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The iPad…You Can Do Better

SAN FRANCISCO - JANUARY 27: Apple Inc. CEO St...
Image by Getty Images via Daylife

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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Published on January 28, 2010
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An HDHomeRun with CableCard?

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.

Published on January 3, 2010
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XBMC Releases Version 9.11

XBMC Media Center
Image via Wikipedia

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.

Published on January 3, 2010
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Is the Telephone Dead?

Picture of a Western Electric candlestick phone.
Image via Wikipedia

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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Published on January 1, 2010
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Internet Video May Be Coming to MythTV

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.
Watch Recordings Menu under Graphite theme
Watch Recordings Menu under Graphite theme

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.

Published on December 16, 2009
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New Adobe Flash and Air in Beta

Adobe Systems Incorporated
Image via Wikipedia

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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Published on November 22, 2009
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MythTV 0.22 Final to Be Released Next Week

Terra Theme
Terra Theme

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.

Published on October 31, 2009
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Roku Video Player to Add Revision3

The Roku Video Player(formerly Roku Netflix Player) will soon be adding the popular and free Revision 3 line of shows to its devices.
Currently, the player supports Netflix Streaming, Amazon Video-On-Demand, and MLB.TV, all subscription or pay-per-view services. The Revision3 functionality will be the first free service for the inexpensive little box that could.

The Revision 3 stable of shows, with their newest as an exception, are all non-fiction shows, geared at various interest groups, and will be offered in HD-quality(or as high as your connection supports).

Updated with links to latest Roku boxes.

[asa_collection]Roku Collection[/asa_collection]

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Published on October 15, 2009
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Should You Still Wait to Buy a Kindle?

Image representing Amazon as depicted in Crunc...
Image via CrunchBase

Amazon is cutting the price of its Kindle 2 to $259, the second drop in the last few months. It is also offering an ‘international’ Kindle for $279, with shipping to begin on October 19th. Books downloaded internationally will cost an extra $1.99. This does free up a gap in the service, namely overseas, and connects Amazon to AT&T over Sprint.

Amazon has said  that Kindle books now represent 48% of total book sales when both Kindle and paper versions are available, up from 35% in May and 13% in February, but no statistics have been revealed on how many units have been sold, but Kindle owners seem to buy a lot of books.

So, with the latest price drop, is it finally time to buy a Kindle? Maybe. But we’d prefer it to hit around $200 before it becomes too tempting to resist, especially with the bulk of new e-book readers coming and Google’s E-Book initiative.

Competition produces innovation. Amazon has said it would not mind selling Kindle books to people with other E-book readers, which would be a smart move for the company. But either way, in another few months, the price will likely be where we want it to be. What do you think?

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Published on October 8, 2009
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Skype Updates its Linux Offering

Image representing Skype as depicted in CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase

Skype, long lagging in its Linux support, after nearly two years of nothing, released version 2.1 in Beta, bringing with it a multitude of new offerings. It shows that Skype is renewing its commitment to cross-platform support.

One of the most important and significant fixes is Pulseaudio support. Most distributions of Linux now use Pulseaudio, so having Skype not cause a conniption when it is use is a major improvement. Improvements in audio and video handling also improve the overall experience.

The reason it took so long was a complete rewrite of some sections of the code, and likely the lower priority placed on Linux support, which got renewed interest now that so many embedded devices and netbooks had been running it. They are working on providing a native 64-bit version, but they currently have a helper application to set up the 32-bit libraries on a 64-bit system so it will work.

They say there is more to come soon. We’ll be testing this new version soon.

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Published on September 8, 2009
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