Tag: xbmc

Tell us about your morning habits?

Early morning Manchester

Got a message on Twitter which originally thought was spam from HabitClock.

We are looking for the morning routines to inspire people with our new app HabitClock. You can help us by sharing the morning routine you wish to gain. Thank You!

I thought it was kind of interesting so I submitted my own morning routine.

This is what I wrote…

I am woken by my lightclock. I get up straight away going to the nearest loo before checking my phone and Google Now for what I need to do for the rest of the day. At the same time, I trigger the latest Tech News Today (Twit network) on my XBMC raspberry Pi setup (Xbian) via my HTC phone. The podcast is usually about 45-50mins long.

Then I go to my kitchen boil an egg or two using my egg boiler. While that is boiling I jump in the shower, dry myself, have a shave and brush my teeth the sounds of my FM shower radio tuned into the podcast via a FM transmitter.

The eggs usually finish just after I finish in the bathroom and I can continue listening to the podcast on a FM radio in the kitchen, while I make toast and tea.

By the time the podcast is finished I have eaten, checked twitter, torrents and most important emails. And I’m ready to hit the road street to go to work. I pretty much time where I am in the podcast with how late or early I am. Although my body clock does go out of sync when the daily podcast is running long or short that day.

And that is the honest truth, although most of the time, the podcast does finish way before I’m leaving for work. So I usually start another one which slows me down again. Also forgot to mention looking at tasks and using Any.do, but heck it will do. Also reminds me I need to hook up the last.fm reporting to xbian.

Of course you can submit your own here.

XBMC used for in hotel system

XBMC?

I was in Amsterdam for the Quantified Self conference (blog post coming soon) and the whole conference was in a hotel called Casa 400. It was a good conference but what was strange was the TV in my hotel room which look familiar to me.

XBMC?

I swear it was XBMC underneath but unfortunately the functionality they could have enabled like Samba/NFS shares, DLNA, UPnP and heck Airplay were not available. If they were it would make for an amazing in room system on top of a already technically great hotel. Couldn’t knock there wifi deployment one bit, even with 4 devices using it all day…

XBMC?

Simple streaming to your android with Yatse

Yatse my favourite xbmc remote just launched a new plugin, which makes streaming locally to the android device, super simple…

If you have enabled UPnp in your Xbmc installation and are Wifi connected to the same network as Xbmc you can stream your Xbmc media to your Android device.

And yes it also supports moving between devices with the resume button which will stop the currently playing media on you Media Center and continue it on your local device where it was stopped.

It was possible to do this before but Yaste just made it super easy…

Changes to the home network

Just about to make a number of changes to my ageing network.

First up, its time to upgrade my XBMC box in the living room, to something more modern and smaller. Right now I’m using a Lenovo Thinkcentre  A55 mini desktop machine to something smaller and can handle full HD without struggle (specially now I got my new full HD TV). A friend has suggested the Feteko MyGica EnjoyTV 510B, but what puts me off is the 10/100 networking and it runs Android.

My home network backbone is gigabit and most devices are gigabit including the Thinkcentre but after doing some recent reading and tests, I have concluded that the speed of reading data off the hard discs is slower than pushing it around the network. I was using NFS mounts for a while which seemed more efficient but I’ve switched back to Samba after not really understanding how NFS mounts work correctly and installing Plex Home server. Seems my Samba setup isn’t caching as much as I would have liked. This all in all means 10/100 device should be ok to receive media from around the network.

Android? My biggest issue with Android as the background operating system is I’m not certain its as flexible as Ubuntu and XBMC is still in beta on Android. Because this is my main XBMC box, it needs to be super reliable and play everything. I do want to get the live TV functionality in the Frodo release of XBMC working too.

On top of all that… I’m also looking to firmware of the Edimax BR-6574N router I have to the classic DD WRT firmware, mainly because I want to sort out a VPN into my home network.

Yes quite a few changes… luckily I got to use up my holidays before April

Replacing my xbmc box with RaspberryPi

Fresh RaspberryPi

I recently bought a Raspberry pi from RS and it actually came before Christmas, so during the holidays I hooked it up and installed OpenElec after reading about the different XBMC versions you could install.

I decided to replace my aging Compaq mini desktop in the bedroom with the Raspberry Pi, because I mainly use it for listening to podcasts and every once in a while I will watch a piece of media (usually podcasts) on the LCD TV screen. So I don’t really have to worry about the might of the Pi or it not beable to decode Mpeg2 smoothly. Its time has come…

So from this aging beastie…

My old bedroom xbmc box

To this lovely compact package on my desktop.

My XBMC RaspberryPi with FM Transmitter

After hooking it up to my 15 inch LCD TV, I had to rearrange the audio to get output to the FM transmitter and to the local sound system (essentially to get audio in the shower, bedroom and kitchen). My hope is maybe to buy more Pi’s and hook them up around the flat to do local multicast streaming instead of FM.

I’m impressed with the Pi and I can certainly see many more uses for it personally. I think I might switch from OpenElec to XBian, as I want the ability to add stuff and maybe mess with the latest version of XBMC . Of course this is as simple as switching the SD card and reattaching the micro USB adapter.

Certainly thinking of attaching the whole pi to the bottom of my desk or behind the LCD TV, just because I can.

Toshiba LED screen

Toshiba 40TL963B

My Samsung LCD gave up the ghost recently and although its fixable with a soldering iron and new capacitor. I pretty much decided a while ago that its time for an upgrade. I bought the Samsung almost 6 years ago I think and it was one of those 720p/1080i LCDs.

I finally bought a Toshiba 40TL963B because it seemed to have most things I wanted.

Top of the list DLNA, Freeview HD, USB recording (well its useful now and then) and of course 1080p. You will notice I didn’t include 3D because frankly the idea and reality of 3D at home makes me break out in hives on the inside of my mouth. Funny thing is the Toshiba actually supports 3D but I won’t be using it ever. Worst still it has that turn 2D into 3D mode which makes me break into hives in places I’d rather not say.

I decided to stick to 40 inch because the next one up was 46 inch rather than 42 inch. It certainly looks smaller because the bezel is about 15mm deep around most of the frame.

To date I haven’t really drove the screen because my xbmc box is set to output 720p. The freeview HD tuner works well and I was pleased to be able to see the paralympics in HD. Things look great in HD and as the review says, SD content looks a bit smudgy. Its ok but noticeably bad. The review is right about that and also about the black level which looks like black ink (this is a good thing). Actually when I changed the Xbox 360 to 1080p and loaded up Geometry wars 2, it felt like I was play on a surface which was best described as the night sky.

Not even touched the Toshiba web TV crap except to get DLNA working, XBMC blows away everything Toshiba’s places item can do and will ever do.

So generally I’m happy with my purchase. I didn’t want 3D but the price difference meant I would only be paying an extra 30 pounds for 3D capability and I would also get higher refresh rates too. Yes it could be nicer about SD content but its only on Freeview SD content I notice it.

Boxee & Plex go for the cloud

In the old days it was kind of clear…

  • XBMC was the original and was a lovely but a little rough around the edges, maybe the kind of person you have to explain before taking him home to meet the parents.
  • Boxee was XBMC’s social and flirty younger sister who wanted to settle down and become famous.
  • Plex was the good younger brother who acted older than he was and went to oxford to hang around talking to hipsters.

Ok thats the way I think about it at least…

But its interesting that Boxee has started to slice of ties with the original XBMC community (too famous too fast?) and also started to making in-roads on Plex with there new cloud system called cloudee.

I stick with XBMC because I like the rough around the edges style. But I will be the first to say, I’ve got nothing against the cloud for home entertainment, just doesn’t really feature in my life right now.

Imagine XBMC with Leap…

Ever since the microsoft kinect was hacked to work with non xbox machines, xbmc hackers have been messing or modifying there setups to support gesture control. So popular was the idea of controlling media with gestures, even the BBC adopted this in the Xbox version of iplayer. However the limits of the kinect was being discovered by the XBMC hackers.

After the first rush for controlling media using your whole body, came the idea of using just your arm then finally just the hand. But the Microsoft kinect didn’t have the density to support this. Now leap motion have brought out their own kinect style solution.

XBMC users should love Leapmotion specially with driver support for windows, mac and Linux.

Supporting not only fingers but even pencils and pens too. all the things needed to really make the xbmc interface amazing.