Gadget Wisdom

If you’ve read this blog before, you know we have some very legitimate issues with Apple products, while accepting that they have some useful and popular designs.

The iPad is essentially a giant iPod Touch, with a 10 inch screen, and the ability to run iPhone applications. There are criticisms, many of which are legitimate, but like many things, many wlll accept it because they’ve drank the Apple koolaid and because it has those good features.

Some think it may challenge the Kindle, but while the Kindle certainly has its problems, the iPad uses a conventional LCD screen, which may create readability issues for some over high-contrast E-ink screen of a Kindle or any of its current challengers. As part of the launch, Apple will launch iBook, their own online book store. We look forward to seeing how this plays out.

Can the downsides, and Apple’s unwillingness to respond to public feature requests be overcome by the fact that it is a cool giant iPod Touch with a new E-book service? We’ll wait and see.

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Recently, Geektonic featured a showcase of a MythTV setup. It has inspired us to break out the camera and take some pictures of our own equipment. You’ve already seen some screenshots from our MythTV setup, but coming soon, we’ll be offering some shots and specs on our current equipment setup, as soon as we clean it up.

In the meantime, check out Rothgar’s MythTV setup, courtesy of Geektonic.

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GeekTonic caught this one before us. We’re big fans of the SiliconDust HDHomerun Dual Tuner. SiliconDust has great support, and is well supported under Linux and Windows.

The HDHomerun streams video, once tuned, over the network to your device. Even without the SiliconDust, we think this is part of the future of video. If this device added a decryption device, it would decode the stream and then stream it unencrypted to the computer, allowing access to all channels.

Hopefully, there aren’t any more restrictions beyond that, and they aren’t forced to limit it to Windows only. We could imagine they’d have trouble convincing Cable Labs that Linux users would honor the broadcast flags, but if it does what we hope it does, we’d have one on pre-order the day they came out.

For a long time, we wavered on the issue of whether to buy an e-book reader. However, after we got a lot of money this holiday season in Amazon gift cards, we wavered and considered reversing ourselves, even though we have major issues with the Kindle.

This holiday season, for the first time, Kindle books outsold traditional books on Amazon, the Kindle itself was the site’s bestselling product.

But even after this, we don’t think the technology is open enough. We didn’t get into music downloading until Amazon released a DRM-free store. It is all about the freedom.

Our latest contemplation, with the delay of purchasing an e-book reader, is to replace our physical classics with free books from the Google Books project, as they are now available in EPUB format, which can be read using the free and open FBReader. What do you think?

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On December 24th, XBMC Version 9.11 was released. It includes a variety of GUI improvements, and playback improvements, including support for RTMP video streams, which is the system that Flash Video players use.

Like Boxee, which is based on it, it doesn’t compile easily under Fedora(our primary operating system), easily, but has wonderful support under Fedora.

The most wonderful aspect of XBMC, which carried into Boxee are the plugins. A loyal community of scripters write plugins to pull in video and audio content from a variety of sites. The difference between XBMC and Boxee is that Boxee often gets cooperation from the content providers for their plugins…in fact, this is part of their goals.

So, give it a shot.

GigaOm reported this week that AT&T asked the FCC to eliminate regulatory requirements that it support a landline network and to provide a deadline for phasing it out. Essentially, they want to get out of the landline telephone business. Today, less than 20 percent of Americans rely exclusively on switched-access lines for voice service. So, essentially, they want to stop serving 1 in 5 Americans who haven’t switched.

Now, to some degree what they are asking for makes sense if they wanted to provide the same level of service digitally that they do over the old analog network. During the great Northeast blackout a few years back, the phone was one of the few things that still worked. Would that be the case if there was no copper network? Whatever you can say about copper telephone service…it has become very reliable, and AT&T’s profits from it, while reduced over the last few years, remain significant.

However, AT&T wants the federal government to seize power in this area away from the various state and local regulatory authorities and eliminate state requirements that a carrier serve all people in a geographic area. These are the areas where cellular service is spotty and internet service is nearly impossible to come by. Also, while Emergency 911 services on VoIP services have improved, it is still an issue. Every person should have the right to have a reasonably priced method of communication with the outside world available to them, be it telephone, internet, or a combination thereof.

If AT&T is expecting the government to force the elimination of traditional telephone service like they did analog broadcast television, we would hope the government response is for AT&T to come up with something just as reliable and deployable before any discussion can begin. Trying to make the government do their dirty work for them is ridiculous.

We still keep our landline service, despite dabbling in VoIP and owning cellphones. We have a hard time trusting big corporations, but oddly enough, trusting the telephone company to provide traditional telephone service is something we can do more than trusting the cable company. That is not to say the telephone company thrills us with their service either. It is just harder to mess up a traditional telephone.

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Earlier today, on the MythTV Users list, contributor Robert McNamara announced that he and Doug Vaughan(who wrote JAMU and the TVDB grabber) are working on a new plugin for MythT called MythNetVision.

MythTV has had Internet video plugins before. MythStream was one of the earliest. We never could quite get it to work consistently, and it hasn’t been rewritten for MythUI, and those won’t work under MythTV 0.22. None of these have ever been included as part of the official MythTV package, which this has the potential to be.

From their description, it would have the following features:

• Easy to Extend with Scripts so New Sites can be added. Adding a site would be as simple as parsing an API or site and formatting each item as an RSS article in the output of the script. Parsing happens in the background as long as the frontend is open to keep information current.
• Support both media which is web-only (by spawning a browser directly to the playback link) and downloadable (by threading off a download and playing in the internal player as soon as enough data is buffered). Also supports external players.
• Like other MythTV plugins, completely themeable.
• Compliant with the Terms of Service of the websites it uses and shipped with a number of popular sites already supported. Scripts would only be distributed that were totally compliant, but other scripts could be added separately, outside of the distribution.
• Two parts: An internet video search and an internet video browser.  Plans to include a “tree view” for a site by dumping the video
  RSS feeds for the site into a grabber config file (adding Revision3 as a fully browseable site would be as simple as dropping the RSS feeds
  in the grabber config).
• All existing grabbers return full screen, autoplay results when they are available and the API allows. When not possible, the best possible result is played.
• Downloadable media will be integrated into recordings.

There is a screencast video that can be viewed here. They hope to release by MythTV 0.23, but possibly sooner.

McNamara used the following sites as Examples of sites that should be very easily (and legally) implemented: Comedy Central, The Escapist Magazine, Revision3, Recent Apple Movie Trailers, BBC iPlayer. They’ve already included Youtube, Vimeo, Blip.tv, MTV Video, and TMDB Trailers.

All of them are very interesting. The Escapist just recently unveiled its app in Boxee at the Boxee Beta unveil, for example.

Speaking of Boxee…it has shifted its focus from media stored on a local drive to online content. MythTV has to do the same. It is a DVR software, and should remain so. But with more and more online content becoming available, it needs to address it, and offer ways for that content to become a part of the interface.

MythNetVideo’s design seems to accommodate for that. It launches external programs, or imports video, whichever it can. MythTV doens’t need to be all-encompassing, it can hand off control to other programs. But having that option allows it to be easily extensible, and that is what it needs.

We love the idea of the Roku Video Player, formerly the Roku Netflix Player. We’ve been talking about it from early on, and have used one, although we admit to not owning one(not yet, at least).

Today, Roku started releasing a major update for the box. It includes ten new content channels:  Pandora, Facebook Photos, Revision3, Mediafly, TWiT, blip.tv, Flickr, FrameChannel, Motionbox and MobileTribe.

Now, there are some disappointments there. These are good sites, but nothing show stopping, like Hulu, or even Youtube. And the fact they haven’t incorporated streaming from your own home computer is equally disappointing.

The Roku Channel Store, the platform under which these new channels were launched, hopes to become a platform for future development. We’d love to see that.

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Last week, Adobe offered up a prerelease of its latest versions of Adobe Air and Adobe Flash. One of the unique things is that they pushed out the beta for Windows, Mac, and Linux. There are a lot of new and exciting features for the new versions.

For Flash, they offer H.264 Hardware Video Acceleration for Windows using UVD2 for ATI Radeon graphics hardware, NVIDIA hardware with PureVideo, Intel GMA 4-Series acceleration support, and even Broadcom video acceleration support via their Crystal HD Enhanced Video Accelerator. Unfortunately for us, as Linux users, they didn’t opt to include Nvidia VDPAU or VA-API support.

For Air, there are a lot of new developer features that will increase functionality when developers integrate them into their programs. For the end-user, the system offers reduced CPU and memory usage, as well as support for features like multitouch.

Ultimately, Adobe plans to push 64-bit Linux versions of these applications. They have had a 64-bit prerelease of Flash for a while which was not updated as part of this beta. 64-Bit Air is held up by waiting for a 64-bit Flash build. No such flash has been released.

We look forward to Adobe pushing out equal versions of Flash for all major operating systems as a matter of policy. We hope they follow through and that more companies follow their example.

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As you may know, MythTV 0.22 has gotten to  release candidates, but now, the team has announced the final version, barring any new critical issues, will be released next week.

Since the initial release candidate two weeks ago, more than 50 updates were submitted.

We’re not sure whether we like the new default theme in actual use, but it doesn’t show of the possibilities the new MythUI offers, and is visually appealing. Our biggest issue was that highlighted items on the new theme have a light box around them which does not contrast significantly.

We’ll be continuing to cover MythTV and the 0.22 release, discussing some of the tricks, tips, and issues we’ve come across.