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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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