich cocktail of local and US content together”.

Hulu is coming to the UK, and it looks like there will be a fight between iPlayer and Hulu. Kangaroo will be eaten alive if this does happen but so will the weaker players like itvplayer, 4od and 5 on demand. Obviously I don't actually know this for sure but it certainly seems that way. The real question is if Youtube and Bit Torrent will ruin Hulu's plans. And will the likes of Boxee and XBMC unite them in a totally different user controlled experience.

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PulseAudio is a sound server for POSIX and Win32 systems. A sound server is basically a proxy for your sound applications. It allows you to do advanced operations on your sound data as it passes between your application and your hardware. Things like transferring the audio to a different machine, changing the sample format or channel count and mixing several sounds into one are easily achieved using a sound server.

So I've recently been playing with Pulseaudio to send audio back and forth between the different ubuntu machines I have in my house. If you look at the Frequently asked questions section there's solutions for the most complex setups. There's even one to push audio from multiple machines into one surround mix. It doesn't create AC3 or DTS signals instead multichannel PCM which some surround receiver can decode. Looking at the instructions you can get slightly scared of the commands you need to feed it. But I've found using Pulse Audio Device Chooser which is in the Ubuntu Universe repository you can do most of the simple tasks without touching the command line.

My only problem at the moment is that I don't boot into Ubuntu when using xbmc or Boxee so I don't get a chance to play with the gui device chooser. Plus xbmc doesn't work well with pulseaudio currently. So the main machine plugged into my largest sound source is currently not setup to receive network audio right now. Expect that to change very soon.

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Found this good interview with Avner Ronen, one of the founders of Boxee. Interesting to hear about Avner's previous work on XBMC and helping out the project. So far there's been two forks for XBMC, Plex and Boxee. Boxee is certainly the more interesting. I would use it more but I find XBMC does everything I need and I love the Mediastream Skin, which looks amazing on my 40inch LCD screen.

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I sold mine a while back but the wii has been totally hacked. When I say totally hacked, I mean not only can you copy games (which is really lame) you can also run unsigned code, which means theres already some homebrew software ready to run on the device. Emulators for the Wii have also moved along really quickly and now you can play Wii games at a higher resolution that the Wii's hardware. Aka you can play some Wii games at 720p resolution rather that 480p. It really feels like the days of hacking the Xbox but with the console online, and it coming out of the box with SD, USB and Bluetooth, I can't wait to see what interesting things get built. Might have to end up buying another one if things get really interesting. XBMC for wii anyone?

There's a ton of links but the best place to start is simply Wii Brew and Dolphin-emu. I found out about the whole thing by watching the video podcast Hak.5 ep's 508, 509 and 510. The show is also now in available in HD which is actually pretty cool for seeing code samples clearly. This is also why I download Coop in HD.

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XBMC Media Center, the free, open source, cross-platform media-player and entertainment hub.

Guests: Scott Davilla and Jonathan Marshall for XBMC

XBMC is a free, open source (GPLv2+) media center application available for Linux, Mac OS X, AppleTV, Windows and the original XBox. It allows users to view, organize, and play back media from an attractive user interface. It utilizes many other FLOSS projects in order to play back almost any media available, and can obtain additional metadata information for albums, artists, TV shows and movies from online sources. And all of this can be achieved from the the couch via a remote control.

There are many skins that allow users to theme the look and feel of XBMC to fit into a user's current system, and many plugins and addons that extend functionality, offering access to online content such as Hulu or Apple Movie Trailers from within XBMC.

The project originated in 2001-2002, with XBox Media Player being developed for the original Microsoft XBox. XBox Media Center was a rewrite of this in 2003, and in 2007 it was ported to Linux and later to Mac OS X, Windows, and the Apple TV, becoming known simply as XBMC. The first, official stable release of XBMC in its current incarnation was XBMC 8.10 (Atlantis), released at the end of October 2008.

Boxee was also discussed. Boxee is a freeware cross-platform media center software with social networking features that is a fork of the open source XBMC media center software with some custom and proprietary additions. Marketed as the first ever “social media center,” Boxee enables its users to view, rate and recommend content to their friends through many social networking features. Boxee is still under development and is currently only available as Alpha releases for Mac OS X (Leopard and Tiger), Apple TV, and Linux for computers with Intel processors, with the first Alpha made available on the 16th of June 2008. A Microsoft Windows alpha version of Boxee was released in January 2009, but is currently available only by private invitation.

• XMBC
• XBMC's Issue Tracking System
• XBMC Online Manual
• XBMC FAQs
• XBMC on SourceForge
• TheTVDB.com
• TheMovieDB.org
• atvusb-creator on GoogleCode
• XBMCLauncher on GoogleCode

TWiT Wiki for this show

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This is so insane. Boxee is doing nothing wrong and even the Hulu team have no real problem with whats going on. But oh no the content providers can't understand the whole situation and have demanded Hulu be removed from Boxee. The users are going to lose out big time in this. We really need to educate the content providers about this new world of digital distribution. This is from the Boxee blog…

we love Hulu. they have built a great product and brand (including one the best Superbowl ads this year). since our early days in private alpha, Hulu was the most requested site by our users. so we built support for browsing Hulu on boxee, reached out to Hulu, and on Oct 20th, 2008 shared it with our alpha testers. the response has been amazing. people love watching many of their favorite shows on Hulu via boxee. last week we generated more than 100,000 streams for them…

two weeks ago Hulu called and told us their content partners were asking them to remove Hulu from boxee. we tried (many times) to plead the case for keeping Hulu on boxee, but on Friday of this week, in good faith, we will be removing it. you can see their blog post about the issues they are facing.

our goal has always been to drive users to legal sources of content that are publicly available on the Internet. we have many content partners who are generating revenue from boxee users and we will work with Hulu and their partners to resolve the situation as quickly as possible.

we will tell them how users love Hulu on boxee, why it represents a great opportunity for them to better engage with fans of their shows, how boxee can help in exposing their content to new people, and why they should be excited about future opportunities of working with us.

In the i'm a pirate and what you going to do about it session at Beebcamp, it was identified that streaming could be the answer to bit torrent downloads for most users. But with decisions like this one, there's almost no choice but to look to the darkside for the same content. I'm really hoping the BBC is stronger that Hulu and won't remove the unofficial iplayer plugin from Boxee. I actually just helped a friend get boxee setup because he would like to watch BBC content on his TV instead of his laptop. There a family which don't really watch live TV and own a Apple TV, Boxee with iplayer makes tons of sense for them and I'm sure many others…

Fear not the users of Boxee, the Boxee team are collaboratively working out a pitch for the content producers. If its any good, it could be very useful for other content producers large and small. I highly suggest everyone get in there and add to there pitch.

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So if you follow me on Twitter, you might have seen I bought a new Home Cinema amp on the weekend. I had planned to upgrade in the near future but when I was out getting my mobile phone upgraded, I come across a great deal in SuperFi. It was a ex-display Onkyo 7.1 Channel Home Cinema amp (Onkyo TX-SR505E). I had planned to buy the next one up from Richersounds but for over double the price. The one I bought was on shop floor for 120 pounds but I knocked them down further again by another 20+ pounds. 97 pounds exactly which is very good for a 7.1 home cinema amp. It took me ages to get it setup because its very different from my previous setup and I didn't have all the cables.

Anyway all this begs the question, what do I do with the old Home Cinema kit? It still works and is still really good but its going to be a real pain to sell on ebay, computer exchange are not going to take it and I don't really think I'll get much for it. So I have made a video to prove it all works and hopefully someone might be interested enough to drop me a offer. I'll add the specs below but here's someone with almost exactly the same setup I had.

Dolby Digital/DTS Decoder: Technics SH-AC500D Surround Processor. Supports 2x Optical and 2x Coxial connections, Supports Dolby Digital 5.1, DTS 5.1 and Pass through Stereo with automatic switching, fully working remote, Dolby midnight mode support, Solid american power adapter included. Bought for 300 pounds brand new from a specialist importer

Dolby Prologic Power Amp: Sherwood Newcastle R725 RDS. 100 watts per channel (5.1) 130 watts in Stereo. 8 analog audios in, 2 tape loops, phono input, A/B speakers modes, supports dolby prologic, 4 surround modes, composite video switching, 2Eq's plus Cinema bass, 6 Channel input (the technics decoder uses this). Remote sometimes works. Bought for 299 pounds from Richersounds in the UK

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