philomyth.us » multimedia

There’s a Boxee in my Revo

Emmanuel — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 17:19:58 +0000

Lately, the INOi MH720 that we use in our living room to watch movies has been showing its age, having trouble with new audio/video codecs and subtitle formats. I had been considering getting a new media player, but after looking into, figured it might be a better deal to get a nettop to use as a media center and as an additional family computer.

I finally settled on the AspireRevo 3610 and got lucky picking up the last one from our local Fry’s. It came equipped with 2GB RAM (enough for basic needs), 160GB hard drive (no big deal since using externals for storage) and an NVIDIA ION chip for graphics (hardware acceleration for HD video), along with an HDMI port out for both audio and video (easy HD connectivity to home theater).

The nettop came installed with Windows 7, which has and once again turned out to be a good upgrade. At first the network folder sharing was throwing me off because I was used to the previous Windows method. But after I got the hang of using HomeGroup [how-to geek], everything came together nicely. No more long USB cable running along the floor to transfer shows

For the media player application, Boxee came out with their latest beta, which does a nifty job of integrating local and web content to make a more complete browsing and watching experience. Basically, Boxee scans local folders and then displays the multimedia files with additional descriptions from the web, along with web-based episodes. It can even grab subtitles directly from opensubtitles for both movies and TV shows. Also, to keep from drowning in kids’ cartoons, I created a separate Boxee account to manage their content.

As for the remote control, the nettop came with a wireless mouse and keyboard, but that’s not very user-friendly for regular media use. I wanted to stick with our trusty universal remote URC-200 which has worked fine all these years, even with the different component upgrades. Unfortunately, the nettop didn’t come with an IR port. So I got a cheap media center remote with an IR receiver included. I used the media center remote to program my universal remote with the basic functions. Then, I found a program called Intelliremote which allowed me to control multiple applications with customized functions for each.

On a side note, I got to try out AmazonBasics when I ordered an HDMI cable. It was a good deal, came quick with Prime, and nice not having to wrangle with clamshell plastic packaging.

Of course, not everything is perfect particularly when on the “bleeding edge”, so here is my list of issues with the current setup:

Boxee’s latest version does not have the ability to manually add, correct or update media files and descriptions.
There’s some occasional strange resolution behavior when turning on the HDTV with Boxee already running in background.
Annoying ads on web episodes, but nothing to be done about that.
Flickr App on Boxee has been running slow, hopefully just a beta glitch.
BBC App limited by geo-location (what’s with cold-war era borders).
Easier customization of Boxee Homepage.
Latest Boxee beta broke support for embedded subtitles (i.e. anime not working)
Stronger parental controls on Boxee to limit content access.
The current remote setup has limited mouse and text input ability.
Windows 7 Homegroup folder sharing not backwards compatible with previous Windows versions.

Mass Media Disconnect

Emmanuel — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 05:43:51 +0000

[from nataliedee.com]

In the past year, I’ve noticed that I have become increasingly less aware of what new movies have come out, even the supposedly good ones that win awards. And I think what I am experiencing is a disconnect with mass marketing channels which primarily try to catch our attention through television commercials and now even through pre-showing commercials in movie theaters (I hate those).

This first started after we got our Tivo a few years back and we got in the habit of skipping through commercials. It got to a point where I didn’t even know what the new shows were on the tube, and had to hear about it through friends or via online news feeds. It seems kind of ironic that by taking control of what I am watching, I became disconnected with knowing what was actually available.

In trying to find an image to visualize this post, I came across this diagram from Ogilvy (a big advertising company, go figure, I guess I’m not the only one thinking about this) talking about “Personal Circuits”:

The way that we consume media has changed significantly from the time where we were all glued in front of the television set, to the present where we have all these different “personal circuits” from which to be fed with music, videos, pictures, etc. I guess it shouldn’t be all that much of a surprise that I feel out of the mainstream, when the mainstream itself is splintering into multiple channels.

I can see how this disconnect is going to become greater until mass media companies figure out how to breakdown their messages into meaningful channels that people want to watch. Especially now that I am barely even using Tivo, now that most shows can be downloaded. And who wants to go to movie theaters nowadays with all those commercials taking up the first 30 minutes and the hassle of it all. Then again, maybe media really does want to be free and we don’t have to rely on the big media companies to tell us what to watch.

Until this all gets sorted out, or some new way of aggregating, sorting and identifying media that I am personally interested in comes along, I’ll just have to keep my eyes and ears open for those stray pieces that catch my interest.

Product Review: Canon HG10

Emmanuel — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 01:42:11 +0000

I’ve been waiting a while to get a next-generation camcorder and finally decided to pull the trigger on the Canon HG10. Essentially, what I was looking for was a hard-drive based device that would record in high-definition (HD). The hard-drive based feature solves the hassle of transferring videos to a non-linear format (from tape to file) by eliminating the tape. And the Canon does both with a 40GB hard-drive and takes advantage of the latest high quality video format, namely AVCHD.

Hardware wise, everything works quite well. The camcorder itself is small enough to hold with one hand, but one thing that I realized is that a stand comes in handy, especially when making use of the 10x zoom. I decided to go with a monopod since it gives me the versatility of moving around and settled on a basic model, ProMaster 1700 Monopod.

I also found a great minimalistic strap which is length-adjustable, OP/TECH Mini Loop QD Strap.

On the software side, it’s disappointing that Windows Vista does not natively support AVCHD. But fortunately, I still have a registered copy of Pinnacle Studio 11, which does support AVCHD and also works quite well in Windows Vista. With Studio, I am able to edit and convert the video files to more common HD video formats.

For video sharing, I can use my original workflow and upload the processed videos to Vimeo. What is great is that Vimeo came out with support for HD video, so the videos that I share from the Canon HG10 are at a much higher resolution and the proper widescreen aspect ratio. The one limitation is that when you embed the Vimeo videos, they revert to a lower resolution, but that’s not that big a deal since you can always go to the Vimeo site to view the HD versions.

You can go to my Vimeo video page to see some recent videos:
Vimeo/emmfan.

Update: I actually finished this review back in December, but just around the time that I was going to publish, the camera’s zoom function stopped working. I took it into Canon’s repair center just before Christmas, and they finally fixed it a month later. It would seem that the camera is rather fragile, at least this particular unit. So we’ll see how it holds up after the repair.

Xbox 360 ‘Media Center’

Emmanuel — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 04:48:39 +0000

Ever since I got my Xbox 360 last June, we’ve had the most fun while playing Lego Star Wars 2. And now there’s another way in which the 360 has been adding to our entertainment value by way of a free program published by TVersity.

The 360 has a feature in which it can stream video files from computers over the network, but this is limited to Windows Media Video files. Now, the beauty of TVersity is that it allows the 360 to stream any video files, such as AVI, XVID and DVIX (with the help of this tutorial). This has allowed us to watch a whole bunch of shows on our living room television that had been stuck on the computer.

In the past, I had tried hooking up my notebook directly to the TV, but it was a hassle to connect and reconnect the cables, and the audio was limited to the output coming from the headphone jack (the 360 has digital audio). And both of our computers are too far away from the living room to be connected permanently. I also thought about setting up a computer as a dedicated media server, but it always seemed like more work than it was worth. Now that I have been able to re-task the 360 to act as a streaming media server, it’s opened up a lot of media possibilities for both video and music.

There are still some limitations to TVersity’s solution, such as having to watch through an entire video before being able to fast forward and rewind. This could be solved by having some sort of pre-caching / pre-loading of video files on the computer side. But TVersity is still adding features and functionality, so I am sure that the software can only improve further.

Going HDMI

Emmanuel — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 21:11:10 +0000

For my birthday, I got a new digital audio/video receiver to complete and bring together the different pieces of our home entertainment system which has been assembled over the years. I started installing it this past week and knew that I could get myself in a lot of trouble technically and socially (the family needs their Tivo and their dad/husband) if I let it drag too long. Fortunately, with some grace and patience from the girls and some web trolling for digital audio and video reference and advice, I finally have it to the point where I am happy with it.

I thought I would put down what I learned here in case I need to refer back some time down the road and also for the benefit of anyone that might be making the jump to a digital a/v system.

DIGITAL VIDEO
Gathering from the diagram at the beginning of this post, HDTV is not nearly as simple or clear (irony intended) as one would expect a digital video technology to be. Not only is it a matter of resolution, but then there’s the matter of progressive [p] or interlaced [i]. It really comes down to what each piece of hardware can handle and maximizing the quality as best as possible without creating undue complexity for regular use. The new receiver has the capacity and capability to make this possible.

The quality of the signal depends primarily on the connections, cables and encoding and whether they are digital or analog, and preserving the signal from each individual source all the way to the screen. So, at present, the highest connection / cable technology is HDMI (thus the title of this post), which stands for High-Definition Multimedia Interface.

HDMI, as its name would suggest, actually incorporates and combines both digital video and audio into the same cable connection. Unfortunately, real life is not so simple as to allow all devices to be so consistent and compatible. Here are a few technical challenges / lessons in going with HDMI.

The first problem was more a result of too many options offered by the new receiver. Using HDMI with the receiver, I could upscale (in a sense, upgrade) the video signals from each source to higher quality resolutions, the highest being 1080i. But when I did that, it essentially forced all the video to be widescreen, completely filling the HDTV screen, but distorting those sources which were produced at a different aspect ratio. This was fine if you didn’t mind seeing images that were out of proportion and as one web resource (HDTVoice.com) indicated, our eyes tend to adjust and filter out those distortions after a while.

However, after looking into the resolution quality discussion at HDTVoice.com, I learned that most analog video looks pretty good upscaled to 480p, and particularly with LCD screens, going to 1080i does not provide that much of an increase in picture quality. Fortunately, the new receiver is intelligent enough to not upscale those video signals that are higher than the target resolution. Another interesting fact is that component video should be considered on par with HDMI or DVI in terms of picture quality.

Anyways, once I settled on upscaling the analog signals to 480p, I noticed that my LCD screen was automatically changing the zoom mode to accommodate for the aspect ratio of the video source. I had basically two Tivo’s sending analog video, but I had one hooked up via S-Video and the other via composite video (RCA). The strange thing was that the LCD screen was automatically choosing a different zoom setting for each of them. It turns out that S-Video for some reason indicates a different aspect ratio. So even though S-Video is technically a higher quality connection, in this case, it turned out to be the wrong choice. Once I switched both Tivo’s back to composite video, it was much easier to handle the zoom settings.

The last challenge doesn’t have a happy ending but I was able to do a workaround. It turns out that with a digital video connection to the LCD screen, the closed captioning information gets stripped out. The reason I needed closed captioning was because at nights when the girls are sleeping, I normally turn the volume low and just read the captions. Unfortunately, there is no way to have the higher quality digital video and the captioning at the same time (at least not that I could find with existing equipment). I ended up connecting a composite video cable to the monitor out connection on the receiver directly to the LCD screen. So when I wanted the captions, I would have to forego the digital connection, route around and switch the LCD to receive the analog signal.

DIGITAL AUDIO
This was not nearly as complicated as the video side since digital audio for the most part has been around longer than digital video. I even got to use a cable that I had purchased 10 years before to test out digital audio quality back then. Let’s start with what worked first.

With the new receiver, I was able to upgrade the audio connection of the DVD player and XBOX 360 to digital using optical cables (yeah, go figure, optical for audio). What was additionally impressive was that the receiver could sense the connection type and also receive audio encoding information from the digital source to select which surround decoding program to use. Everyone says that you have to play the XBOX 360 on an HDTV to appreciate the video quality, I would venture to say that the digital audio output from the 360 is equally as stunning and necessary to the gaming experience.

Now for the confusing bit, and once again, it’s a matter of too many choices, or in this instance, too many speakers. Originally, with surround sound, it was a matter of 5.1 or 5 speakers plus one subwoofer. In the 10 years since I purchased my original a/v receiver, they went and upgraded the surround specifications to 7.1 or 7 speaker signals plus one subwoofer. I say speaker signals for 7.1 because in actuality, the number of speakers is more like 9 since two of the signals have dual symmetrical positions.

Anyways, I took the simpler road, and decided to ignore the two new audio signals, until at such time my living room can actually accommodate that many speakers in a non-intrusive way. I think you would really need a bigger room and probably a custom room and built-in speaker configuration to take full advantage of the digital audio technology, but that’s for some time down the line.

Did It Work?
When Rebecca first saw the remote for the new receiver, she was more than a little skeptical about having to learn how to use it. One of my objectives was to make it such that there would be little change to how we actually use the system via our existing universal remote, and yet still be able to take advantage of the new receiver and digital connections.

In the end, the only change in user behavior was to use the ‘off’ button to shutdown the components rather than simply pushing the ‘power/on’ button. As for the improvements to the audio and video, Rebecca commented that the video picture looks better than before, which is all the validation that I could hope for

I wanted to thank Rebecca for being patient with me and allowing me to work on the system even though I was sick and should have spent more time resting. And I wanted to thank my parents for offering to pay for the receiver as my birthday present from them.