Gadget Wisdom

Many years ago, we owned a hardware DVD player. Then, over time, we dropped the extra device in favor of playing movies back through our Home Theater PC.

But Blu-Ray is a bit more complicated. We use Linux, and a group of intrepid individuals reverse-engineered the DVD standard, as no one would offer a licensed copy. At least until this past July, when Fluendo released a licensed DVD player for Linux. They have not yet released a Blu-Ray player.

Which leaves the reverse-engineering road. The latest versions of mplayer now support most of the Blu-Ray codecs. But that isn’t playback of the disc. That means you still need to rip and encode the disc for it to work. Which is where the problem comes in. There is a limited guide available for Ubuntu that offers some updates on what you might do.

MakeMKV has a Linux version, which apparently works for ripping Blu-Ray discs, even many BD+ encrypted titles. It will take them directly to the Matroska(MKV) container format.

A Blu-Ray rip will take at least 50GB, before post-processing down to a smaller format, which is a lot of hard drive space. Especially if your goal is to merely watch the disc.

Am looking forward to testing all of these methods someday, but will need a Blu-Ray drive and a sample Blu-Ray disc. Will likely choose to wait. Although we may choose to try a hardware Blu-Ray player to dip our feet into the world of Blu-Rays. We don’t really need to watch HD movies, as much as it would enhance our experience, but we want to slowly phase out purchasing DVDs in favor of Blu-Ray for new releases. Not that we buy any movies regularly. We save purchases for special titles.

We’d like to hear what other people think on the subject.

Last week, the Device Guru website was temporarilly overloaded due to the syndication of one of its posts on Slashdot about building dedicated hardware to run Boxee. Boxee has been getting a lot of press, not just from us.

For those of you who haven’t been following it, Boxee is a complete media center solution based on XBMC, which it is an alternative for. Both provide an easy to install media solution with complete support for most video and audio formats, as well as streaming. Both have full plugin support, so you can extend it to support additional sites and online content, such as RSS-based media enclosures to follow podcasts.

Boxee takes it a step further by integrating flash-based players into its offerings, allowing it to offer full Hulu and other flash-based player site support controllable by a remote, although rewind and fast forward are apparently still buggy. XBMC has a Hulu-plugin that uses direct RTMP streaming. Since this eliminates the commercials, it means if it continues, Hulu will likely try to find a way to stop it, unlike the flash player method, which is fully supported.

Every month, Boxee seems to get support for a new site, such as ABC, BBC, etc. They even ask users to vote on what they want to see next.

That brings us back to Device Guru, who detailed his goal of building a sub-$500 IP-STB(Internet protocol set-top box), essentially something with the form factor of a piece of dedicated hardware, ie dvd player, stereo, etc, and capable of delivering a/v content to a TV/entertainment system/home theater without monthly cable fees and such. One can get some dedicated prebuilt boxes to do this, including the AppleTV, which Boxee has ported its software to, but there are advantages to building a small form-factor computer and loading Boxee, XBMC, and whatever else you want to use into it.

The DeviceGuru uses an Intel MicroATX motherboard, and an ultra-slim case. You can go for a Mini-ITX motherboard, and go even smaller. But if you want room for extra memory, firewire, DVI/HDMI, digital sound, etc., and the horsepower to decode and playback HD video, you may need the extra throttle.

Boxee, as well as XBMC, runs best on Ubuntu Linux, and thus all the software is free of charge. Get yourself a USB remote, set Boxee to autorun on startup, and your device will be indistinguishable from a DVD player.

We have a media player of our own, but we opted for a MicroATX cube, like Device Guru’s, from Silverstone. The SG-02. It uses a normal power supply, and has enough room for high-end video cards and hard drives with a moderate sized form factor. We have another cube made by Antec.  They move well, they allow us to use spare parts from other systems to upgrade, and for flashy effect, we added in a Crystalfontz front display. Many home theater PC cases, designed to be integrated in this manner, include displays for displaying the currently playing program, and there is display support in XBMC for them.

Either way, for a variable amount, less if you have some spare drives, you can build a media center that will integrate internet and computer based video into your entertainment center. And it will offer a unique selection of items, many of which you cannot find on cable.

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Continuing our series on this topic is this checklist we’ve made up. Recently, there has been a slew of mainstream articles on people downgrading or cancelling their cable or satellite service in favor of alternatives. CNET reported on a family who dumped their satellite service.

• Break out a lineup of channels you currently receive, or could receive with your cable provider. We did it for ours in a previous post.
• Make a list of channels you actually watch.
  • What percentage of the channels that you are paying for do you actually watch?
  • Can you justify paying for it if you only watch a small percentage?
• If most of your content is on local stations, do you get good enough reception with an antenna and a digital TV and/or converter box?
• Out of those non-local stations that you watch, identify programs that you watch religiously
  • Check to see if these programs can be found online for free or for individual purchase
    • Hulu, Joost, Fancast, Youtube, Sling and the website of the actual network may offer free content. Right now, these sites have limited commercial interruptions, but as their popularity increases and the popularity of cable decreases, they may have to make up the ad revenue with more ads.
    • Netflix offers some TV content online as well as box sets through their mail program, and since many people adopt it as a TV/Premium Cable alternative, why not try it?
    • iTunes – Apple offers episode download for around $1.99 for SD, $2.99 for HD per episode, season passes available, as well as movies for varying prices. We’re not a big fan of iTunes. We find it too restrictive.  But for the shows you can’t find elsewhere and can’t live without…
    • An alternative to iTunes, as we continue our issues with the restrictive nature of Apple, is Amazon’s Unbox/Video on Demand store. They offer a downloadable player for Windows systems and a streaming flash player(which should work, even on Linux. They offer more downloadable movies than iTunes. They offer TV series from US networks, BBC, MTV, Bravo, etc.
    • Another alternative is Cinemanow. All three have the same basic pricing structure.
    • If there is anything that we’ve learned from our explorations, if you are addicted to the news, you won’t have any problem finding video content from various sources.
  • An important question, mirrored recently by TVSquad.com, is if you feel ready to adopt the cable-free lifestyle? Check out some of the comments on that post. It isn’t for everyone.
  • Torrenting – For TV sharing and such, it is usually illegal to download shows via torrent. Torrent has many legitimate uses(we use it for downloading Linux OS release CD/DVDs), but if you intend to engage in video piracy, that is a strategy, but you’re on your own.
  • Hardware
    • We’re assuming you want to watch your TV-like content in a TV-like manner. Those of you willing to peer at a laptop or computer screen and watch things probably need very little.
    • Computers
      • Not every old computer has the horsepower to become a media computer. If you are watching high-definition or blu-ray, you need a little more horsepower, although a lot less than if you are a gamer. Gamers wishing to use their media computer to game should increase their needs accordingly.
      • You can get a prebuilt Home Theater PC(HTPC) from various vendors. We may have more on this at some point, but we prefer to build.
      • If you want Blu-Ray support in your HTPC, Linux has limited support for it right now. You can always, if you go the open-source route, wait till it comes, if ever, and upgrade.
      • If you want to add in digital broadcast, you need a digital capture card. Hauppauge is the King of such cards, but they are hardly the only good company out there in this field.
      • If you want to output to a TV, you need one or both of the following: A computer with a TV out or a television with a computer input. The highest standard for TV right now is HDMI, which some computers do offer as an output option. It combines video and sound digitally in the same cable. If you have a DVI output on your computer, it can be converted to HDMI to carry video only. Some TVs have RGB inputs, and if your TV only has analog inputs, you’ll need a computer that can output to that to hook things up.
      • Remote Control – Some digital tuner cards come with remotes, but you can also buy a Media Center remote separately. This is a remote with a USB receiver that works with a computer.
      • An alternative/supplement to this is a wireless keyboard/mouse. Not everything, as we’ve complained, can be easily navigated with a remote control…websites for example.
  • Bandwidth – If you are doing all this streaming, make sure your internet connection can handle it. We would suggest no less than 3000KBps down.
  • Quality – Some things are not at quite the quality they’d be if on TV, especially HD programming. But bear in mind two things:
    • It’s getting there…if slowly. More and more HD content is coming online.
    • You can use your savings to buy or rent the box sets when they are released. of those series you just want more of. Face it, only a percentage of programming is worth watching twice. For that matter, only a small percentage is worth watching once. A small percentage of a small percentage…how many programs is that?

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