A few months back I moved into a new house.  Since then I’ve finished most of my unpacking and moving in but a few projects have definitely lingered.  Most notably is running Ethernet cable all around the house.  The issue is I’ve got hardwood floors in the upstairs so running along baseboards/carpet just isn’t an option, nor is running in the ceilings.  So my only option is to drill into the side of the house and run it outside and that isn’t fun either.  So for now I’ve just had a long Ethernet cable running through the main floor of the house.  While it’s esthetically wonderful I should probably come up with a better solution as clearly I’ll trip over it and kill myself soon.

Belkin recently announced a powerline Ethernet adaptor that is capable of 1GB/sec.  Yup, 1GB/sec.  Given that, I figured it was time to try these little things out so I stopped off a BestBuy and picked up a set (they didn’t have the new Belkin ones so I went with the Netgear XAV101).  For $129 a set they are perfect.

Setup took all of 3 minutes.  The hardest part was getting behind my stereo in the living room to get to the wall outlet.  I plugged in there, plugged in my office, plug into networking on both ends and DONE.  My first test was to stream a 1080p Bluray rip from my PC to my Xbox in the living room.  Perfect, not a single stutter.  Next I streamed live 1080i television (so uncompressed and takes gobs of bandwidth) from my Media Center PC to the Xbox – again perfect, no issues at all.  Wow.

So if you need to get Ethernet around the house and don’t have cable get a set of these and try them out.  Isn’t it great when things just work?

A long while back i got what turned out to be a worthless box that I thought would forever live in my closet, an AppleTV. I first got it with the hopes of hacking it to play DivX and other media but soon learned that was much harder than I expected. Since I simply hate iTunes and would rather eat glass than be forced to use it the AppleTV was of very little use to me. And yes I knew all this going in and didn’t care, I just wanted to play.

Well Apple finally released the Take 2 update for AppleTV last week. So yesterday afternoon I took advantage of my sick day off and updated my AppleTV to see what the new changes were like. Gone is the pretty scrolling interface of the first AppleTV, instead replaced with an extremely boring, square two column menu system. While this works just fine it looks like shit – very non-Apple if you ask me. But ok, how are the new features? Well the main one I was interested in (and will review here) was renting an HD movie from the iTunes store directly from the device. I’m happy to say this works well and is easy enough. You can browse through the HD movies and once you’ve chosen one you can even watch the trailer if you want. I selected my movie and for $4.99 I rented the HD version (their HD selection sucks right now but should be growing). Once I selected it I had to put in my iTunes ID information (which I should only have to do once). A few minutes after it started downloading it said it was available to view, a nice touch. It of course has the typical DRM shit on it, I can watch it as much as I want for 24 from the moment I start watching it.

So how did it look and sound? Well it sounded great, no pops, cracks or scratches. It also looked very nice, but not “full” HD. I’ve got my AppleTV connected to a 46″ Sharp 1080p LCD and while it looks very good I definitely could see some encoding artifacts and lots of banding in gradient color areas. I’m not sure what real resolution/bitrate it was but it sure wasn’t 1080p. It didn’t look so bad that I was upset, I’d say it looked like a standard DVD upscaled to 1080 – but a very good upscale.

All-in-all a good experience, if they continue to increase the HD selection I will definitely be renting from them again. Now if only it were prettier and if it only had a real remote, gotta get my Harmony 880 programmed to control it, I just know I’m going to break that little thing.

If you read my blog I’m sure you know I’m no fan of DRM.  I have no problem with the underlying goal of keeping people from profiting from piracy but in general I believe that DRM simply makes things more difficult (or costly) for regular consumers.  While I’m not really a regular consumer and am pretty out on the fringe when it comes to digital media I’m doing what everyone else will at some point.  So why did DRM cost me $85, I’m so glad you asked…

This weekend my new Bluray drive finally showed up and I sat down to install it.  Everything went great with the hardware install (took about 20 minutes to physically install it) so I quickly moved to install the software.  Once I got that installed and going I popped in my first Bluray title and sat back on the couch ready to be blown away ready to be disappointed.  And disappointed I was.  The disk started to play and the FBI warning came on screen (since I must be a criminal).  A few seconds later an error message popped up which lead me to a tool to test my system for Bluray support.  I ran the tool and it found only one problem, my video card doesn’t support HDCP (High-bandwidth Digital Copy Protection) – DRM.  So while my system runs great, my current video card works perfectly and looks beautifully AND everything I’m trying to do is perfectly legal (I’m not ripping, stealing, etc) I’m screwed.  I’m trying to play a disk that I rented in a machine that I own in my own home.  And because someone somewhere is afraid I’ll try to capture a digital stream of the 30GB movie as I watch it I have to get a new video card.  This is utterly ridiculous.

So thanks to DRM I still am unable to enjoy the $250 Bluray player I bought with the Bluray disk I rented.  I completely understand I’m out on the fringe here doing this in Windows Media Center, my point is if DRM is going to stop me from doing something that should be totally legal then how is this ever going to work for normal consumers.  The answer is it isn’t which is why we’re all seeing DRM slowly fall away.  Too bad it couldn’t have happened sooner, I really wanted to use the stuff I bought to entertain me, not give me another reason to bitch.

I’ve been on the fence for a long time in the current HD disk format war.  Being a huge A/V buff you’d think I would have chosen a format long ago and while I did own the HD-DVD drive for the XBox360 for about a week (and returned it) I haven’t really cared.  Why?  Well there just hasn’t been much content and I didn’t want to pick the losing format.  So why now?

Well a few reasons, namely because I think the war is over (or ending).  While there may be a few more shots fired by the HD-DVD guys (like dropping the hardware to crazy cheap lows) I think ultimately the decision of almost all the major studios to support Bluray sorta seals it.  It doesn’t hurt that Bluray can store more data than HD-DVD (50 vs 30GB).  So this weekend I threw in the towel myself and ordered a Bluray drive for my HTPC.  It’s supposed to be here tomorrow and as my first shipment of Bluray disks just arrived from Netflix I’m dying to get it installed.

While I was sorta hoping HD-DVD would win given how much I just can’t stand Sony these days I’m just happy to see that a winner is finally emerging. Of all my friends that have chosen a HD format (other than Ryan who won a HD-DVD player) they are all Bluray. So I say long live Bluray, HD-DVD it’s time to throw in the towel…

I’ve been paying a little bit of attention to Netflix’s Watch Now feature for quite a while, ever since it was introduce last year.  As I wasn’t a Netflix customer until recently (I was using Blockbuster who I recently ditched) I didn’t really get to play with this much.  Now that I am a happy Netflix customer I decided I’d check it out.

The first problem with the service is selection, there really isn’t any.  It’s pretty damn terrible in fact with one exception (so far), TV shows.  After browsing around I found two shows that I’ve been wanting to catch, NBC’s 30 Rock and Showtime’s Dexter.  There remained one problem, I really don’t want to watch these on my laptop but rather on my Windows Media Center edition PC in my living room.  This is where MCE Browser comes in.  MCE Browser is just as it sounds, a browser add-on to Media Center that lets you surf around with your standard remote control.  After a few keyboard entires (to put in my Netflix user/pass) I was happily watching the pilot of 30 Rock on my nice 46″ LCD TV.  Sweet.

While this worked it wasn’t a great experience (had to use a keyboard a lot, no playback control from the standard remote), someone needs to build a real interface into Media Center for this sorta stuff.  With tons of Media Center PC’s out there (no clue how many are actually used for Media Center) this seems like such a natural fit for these types of applications, I just don’t get why no one has connected the two.  Anyone wanna start a company???

Here I am again bitching about Microsoft again, why this time? Because they have decided to add DivX support to the XBox360 – finally. Then why am I complaining? While they have added DivX support they’ve chosen not to support DivX inside Media Center extender on the XBox360. What? Huh? Why would they do this?

For those of you that don’t use Media Center (I’d assume everyone reading this) let me explain the issue here. There are 2 ways to use an XBox for video – the first is through the standard XBox360 interface. You can go to the media section and stream content from Windows Media Player on a XP or Vista box. This is very cool for people that just have a few photos, MP3’s, or video files they’d like to play on their TV. In the past DivX support wasn’t included here so you either had to per-convert your files or transcode them on the fly – neither a good solution. So the recent news that Microsoft was going to be adding DivX support was very welcome for someone like me who has tons and tons of DivX video (DivX is easily the most popular video codec on the net right now). The second way to get video/music/photos out of an XBox360 is to set it up as a Media Center Extender – this acts as a frontend to a Media Center PC by bringing that interface to your TV through the XBox360. They’ve been doing this for years and in general it works great, you get almost the same experience on the XBox360 that you would on a Media Center PC – with a few exception. One of those exceptions is DivX support (and a few other codecs and features).

So the news that Microsoft would support DivX on the XBox360 was very exciting to me as I could stop using my Media Center PC (that can be flaky, like most Vista boxes) and start using my XBox360 for all my video. Nope, Microsoft has screwed me again – they’ve, in typical fashion these days, done a half ass job of supporting the standards. Why would they do this? Why would they leave the early adopters, the ones that have shelled out the cash for a full Media Center PC/XBox360 out in the cold? Really, I’m asking? Microsoft care to answer? Nope, didn’t think so.