Keebler/Blog

With my Xbox Media Center (XBMC) installed, I booted it up for the first time. First impression: “Wow, this boots up quickly”. It’s only takes 10 seconds from when I click the power button to the Home screen. That’s faster than my Tivo (version 1)!

Navigating around the menus with my Xbox DVD remote from my couch, it became quickly apparently that this is a really polished distribution. The default skin looks great, and the animations between menus are slick. You can even reskin the menus to look like Window Media Center or AppleTV.

From the “Video” area, I was blown-away by how many “sources” of video you can add.

Out-of-the-box, you can watch videos from the Xbox DVD or hard-drive, an FTP, or a SMB/Windows share. There are also some other weird options like ReplayTV, TuxBox Client, UPnP Media Servers and XBMSP Network Servers (an open protocol that boast a long list of clients or almost any O/S). To give you a sense of how polished this menu is, you can browse the machines on your network to look for SMB/Windows shares. You never have to type something in like \\192.168.168.2\YOURSHARE. You also never have to open up a config file on the Xbox via FTP. Almost everything can be configured via the GUI.

Using a SMB share, I set the default video location to a be my Movies directory on my Mac, the default audio location to be my Music directory, and the default pictures location to be my Pictures directory. I can now browse all my downloaded videos, iTunes music, and iPhoto photos right on my TV (assumed my MacBook is powered-on ).

XBMC can play almost anything. It appears to be using the MPlayer media player (my favourite player for Linux or Mac) so it can play Divx, Xvid, MOV, Mpeg, DVD rips, practically anything you can download! And it can stream all those videos right off your network shares i.e. you don’t need a big hard-drive in your Xbox. When I click on a video, it buffers and starts playing within 5-8 seconds.

Another nice thing about MPlayer that I’ve used in the past: it has no problem starting to play an incomplete video file. If you’re in the middle of downloading a video (linearly, not via Bittorrent), you can start playing in XBMC before it’s even complete. A nice feature if you’ve got decent download speeds and you can’t wait to start watching a video.

I have a Sharp Aquos 32″ HD LCD TV, and something that has plagued DVD-players and PVRs that I’ve attached is their inability to deal with the 16:9 aspect ratio. I usually have to resort to a combination of using the Zoom feature on the TV, and fiddling with the ratio on the device to make sure I see as much picture as I can. I hate a 4:3 image stretched to fill the screen (everyone looks fat), but I also dislike when I get a weird film aspect ratio that can fit more than a 4:3, but can’t fit 16:9.

XBMC does the best job of resizing video aspect ratios to fit my 16:9 screen than I have ever seen. From the first time I booted it up attached via component video, it has recognized my screen size dimensions and pushed out 1080i to match my LCD. There is a great settings menu where I can even adjust the overdraw of the image so I can make sure nothing is being cut off. Every video I play is always resized to the correct dimensions of the screen without being stretched. If you are watching a video with black bars encoded into the file (which is really stupid, but happens from time-to-time with a rookie encoder), it can even automatically cut-off the black bars for you and hit the maximum dimensions of your screen. I’ve never seen a DVD player that can do that

As for audio, I connect the XBMC to my 5.1 channel receiver with digital audio cables. It’s pumping out AC3/DTS 5.1 when appropriate. When I watch an Xvid encoded with 5.1 surround sound, I can hear the correct back channels. SHOUTcast internet radio is built right in. And check out some of the visualizations with translucent track-info overlay (with album art if you have it):

I won’t go through every feature of XBMC, but essentially, it really is a media center powerhouse. I’ve heard people say that it’s everything the AppleTV should be, and after trying it out, I have to agree. With an expanded hard-drive it easily matches the features of AppleTV if you’re downloading your own videos, and it does so without breaking a sweat. There’s no need to reencode the videos you download (and let’s be honest, with the iTunes library being so small, you’re probably downloading Xvid/Divx) before playing them on XMBC, like you have to with AppleTV.

The AppleTV mod community is hard-at-work hacking that box as well and I have no doubt that they will more than match XBMC very soon. With built in wifi, a beautiful form-factor, and updated hardware, I think the AppleTV mod community is going to blow-away everyone with what they can do. However, for now, the Xbox Media Center has won the coveted space in my media set-up next to my PVR. Only a convergence heavy-hitter (DVD + downloaded content + PVR) can knock it off its post. Maybe it’s time to give Mythtv another look

Everyone usually assumes I’m a huge gamer because I’m a Web-guy. The truth is, I never got into console gaming when I was a kid (mostly because my parents had some problem with it and would only get it for my bro and I if we were home sick). When I was just-finished university and job hunting — hell, when I was in university — I got really into Quake 3 (pretty much had to: we were on a wicked-fast LAN) and Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory (it was free and we could shoot Nazis) but after that, I never really got into it again.

So when I traded Mike for an original Xbox, I wasn’t sure what would happen. Would I descend into the gaming scene, develop bleeched white skin, and survive on slimjims and coke?

Turns out, no, no I did not. In my modern-living, smallish-condo phase, I packed up the Xbox within a day and stored it under my sink. However, having been a long-time admirer of the DIY media center projects (Mythtv in particular — that I have tried to install dozens of times unsuccessfully), I knew that one day I would have to try installing Xbox Media Center (the free, opensource media center for the original Xbox).

Six months later (which happens to have been last Wednesday), with WhyYouShould far enough along that I could ignore it for a while, I decided to check out what was involved with converting my unmodded Xbox to an Xbox Media Center. Everyone seems to link to this walk-through for “How to Go from Xbox to Xbox Media Center in 30 minutes”. The instructions seemed simple enough, and for once, I had all the components I needed except a copy of MechAssault that I found in a store’s discount bin for $4.99. I decided to give it a shot.

The walk-through covers all the details of what I did, but amazingly, within 3 hours I went from an unmodded Xbox to an Xbox Media Center. That includes downloading all the software images over Bittorrent and about 45 minutes of messing around with my Action Replay mounted in Parallels. Not bad at all!

With some glee, I booted up my Xbox Media Center for the first time…

Continued

I just hacked my Xbox last night and got XBMC on there, and I gotta say, “OMG! THAT’S F**KING AWESOME!”

More blogging to come, but check out some of the reasons I love it so

I ran across a little note about this phone service, jaxtr, in Wired this month. Basically, you set-up an account with them (as long as live in one of 29 countries) and they give you a widget (like the following) that lets people call you for free from their own phones.

It works just like Google’s Click-to-Call:

Click the phone icon or call link, and you’ll be invited to enter your own phone number into a special field. When you do so and then click Connect for free, Google will call your number almost immediately. Pick up, and you’ll hear ringing on the other end as Google connects you to the business you selected. When they answer, you simply talk normally as you would with any other call.

Check out all the details in their FAQ. It’s basically unlimited emails, unlimited voicemails, and 100 minutes of direct calling per month for free. Not a bad way to let people give you a call without revealing your phone number, eh?

Now, this may be an incredibly bad idea, but here’s my jaxtr widget. If you ever wanted to call me, or just leave me annoying voicemail for some reason, now’s your chance I’m in the Eastern timezone, so no threatening calls in the middle of the night, k?

Watching people twitter all over the planet in real-time is insanely captivating

twittervision

(Thanks Andre)

A bunch of people have been asking me lately how Easynews works, so I thought I’d give a quick walk-through.

I talked about Easynews a couple years ago, and later, their competition from Guba. Basically, Usenet is a discussion system that’s been around almost as long as the Web and is mirrored across thousands of servers around the world. Some years back, people figured out how to post binary files (i.e. images, movies, and programs) on it by converting the bits of the file into words, posting them in the discussion groups, then distributing programs to reassemble them into files. This has reached a new level with Easynews.

Whereas most Usenet providers (and most Internet Service Providers run one themselves, including Rogers Cable until a year and a half ago) make you reassemble the files yourself, Easynews does that for you via a handy web-interface that even lets you preview the content and quality of videos with screenshots from within the video. Easynews has several direct connections to the backbone of the Web which means your download speeds will pretty-much always reach the top speed for your Internet connection (I routinely get 700kb/s on my cable modem).

Now, I warn you, the search interface is in desperate need of a face-lift…okay, it’s ugly-as-hell. But it’s fast and it works!

Another weird little thing, the powerful search interface I use is, “in a state of active development. This is version 0.1″ and has been for the past 3 years, so they don’t link to it anywhere on the site. However, it’s constantly improving and features are being rolled into the regular search interface constantly. I don’t know how many developers they have, but the functionality they build is amazing, if not aesthetically pleasing.

Now the brief tutorial:

1. Go to Easynews.com and sign-up for an account for US$9.98 per month. You can even pay via a 900-number, mailing-in money, or hardware donation. Trust me, I’ve been using them for three years and they are legit! The billing department is also super-nice and you can cancel at any time (I’ve done that once too ). Feel free to ask them any questions via their 24 hour Support.
2. Once you have an active account, go check out how many gigs you have left to download. You get 20GB per 30 days, but you can buy more at any time (automatically, if you like). Don’t worry, any unused amounts roll over to the next month. You can even earn more by doing a survey every week, or donating your spare computer cycles to World Community Grid.
3. (Optional) Install a download manager so that if the file you’re downloading interrupts, you can resume it.
4. Now that you have some gigs, it’s time to find what you want to download. Go to their search interface at members.easynews.com/global4/search.html (trust me, you’ll memorize that pretty quickly). You can even search and download over SSL from here so your ISP can’t watch you, or download over SSL and port 81 for even more protection.
5. If you are searching for music, just check the “Audio” checkbox, fill-in some “Keywords” and click the search button to see your results. Once you found the song, you want, just right-click and select “Save as…” to download it to your machine (hopefully via a download manager). If you’re downloading a complete album, you can check the checkboxes beside all the songs you want, then click the “Zip” button (just above the results) to zip all the files into a file you can download in one piece. Click here to go to the search interface with the Audio options already checked for you.
6. If you are searching for videos, you can use a feature of Easynews called “autounrar” that unzips or unrars large videos into the AVI or MPG format they started in. To do so, just check the “Movie” checkbox, fill-in some “Keywords”, and put “autounrar” in the “Subject” field (so you only find the large-sized videos). You can then change your “Output Style” to “Hybrid 1″ if you want to see all the pretty thumbnails. If you’re looking for “smaller videos” *cough, cough* forget the “autounrar” and just search. When you find what you’re looking for, download it the same way you did for Audio. Click here to go to the search interface with a TV show search already set-up for you (just fill-in some keywords)
7. If you’re searching for “images”, figure it out yourself you pervert
8. Watch and enjoy!

Now, go have fun and be careful downloading copyrighted material if you live in a country with a DMCA (not to name anyone in particular). On the plus side, whereas with Bittorrent you’re actively distributing the stuff you download to other people (which opens you to a whole slew of legal badness) downloading from Easynews is a one way connection i.e. you’re not distributing. Don’t blame me if you get arrested because you downloaded something copyrighted. I’m just downloading Linux ISOs myself

Now that I’ve finally joined this Facebook-thing, and Facebook has image gallery functionality and an API to use it, why is there no easy way for me to dump photos from Flickr to Facebook? All I need is a nice bookmarklet or something to click a Flickr photo and send it into Facebook. I’m kinda surprised it doesn’t exist already.

Has anyone found one? Am I going to have to write one myself?

UPDATE: I decided to build it myself after all. Here it is!