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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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