Atlanta ASP.Net MVC Developer/ Architect
IPTV
Plasma TVs do suffer from screen burn
Oct 6th
Just for the record: if anyone is considering a Plasma TV bear in mind that screen
burn does happen. When buying mine early this year almost all the press were
saying that it barely happened with old models, and is the same a CRT for the latest
generation of Plasmas. Well with pretty light use (we don’t even have cable!) my Plasma
is already showing a faint impression of the xbmc menu + pause/ progress box
during power-off.
This is no big deal for me it was caught in time and I set the xbmc screensaver
to stars with a one minute delay. The default is dim (to 20%) after
three minutes which obviously was not doing the trick.
Routers with Hard Drives? What a great idea
Aug 24th
Asus are the first out of the gate with one:
http://usa.asus.com/products4.aspx?modelmenu=1&model=979&l1=12&l2=43&l3=0
A big sell to me is: Hide one in your attic or coal house and
you have a theft proof network drive.
This device also comes with Bitorrent, ftp etc capable client and servers, although no podcatcher support which
would make it a done deal for me. Bitorrent support may help marketing,
but I the main appeal for many is an always on Samba Share – right now I need
a (noisy) PC running to share media between my xbmcs (the xbox’s SMB server implementation
is single threaded and cannot run in parallel with xbmc). Podcast support + SMB
server would allow me to part another PC for eBay (I am down to three
today); but without both those options I am skipping the ~$270 device for now. By
Xmas I predict similar devices will also pull down podcasts and IPTV via RSS.
Before this router appeared I was close to buying another used xbox (~$90 on
Craig’s list [Aug 2006]) and running a SMB share via linux on one. In case you
have not heard; it is now child’s place to hack an (original) xbox without a chip/
special game/ memory card etc. A used xbox makes a very cheap linux server
or 1080i capable media center. That reminds me I have some used
xbox games to sell on eBay… who has time for games anyway?
IPTV: Democracy Player
Jun 18th
Update (2nd July): Since this post I have reverted back to using Juice
Receiver which although not designed for video has fewer glitches. If anyone knows
of a more reliable solution please let me know.
IPTV is about where podcasting was when I started manually downloading podcasts in
the summer of 2004 [i.e. in its infancy]. Within only two years podcasting has made
a small dent in the nation’s listening habits, with high awareness in the high spending
demographics that advertisers salivate over. Will IPTV do the same?Already we have several aggregators; the one I recommend trying is Democracy Player.
It is open source and runs on all popular operating systems, but did not work with
on my install of Vista Beta 2.
Like iPodder Lemon before it Democracy Player installs
with several pre-selected channels, which just like iPodder downloaded large quantities
of utter garbage to my hard disk. I suggest deleting the pre-selected channels, clicking
on Channel Guide and using the iTunes like interface to select from popular listings.
As the following screenshot shows I am trying out ABC news, Ricky Gervis, and TWIT’s
h.264 feed:
This is early days for the software and this player does work perfectly as a media
server. I view the content from xbmc over a SMB share, which works fairly well but
all the media is deposited into one folder with often cryptic filenames. Hopefully
a future build will create a directory for each feed like Juice Receiver does for
podcasts. Finally it is worth noting that Democracy Player uses Bittorrent under the
hood so downloads should be fast – there are no custom port settings yet so I have
temporarily enabled UPnP on my NAT Router.