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I bought a Xbox 360 on Friday night, it was my treat for being good and saving up over Christmas and New Years. Anyway, when I was in the shop in Leeds, they had one 2nd hand for 129 pounds with a 20gig hard drive and wireless controller. Now to be fair that was a hell of a lot cheaper that CEX's 130 pounds for the same without a harddrive of any kind. The only thing about the option was the lack of a HDMI port, it was strictly Component only. So I had to move up to the next option which was a brand new Xbox 360 with 60gig harddrive, wireless controller and HDMI. Looking back for the extra 30 pounds it was more a better deal that the 129 pound one. I didn't get any games because I knew the games I really wanted to play were online, namely RezHD and Geomentry Wars.

So why the need for HDMI, well on my current setup I have a Samsung LCD with lots of HDMI ports free and only one component input which is used by the old Xbox (which I still use for a backup when the Linux PC box does odd things – if you like XBMC avoid upgrading up to ubuntu 8.10). So using the HDMI is good but the dolby digital audio which is passed over the HDMI cable isn't then passed through the TV's optical output. So now I got digital stereo sound instead of the full dolby digital surround. The AV cable that comes with the Xbox 360 does have a optical out but of course, Microsoft decided to put the HDMI cable slot directly under the AV slot which means you can plug both in at the same time! No I just learned I will need to buy another AV cable for the ability to listen to dolby digital surround and watch using the HDMI cable.

I hope this might be the last thing I'll need to buy for the Xbox 360 for a while, as I'm saving for a replacement home cinema amp. A new amp would also solve all my component and HDMI audio problems. Currently my Sherwood Newcastle R725 receiver only supports analogue composite for all video switching. Yep not even S-video input is supported because its pretty much 12 plus years old. The only reason I still use it is because it a great power amp (100watts per channel) when plugged into the Technics SH-AC500D DD/DTS Decoder. Unfortually even the pre-amp/decoder's digital inputs were all used up before the Xbox 360 was bought. Time to buy a new cinema amp me thinks.

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I can't decide. They both have there advantages and disadvantages but I'm hoping the people out there will be able to help me.

So quickly a couple of things. Blu-Ray is a non-starter for me, I'm not interested and so being able to play back a HD disc source is not going to score the PS3 any points. The high price of the PS3 is off putting due in part to that Blu-Ray drive which I'm not going to use. I also don't need a media player replacement, I already have a Ubuntu box running XBMC and Boxee for Standard and High Def content across my network. Plus I have a Xbox which runs a older XBMC (need to upgrade it really) for backup even. I know I can stream stuff to the PS3 using Universial plug n play which is nicely built into my NAS box. The xbox 360 seems to require other less standard software to do anything with media.

Home on the PS3 also looks silly but so does the new dashboard on the Xbox 360. The PS3's online play is also very dubbious compared to Xbox Live but its free and seems to work ok with Little Big Planet.

On the game front, Little Big Planet and Wipeout HD are killer reasons to own a PS3 while on the Xbox 360 I'm loving Geometry Wars and Burn Out Paradise. I also hear Rez HD is on the Xbox 360 for a cheap download, and I got to say I like the idea of little mini-games like Geometry Wars which you can have a blast at for a while then put down again. I think the last game I completed was Max Payne on the PC.

I don't really get the difference between the Xbox 360 Arcade and Xbox 360 Premium, it seems once you buy a couple of games you might as well have bought a Premium package. The PS3 comes in many flavors, but the cheapest I've seen one for is 179 pounds for the 40gig version. HDMI is all good for me, which they both support now. I think the fact the PS3 seems to play/run unsigned code seems like a good thing to me. Yellow dog linux is running on it no problem while on the Xbox 360 it seems almost impossible to run anything on it besides signed code (hackers have been trying for years). But then again that was before the XNA team showed off Kodu which really interests me. But then again some people are saying Little Big Planet has that end covered off on the PS3. I'm not so sure.

I think this will come down to economics, if I buy a Xbox 360 on ebay, I might be able to get one for less that 100 pounds and that means more for my home cinema upgrade which needs to happen sometime this year. I was also considering if I was to get a Xbox 360 and PS2 that might be a good compromise.

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Doc Searls is such a great thinker, it would be great to see him on stage at a Thinking Digital, Pop!tech or TED.

Video 3.0 is two way. Or many-way. It’s with, not just to. And its “def” is truly high, and not compromised by current channel-defined bandwidth constraints. This is what will disrupt both telecom and cablecom in a huge way, unless they get on the side of all producers — including the people they now call consumers. The opportunities here are enormous. I think telcos are especially advantaged in this sense: telephony is naturally two-way, and has been ever since the 1880s. Now is the time to think about how we return to that in a big way. Telcos may be getting hammered flat right now, but there’s a groundswell underneath there. Just watch.

I've been asked again and again, so whats the future then Ian? and I always say video online. This usually causes a puzzled look. Maybe I should be saying Video 3.0 or maybe a better word would be Participtory Video or even Networked Video? Don't make the mistake of thinking Podcasting video is Video 3.0. Some of it is simply Video 2.0 (dump video online), some of it is Video 2.5. I've not seen anything which says to me Video 3.0 yet. Even Seesmic, Ustream, etc.

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So i'm watching live TV because I'm ill and am really waiting for the IT Crowd to start. Anyway Film 4 have Baz Lurhmann's Romeo + Juliet starting and I thought I've not seen that for ages and boy I love the sound track and start of the movie. I mean who doesn't remember the petrol station scene at the very start of the movie? It's a classic and one of the best starts to a film ever.

But Channel4 or Film4 killed it for me. They resize the beautiful 2.35:1 panavision aspect ratio down to 16:9 and cut off he edges! There should be a law against such things. It looked stupid on my large widescreen LCD, and it wouldn't have hurt them to add a small border on the top and bottom to keep the ratio correct and not slice off the left and right of the picture. But they wouldn't let it lie, no. They also soften the dynamic sound track using some kind of dampener or compressor. Its the equivalent of listening to a Dolby Digital track through a pair of ipod headphones (yes I now have a pair and I can tell you my Vodafone 12 pounds headphones are so much better that those white bud things, avoid at all cost). On most AV systems with digital sound, theres this thing called Midnight mode. From the Dolby site, it works like this.

Midnight mode allows low-volume listening with high-volume benefits, reducing the volume on just the loud effects of a program, increasing the volume on quiet sounds, and maintaining dialogue at a consistent level. A Dolby Digital feature applies dynamic range compression that preserves low-level sounds, prevents dramatic passages from getting too loud, and keeps dialogue intelligible during lower-level listening.

The amount of compression is not arbitrary, but is decided in advance by the soundtrack's producers and coded right onto the soundtrack.

Some Dolby Digital decoders let you select various amounts of the available compression (for example, 50, 75, 100 percent), while others provide only 100 percent when the compression mode is selected.

Well they applied this technique to the whole movie but at like 100 percent. It was dull, lifeless and flat (that is me being nice). In the end I turned the bloody thing off and watched something else till a excellent IT Crowd. I was that pissed off…

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Its BBC iPlayer's first birthday today and the BBC has a range of things planned around the event. Good stuff, its been something to be proud of and the alterations keep coming thick and fast. But although there is all this lovely innovation going on with iplayer and all those iphone, nokia nseries users and console owners are feeling the benefits, I got to be frank and say its done little for myself.

This will seem quite negative and maybe not best timed some would say, but I've been thinking about it and where I would like to see iplayer this time next year. Actually last year about this time, I remember watching Ashley Highfield take the stage of a central London venue and show BBC FM&T (future media and technology) the iplayer adverts which would go out on TV during Christmas. Yes remember making the missable unmissable or something tag line like that? Anyway, even then, I knew it was going to change very little of my media consumption.

I can't put my finger on it, I like watching stuff on my 40inch LCD screen and I like the idea of accessing files when I choose to watch them. iplayer's 7 day window means I still can't watch whole series in one go or catch up with old episodes of a series I may have missed the start of. So for example, I caught the 3rd episode of the BBC high budget post super-flu drama Survivors. Within a few days, I was able to find parts one and two in high def to watch back to back. This type of behavour is common when leaving the broadcast stream but iplayer doesn't quite support that. iPlayer doesn't support playlists, this might sound kind crazy but think about it, when I watch media at home I add them to a mixed playlist of not only TV content but also films and Podcasts. To me its all just media. Formats are reduced to nothing because XBMC plays everything and anything. This is also why I've not bought a CD since 1997. Any CDs I've borrowed have been converted to Mpeg3s and most of my film collection exists on HD now. Streaming content can fit into the routine, for example I do sometimes watch youtube, vimeo, bliptv conehttp://farm3.static.flickr.com/2133/2451266469_653d85446d.jpg?v=0tnt but with iplayer the 7 day window makes links harder to engage with. Every once in a while I will cut or edit media for the blog or something else, so the ability to do so in iplayer is not possible. Even the ability to include a start and end position like Hulu and even Youtube now, would be useful.

So what would I like to see in the next year? 31 day window would be great and finally allow for more long tail use and the effort of getting the streaming links would be worth it. I would like to see all of the BBC's content on iPlayer including HD content. Yep some HD like Vimeo/Blip streaming flash would be lovely, those extra lines are useful on such a large screen. It would be good to see other types of streaming like Pure Mpeg4 (non h.264), Theora, Windows Media streaming would cover older windows mobile phones and slightly older smartphones. Download and Bit torrent distrubution would be great but I understand thats still sometime away due to the copyright owners and not the BBC.

Happy Birthday iPlayer, time to grow up and revisit some of those more touchy issues. If you don't the community will do it for you.

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Lifehacker are running a poll for the Five best media centre applications. On the hot list is XBMC, Boxee, Windows Media Centre, SageTV and finally MythTV. This means no AppleTV, Frontrow, Media Portal or Plex. Although I got to say Plex is pretty much XBMC anyway, so no real surprise there. Mediaportal is based off the Xbox Media player which you could call a distant cousin of XBMC, so I see why that wouldn't make the list either. Boxee is a odd one to have the list, like Plex its based off XBMC but I would say there is enough to make a difference. Should it be on the list? Yeah why not, I mean its the first media centre to actually take advantage of your social network, so fair dues.

Obviously I voted for XBMC.

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Another reason not to buy a apple laptop me thinks.

High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP)—you can't live with it, but you practically can't buy an HD-capable device anymore without it. While HDCP is typically used in devices like Blu-ray players, HDTVs, HDMI-enabled notebooks, and even the Apple TV in order to keep DRMed content encrypted between points A and B, it appears that Apple's new aluminum MacBook (and presumably the MacBook Pro) are using it to protect iTunes Store media as well.

And in other news Blu-Ray has been cracked again…. so the endless war looms onwards.

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Boxee has been on fire recently, now in the latest upgrade you can stream content from CBS, Comedy Central and Hulu. There's also a couple other changes like the ability to enter RSS urls via the browser using the Boxee website instead of your control pad on your TV. Good stuff all around but when is the BBC iplayer coming to Boxee. It seems like a perfect match to me.

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New laptops, yeah yeah who really cares? Well I certainly don't but what I did find interesting was Steve Jobs comments about Blu-Ray after the prep rally. “A bag of hurt.“

He's right, its a mess. Although I certainly wouldn't agree with the later comments by some Apple person about iTunes being the best HD movie experience or HDMI being limited in resolution. As far as I know, HDMI 1.3 supports WQXGA which is 1600 progressive, which is 2560×1600 pixels resolution (over 3 mega pixel image)  as supported by the 30inch Dell LCD. Not only that but it supports uncompressed Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio. HDCP is problemantic, but thats just a small subset of the problems with Blu-Ray.

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I called it a while ago I'm sure. It was obvious that with Boxee allowing you to see and share what you currently watching/listening to, the ability to actually share that media wouldn't be far off.

dropbox enables users to share files between computers in a super-easy way.

once you install dropbox it adds a folder to your PC/Mac that you can
share across your own computers or with friends (watch the video on
getdropbox.com it’s pretty straight forward).

it becomes really cool when you add your Dropbox folder as a source on boxee.

go to Settings->Media Sources choose to add a Local Source and select the Dropbox folder.

now whenever a friend is uploading new pictures/music/videos you can
see it immediately on your boxee. in case of Music or Video, boxee will
automatically scan it, and you’ll see the artwork appear in Recently
Added in the home screen of boxee.

Awesome, will try it out once I get home tonight. To tell the truth I've not been using Boxee much since XBMC Media Centre beta 1. I'm sure once it catches up with XBMC again, I'll use it more often again.

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I did do a session about the XBMC media centre and Boxee at BarCampLondon5, but unfortunately I picked 10am on Sunday morning which was too early really. So I had a grand total of about 5 people listening. Anyway, one of the things I remember talking about at the session was the attention to ui detail xbmc always had. Its almost unlike any other open source project I know of, the technical and  interface attentions have been equally catered for. Last night (4am) before the talk but of course after playing werewolf. I got Boxee working and I installed the mediastream skin in XBMC. I was amazed… Then I saw it on the 50inch Plasma during my talk and WOW! And that was over a analogue VGA connection on a cloned screen. So when I finally got home a hour ago, I tried it on my dedicated XBMC and Boxee machine over HDMI using the correct rez.

All I can say is, this is what my LCD has been waiting for. Corner to corner smooth but uncluttered ui to play all my media on.

I have got to give a huge shout to not only to the mediastream guys who are uk based but also Vinci, Focus, Aeon and of course Project Mayhem (Germany I think)

Here's some screenshots from Vinci as a appetiser. I can't wait to start playing with the scripts and remote controls now.

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Another excellent talk' from TED…

In this absorbing look at emerging media and tech history, Peter Hirshberg shares some crucial lessons from Silicon Valley and explains why the web is so much more than “better TV.”

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Hot off the internet's… Xbox Media Centre is now available for Linux, Mac and Windows platforms. Amazingly, there's even a ISO image which means people can try XBMC from a CD or USB drive without installing it. I'm so excited, that I'm attempting to download the binaries over my HSDPA connection on the train, as I pass through Rugby going to Manchester.

For everyone's never tried out XBMC, please give it a spin. You will be shocked how well everything just works and its still in Beta. I have always been a fan of XBMC and to tell the truth I can't imagine not using anything else… Right enough said, download it and try it out for yourself.

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John and George are better at explaining P2P-Next that myself, but I got this working the other day over my mobile phone's 3G/HSDPA connection and I was very impressed. Seriously its amazing and you can try it out for yourself on the trial.

p2p-next looks like anything else on display at IBC until you understand what it's doing. live p2p video streaming based on the tribler infrastructure. a potential solution to iplayer success…
great project involving BBC's george wright and the EBU amongst others. of course not just video can use this. nice work

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I meant to blog
eyepet a while ago when they first showed this. But never got around to it. It got sent around the BBC internal lists for a while and some of the comments said it was everything from fake to amazing. When I first saw it, I had a slight feel of deja'vu. I swear I saw this exact same thing 6 years ago.

The ICA had a event to do with gaming, Sony showed off the eyetoy and some of the more interesting things they were doing. One of those things was a little animal thing which you knock about with your hands and physical objects. It would also do things like balance on small objects, be aware of depth and speed. I can't be the only one to have seen this right? I know we were not able to take pictures or videos but people must have spoke about it. Each group was about 20 people and they had about 4 sessions that day. Obviously it wasn't that smooth or polished as it is now but you can certainly see where eyepet came from. I guess the Playstation2 couldn't handle the processing while the cell processor in the Playstation3 can.

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