Category: Tech

Now that HD DVD is dead and Blu-ray lifts its fists in triumph, my first thoughts were about how long it would take HDTVs to come down to a price I could afford, but now I’m not so sure. In my house old tech usually ends up serving in the bedroom until it dies or is replaced by less old tech. Last weekend saw an ancient Sony CD player and a no-name VCR replaced by my original Xbox and a fancy, but still obsolete, Philips VCR. Both of these are now connected to a 17 year old, 13 inch Sharp TV. This TV doesn’t usually get much love, but I was excited to have a way to play DVDs in the bedroom without using my computer. So I put in some Outlaw Star and discovered that the small screen didn’t bother me one bit.

Indeed, upon further thought, the small screen has become not only ubiquitous, but the primary way a lot of people consume video information and entertainment. Playstation Portables, iPods, cell phones, and YouTube all deliver video via the small screen. So why are living room televisions big in the first place? I can guess that originally a larger screen was intended to recreate the movie experience at home. The widescreen format that’s becoming the standard is a further testament to that goal. But it seems that the game has changed and now portability is trumping screen size.

Ten years ago, I would whip out a book to read while waiting for a movie to start, or riding a bus. But now I’m just as likely to pull out my iPod to watch a podcast, and all is well with the world.

The last few weeks have certainly been dramatic in the high definition format battle between Sony Blu-ray and Toshiba HD DVD. But after some high profile defections, HD DVD has made the Engadget Deathwatch. This is all interesting, but honestly I don’t really care. DVD’s work just fine for now and I don’t have an HDTV and no plans to get one in the coming months unless the price drops a lot more, or my current TV bites the dust.

I’m a lot more interested in getting a larger hard drive for my Xbox 360 which I’ve been using alongside the TiVo and in conjunction with my PC to watch shows and music videos from the internet. The disc doesn’t really matter anymore, except writable ones for archival purposes. So while I’m not too wild about all of the shenanigans that surely brought about the demise of HD DVD, it really isn’t very relevant to the way I see my entertainment needs developing in the future. I’ll still get a PS3 at some point, but it will be to play the games, not Blu-ray movies.

IBM says that Lotus Notes for iPhone is not ready yet, but I’m rather surprised that the product is coming at all. Ok, not really too surprised. Many analysts have written that the iPhone is not going to be adopted by businesses for this that and the other reasons. But business people are not immune to hype and cool any more than anyone else. So if traditionally staid IBM is bringing Notes to the platform, then there must be some demand for it, or advantage for them to provide the product. Apple isn’t likely to make any major changes to the iPhone in order to cater to business, but I can only hope that iPhones seeping into the business realm will spark better phones that copy the popular iPhone features (particularly the interface) which would be a good thing for everyone.

Over the last year I’ve been playing an increasing number of videos on either the TiVo or the Xbox 360. I’ve really enjoyed having a lot more control over what I watch and how I watch it, but there still remains one huge omission on both of these platforms. Where the f*ck is my video playlist?!>.> Just how hard can it be to make it possible for me to create a list of videos to play in the same way I can make a list of songs to listen to?

At this point I can only guess that the big media companies don’t want the home viewer to, in effect, become their own program directors. I’d love to be able to plan out the whole evening’s programming mix of tv shows, music videos, and movies. But I guess the media companies fear that I’ll be skipping commercials and totally ignoring their latest reality show or doctor-lawyer drama. Well, I’m generally too lazy to bother with the former (besides, one still needs bathroom breaks), and I’ve been doing the latter for years.

YouTube already has video playlists and my iPod does too. But I can’t watch either of those on my TV with the equipment I have now. My best guess is that TiVo and Xbox won’t be seeing video playlist unless Apple TV, which has the features I want, becomes popular. With a lower price, and now a standalone device, Apple TV might just fit the bill. Thing is, I’m not in the mood to buy anything else right now. *grumble*

Well, it’s official, in my home at least, fear of Windows Vista has resulted in a Mac sale. For the first time in over 10 years, I have a Mac in the house! Our new family member is a black Mac Book with 2GB of memory and a 160GB hard drive.

It’s actually a present (sort of) that I bought for my wife’s birthday. Her old PC was becoming less and less able to cope which meant more time wasted fixing things. And she really wanted a laptop. Unfortunately, getting a new Windows based laptop, generally means getting Windows Vista probably on under-speced hardware. So with all of that “fun” on the one side, going to the Mac side looked pretty good. For the kind of things she does, the Mac with a copy of Microsoft Office, is a good fit. And now she can do multimedia stuff without the hassles we’ve always encountered on the PC.

The transition is going to take some time, but she seems pretty happy with it. Macs are what we both used in college. I still need to stay on the PC for professional reasons, but I definitely have my eye out for an excuse to get a Mac for myself! ^_^

Update: Mac sales are up 40% over last year. Perhaps Vista really is pushing some to the Mac side!

After all of the trouble I’d had with Windows Movie Maker during my last project, I decided to upgrade my tools. In addition to this, I’m planning to save my videos primarily in H.264 mp4 format which is higher quality than wmv and is compatible with my PSP and iPod.

Unfortunately, despite what the fall update said, I was not able to play the mp4 videos on my PC on the Xbox 360 in the living room. A lot of tinkering and searching finally lead me to a blog article in A Red Herrings Space which had the instructions I needed. Thanks Red Herring!

Stream H.264/MP4 from Windows Media Player 11 to Xbox 360/Playstation 3

When all of the talk about this box or that box taking over your living room and being the mother of all multimedia got started, I could only greet with yawns of indifference at best. I really didn’t want everything ending up in one box (including my PC), and hooked up to the living room TV. Afterall, I’ve got some things on the PC that need to just stay there…heh heh…like all of my code, yeah, that’s right… But I keep an open mind, and like to at least try new things before passing judgment.

I have my TiVo box to thank for my latest discoveries because the 2.5.1 update to TiVo Desktop got me exploring new ways to stream video on my PC to the TV in the living room. Well, I’ve not been over impressed, actually, not impressed at all with TiVo Desktop. TiVo Desktop feels clunky and lacks a number of features unless you spend $25 for the plus version. I found it particularly annoying that the 2.5.1 update seems to imply that you can stream a bunch of new formats, including wmv, in the free version. I wasted a lot of time before discovering that I would need the plus version for that. Even if it was included, I have a series two TiVo which is so underpowered that you really have to wait for the whole thing to download to avoid stop and go playback. TiVo is good enough for its main job as a personal DVR, but really sucks for the added on multimedia extras.

So in comes my Xbox 360. The most recent Xbox Live Update included support for a number of additional media formats and since I’d not used it for anything but games, I decided to see if it could easily get my PC bound media playing on the big screen of the living room TV (sadly, still SD) and saving me the time and trouble of burning DVDs.

I was not disappointed. Right now it plays everything I have except a couple of oddball DivX encoded videos (plays other DivX okay) and, of course, music from the iTunes store. I was so happy with it that I’ve not touched any games on it for some time, instead using the time to give my PC media a living room airing out so to speak. No more lengthy transcoding! Yay!

Bottom line, TiVo had better watch its back. Outside of being a DVR, my 360 did everything better than my TiVo. If DVR functions are added plus a comparable TV scheduling service, getting the 120GB hard disk for the 360 might be looking pretty good. TiVo is already in partnerships to add their software and service to 3rd party cable boxes. If they’re smart, they’ll also be exploring ways to get on the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 because after what I’ve seen, the multimedia functions of these powerful games consoles will eat them alive. If these boxes become powerful DVRs as well, it could be game over for TiVo.

Here’s some pure geek gold from xkcd. Just a reminder to us pros to never trust user input! It reminds me of the story behind the naming of Slashdot.

As I had hoped, the attack of the iPhone killers has begun. Verizon has fired the first shot with its soon to be released LG Voyager. First, this is a nice looking phone with a buttload of features, but iPhone killer it is not. Indeed, I’m not really sure that is the true intention anyway. The LG Voyager has features that I think are designed to keep the Verizon faithful, well, faithful. As long as the interface works well, and the phone comes in at a price point less than the iPhone, it will make a lot of people happy. I’m just happy that the popularity of the iPhone is starting to grace the whole US market with better phones through competition. Now if we could just get rid of that nasty locked phone business and long term contracts, then we could all ascend to cell phone Nirvana.

In the meantime, if Verizon really wants to move this phone, they need to hit us with some really sweet deals. I, for one, just bought a new phone a few months ago. So by the usual rules of the game, switching phones for me would be an expensive proposition. I might be persuaded to go with a Voyager, with the right deal. I like the hidden keyboard, and if the web browser is good, the Voyager may be just what I’ve been looking for. But without some incentive, I’ll probably continue to wait for the next version of the iPhone, and hopefully a wider range of providers.

I’ve been working a bit with RSOAP and one of the required packages is SOAPpy which unfortunately does not appear to be actively supported anymore. Attempts to compile SOAPpy on Windows or in Cygwin always resulted in the following error.

SyntaxError: from __future__ imports must occur at the beginning of the file

I’m no Python expert, but I managed to fix this by placing the following line,

from __future__ import nested_scopes

before any executed statements in the file, including the ident= statement. This had to be done in 3 files in the SOAPpy subdirectory.

Client.py
Types.py
Server.py

Doing that allowed me to build and install SOAPpy 0.12.0 on Windows XP. I haven’t checked this on Linux yet, but my guess is that this fix should work there since I think it is due to changes in Python going from version 2.3 to 2.5.

I’m passing this on here in case anyone else runs into this problem since googling it didn’t turn up any solutions for me in my own searches.