The new Walt Disney movie ‘Enchanted’ is a real nice, quality movie to take your kids to see. I really liked it and thoroughly recommend it if you have kids (and even if you don’t). Its just a well put together feel good movie.
January 2, 2008
June 27, 2007
BBC iPlayer
Today the BBC announced on the news that they will release the on-demand iPlayer so licence payers can watch programmes up to 7 days after broadcast free of charge on their PC Unfortunately my demographic of non-ethnic, male professional, IT aware meant I couldn’t take part in the iPlayer trials, but now the beta will be available to everyone on July 27th. Like 4OD and Sky Anytime before the iPlayer will only support Windows XP SP2 as an OS, so my Vista Home Media Center still can’t participate in any of the current on-demand services available to me. The ITV version is coming soon, but I’m not sure what their criteria will be.
There is a darker side to this though, as both Sky Anytime and 4OD silently install Kontiki P2P service so that your PC now becomes a distributed server for other users. There’s nothing inherently wrong with P2P as a technology, but you are giving up bandwidth to act as an unpaid server for Sky or Channel 4, and doing so without being told or compensated. You also have no control over how much bandwidth you contribute and when its used. I will be looking into how I can take control of my bandwidth when I have time and will post my results. Not sure what technology the iPlayer service will employ.
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June 25, 2007
BBC Archives
We finally got our login to the BBC archive after waiting ages. I completely failed to qualify for a login because i was the wrong demographic (male, young(ish), IT literate and professional). Now I know this sounds really bad, but in an inspirational moment I signed up Vicki and she met the demographic criteria (being female made the difference) so now we have access. There seems to be about 8000 shows available including Eastenders episode 1. There’s certainly no depth to any of the featured series but it does show promise. I’m not entirely sure how far the BBC will go with this and whether it will become permanent. I am hoping it will become pervasive so if for instance I want to watch the 1978 British Grand Prix or Going live from September 19th 1992, I would be able to find and view it. But already Vicki found value in a play that is published that was shown only once that she could not get a copy of for one of her lessons.
So keep up the momentum BBC!
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June 4, 2007
Apple TV finally gets You Tube
I really like my Apple TV unit, sure it gets very hot and only wants to play stuff via a iTunes connected PC, but it looks elegant and the UI is gorgeous. So I was very pleased to hear that here would be official support for You Tube content from June (obviously later in June than now). This is a big step forward, now we just need official support for other non-Apple owned CODECs like XVid, DivX and Windows Media. Its unbelievably arrogant of Apple to pretend they don’t exist and force owners to perform long and expensive file conversions whilst simultaneously performing an incantation to prevent the conversion failing mid way through.
Yes I know I can hack the box to do these things, but I shouldn’t have to, Apple should be doing this for me and embracing the whole market, otherwise, how are they going to get broad acceptance of what is in effect a severely hobbled, but cheap Mac Mini. I just want it to work like it should work. You Tube support is a step in the right direction, keep going Apple!
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June 3, 2007
Philips EasyLife LX2000
I saw this advertised on TV last week and I couldn’t find a review so I went and had a look at one in PCWorld. It looked very nice and I’d wanted a home media hub to replace an ugly PC for some time now so, despite it being horrifically bad value for money at £499, I bought one. They also sell an LX3000 which has a bigger hard disk (250GB vs 160GB), double memory (2GB vs 1GB) and a processor with double the cache (couldn’t see any other major differences) but that was a whopping extra £200 and even worse value, and those are bits I’m happy to upgrade myself if need be.
I was a bit cautious because it ships with Vista Home premium which normally requires a Cray and 100GB of RAM to run at anywhere near XP speeds, and this was a weedy 1.6GHz Dual Core (think its a Pentium and not Core Duo, the spec says Core Duo but it has a Pentium sticker on the front) with just 1GB. However, I don’t want it to do anything else but be a media center, so I decided to go ahead.
Quickly got it up and working, but it soon became obvious that this is the real bottom end for Media Center performance with a Vista score of 3.8 (constrained by video perf). However, to my surprise the built in Intel graphics chipset did run Aero and at the full 1920×1200 of my 47″ HD LCD panel. I actually ran this through the VGA connection via a VGA->DVI converter. There’s no HDMI on the LX just a DVI.
So everything worked out of the box, just a little bit slowly. Its not too noisy, but gets very hot if its in a stack of units, so give it an airflow. The fan is on the bottom and they provide a stand so that you can have it stand upright, although it looks less attractive vertically.
It comes with a wireless keyboard with a built-in trackball which is the size of a marble and bizarrely light up red, at which point you can see its filled with glitter… However, you do need to plug in a USB transceiver for it onto the unit which is a bit Heath Robinson. I do like the remote control which feels good and works well, in fact, don’t use the mouse in Media Center, the combination of the slow speed of the scrolling the massive acceleration of the trackball means you will never be able to get to the menu option you want, always the one before or after, just use the remote.
One minor annoyance is that the IR port for the supplied remote control is external, in fact it’s that huge shoebox sized unit shipped in the original MCE SDK that looks like a bar code scanner from Tesco, and its very out of character with the rest of the package. One super-HUGE annoyance is the power LED. Its blue (but that’s ok) but its as bright as a lighthouse! and when on standby it flashes every second so when you turn the lights out you immediately feel like there a police car outside. Clearly any fix for this issue will look ugly (tried a plaster) so not sure what I will end up doing…
This looks like its exclusive to PCWorld, Dixons and Currys as the Vista build and even the Philips manuals have been edited, added to and branded by ‘The Tech Guys’, the trade descriptions contravening brand belonging to DSG.
Anyway, I quite like it overall, and although I know I could have built a better one myself, there is something to be said for just buying something complete that is just designed to do one job. The actual clincher to buying it was that my wife said she liked it … its also the same reason that the top wasn’t off it and its guts exposed within 5 minutes of me getting it home, shame!
http://www.pcworld.co.uk/martprd/editorial/philips-easylife-lx2000-lx3000-tv-package
UPDATE: so lots of people have asked me questions about this article here are some of my answers:
Yes It definitely does 1920 x 1200 using the DVI connection to my ATEC 1080P (1920×1200) LCD TV.
It is slow, just on the cusp of usable. Getting the extra memory would probably help a small amount but not as much as a better matched processor, maybe a 2GHz.
With media center running and nothing else it uses about 800MB of its 1GB RAM.
Its not at all noisy for me, I stand it vertically so the fan is in clear air. When I had it stacked with my Apple TV it got very hot and span the fan up. In normal operation its quieter than a Sky HD or PS3.
I have not found any way to turn the bright blue LED off at night.
No I can’t turn it on with the remote either, I have to press the button on the front to get it back from standby, big issue in my view.
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November 29, 2006
Bond is Back!
We went to see Casino Royale, and for once got some good seats, and i thought it was a great movie. I think the non-stop start contributes to a really positive feeling about the whole movie which perhaps isnt quite so exciting. Even though there were no gadgets in this opening scene it was possibly the best Bond scene yet. Well worth seeing!
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