All Things IT Blog

Netflix comes to the XBox and TiVo!

Welcome to the Revolution!

This week Microsoft rolled out Netflix instant streaming support with the new XBox 360 Dashboard (which they’re calling the “New Xbox Experience”) while TiVo is also rolling out Netflix support this week in their latest beta firmware update.

Netflix streaming allows people who subscribe to the (currently) $8.99 subscription to stream UNLIMITED movies available for Instant Online viewing to their XBox or TiVo for no extra cost on top of their monthly subscription. To sweeten the deal, Netflix also offers up to 300 movies in ‘HD’ quality at no extra charge.

So, let’s review the score. HD-DVD has gone the way of Beta Max and although both Apple and Amazon have offered rental and purchasing of movies electronically but are still bound to their respective platforms (Apple being iPhone/Pod and Amazon being TiVo) including the PC. I’ve yet to see either party partner with another distribution outlet which is expected from Apple but almost a shock with Amazon.

When I think about it though, Netflix is an obvious answer to the question of what company would be the first to provide movies to Microsoft for online streaming. Netflix partnered with Microsoft in the first place to provide online instant viewing of movies through Microsofts (at the time, new) Silverlight technology, which is a competitor to Flash (which popular video sites like YouTube use).

So now you have a company with an already established shipping and distribution system setup for physical media (both DVD and Blu-Ray) and has partnered with two ‘direct to TV’ companies who have in total over 30 million set top boxes already installed in homes across the WORD! Could this be the coming of the revolution?

I certainly hope so!

About six months back I finally decided to just sell my entire DVD collection. I personally was just done with physical media. I was tired of moving them, dusting them, having them take up space and never really sitting down to watch them. I mean really, I owned a little over 200 movies and sat down AT MOST one time a month to watch one. It got so bad that some of the movies were still in their original shrink wrap packaging. The industry had hooked me on the idea that I needed to COLLECT movies and I had come to the realization that it’s seriously a stupid hobby.

I became a personal flag barer for electronic distribution starting with the ability of renting a movie from Amazon unbox for only $.99 (when they’re on sale) but even then I’d have to wait about 30 minutes for the movie to buffer enough for me to be able to watch it the entire way through without having to pause and let it buffer some more.

Enter Netflix. Not only does it let me INSTANTLY begin watching a movie by detecting my connection speed and ability to download data at real time, but I can also ’shop’ online for more movies to watch while not at home using Netflix.com. This means I can think of a movie while at work or on the go, queue it up and watch it instantly when I get home.

The bonus? This is all covered under my $8.99 Netflix account that I already had. Oh sure, there are more costs involved, but let’s break that down (and to keep it fair, I’ll break down as if I’m starting with NOTHING):

- Netflix: $8.99/mo ($107/year)

- XBox 360: $199 for Arcade Edition ($199/year, first year)

- XBox Live Gold Account: $7.99/mo ($49.99/year)

- Digital Cable: $39 for 10mbit down/1mbit up (in my area) ($480/year)

So even including your monthly Cable bill, you’re only looking at a monthly average cost of only $70 or only $29 pr month if you don’t include your monthly cable internet bill! FOR UNLIMITED INSTANT MOVIE VIEWING!

That’s pretty amazing to me! I hope more people hop on this bandwagon and we begin the revolution! Down with physical media!

I’ll step off my soapbox now

Cheers!

What I’ve been up to…

Not that anyone who finds my blog will actually CARE what I’m up to, but it’s my blog and I run this dog & pony show!

My projects as of late have mostly been electronic in nature. I’ve actually had three projects on the burner:

Replacement of the capacitors on my Mortal Kombat 2 arcade machine’s CRT controller

This was far more time consuming that I thought it would be. Not because it took me an actually long time to desolder and replace the capacitors on the board, but ordering the CORRECT caps and waiting for them to be delivered took the most time. I decided to use Mouser for my components and they delivered as promised. I posted pictures of my extracting the CRT controller here. From what I was able to gather with some Google-Fu and the few English markings on the board, I determined it was a Wei-Ya C829HR CRT board. Of course there aren’t any cap kits for this board (for whatever reason), so I had to order all the caps (about 30) one by one getting their voltage and capacitance from the one’s that are currently on the board. The one cap that I wasn’t able to find (easily) a replacement for was this monster bipolar 75v 4.7uf cap.

FINALLY finishing my Replica 1 computer (which I posted about starting here… over a year ago)

I know, totally lame right? I’d like to say it got put down during the move and I forgot but I literally think it was just the time of year and I was tired of freezing my ass off in the garage with only the glow of a soldering iron to keep me warm So I picked back up the kit and finished soldering the rest of the 50-or so IC pins and fired it up. I got a response on the video port but when I reset I get random giberish. I checked and the oscillator is clocked in at 1mhz and voltage at the test points looks OK. I’m thinking it’s probably a bad rom. I’m currently e-mailing the project creator and he’s been very helpful!

Building a Blue Box

This year I decided to be Woz for Halloween (I figured Fat Nerd is an outfit I’d be able to pull off ) and I wanted to have a sweet accessory to go with my outfit of a vintage apple shirt, name tag and rockin facial har. I decided what cooler than actually building a function blue box! I found this schematic which seems to be the defacto one that everyone since the 80’s has been using. The down side? Exar no longer makes the XR2207 voltage controlled oscillators. I tried to get samples straight from the company, but no luck. I was able to find them through some IC resellers, but they wanted $30 per chip, so F’ that noise!

Again, I activated some hardcore Google-Fu and found this slick project by a website called ProjectMF.org. He used a PIC microcontroller to generate the frequencies which is waaaaay easier and makes sense in a more modern world I used his schematics and again ordered the parts from Mouser. I was able to solder together the power supply portion and will fire up the PIC programmer later this week! Super cool!

So anyways, I haven’t been hacking away on the code or software projects lately but I find my creativitiy comes and goes through phases. I’m just in a hardware one right now, but I’m sure sooner or later I’ll fire up Visual Studio again

Cheers!

Not to bring politics into my blog..

I figured I should say something on the topic of the recent “Keating Five scandal” that’s been sweeping across the blog-o-sphere and what people are saying about it.

To be outright honest, I’m a Democrat and I’ll be voting for Obama/Biden this November.

I’ve known about the “Keating Five scandal” for a long time and I even told my wife about it early on in the election and pondered if it’d be brought back to light before election day. She laughed and said that the 90’s is ancient history in politics

Say what you want about it, but the fact of the matter is that John McCain -WAS- investigated by the Senate Ethics Committee for his involvement in the Savings and Loan crisis. This isn’t hear say or guilt by association, but documented proof and evidence that he was personally involved with Charles H. Keating during his time at Lincoln Savings & Loan scandal.

Period.

Here’s a link if you want more information on the topic:

http://www.keatingeconomics.com/

Just watch it and learn the FACTS. Even the ‘CNN Truth Squad‘ analized the claim and said that the facts presented by the Obama campaign are true.

Decide for yourself.

This is all you’ll hear from me on the issue

Cheers!

Apple Genius Playlist — It’s like Pandora for your IPod Tunes!

I finally took the time last night to setup the Genius Playlist option for my iPhone. Basically the Genius playlist option now lets Apple generate a playlist with songs in the same fashion that Pandora does for it’s Internet Radio streams.

For example, I selected the new Ben Folds song Hiroshima and it created the following playlist based on the songs that are on my iPod:

1. Ben Folds - Hiroshima
2. William Shatner - It Hasn’t Happened Yet
3. Counting Crows - A Murder of One
4. Weezer - Only In Dreams
5. R.E.M. - Bad Day
6. Beck - Loser
7. The Offspring - Hammerhead
8. Cake - The Distance
9. Tom Petty - The Waiting
10. Ben Folds - Give Judy My Notice
11. Blues Traveler - Hook
12. Steve Miller Band - Take The Money and Run
13. Beck - Where It’s At
14. They Might Be Giants - Particle Man
15. Counting Crows - Raining in Baltimore
16. Weezer - Surf Wax America
17. R.E.M. - Imitation of Life
18. Oasis - Hey Now!
19. Green Day - Long View
20. No Doubt - Spider Webs
21. Disturbed - Down With the Sickness
22. Ben Folds - Rock This Bitch
23. Tom Petty - American Girl
24. Beck - Devil’s Haircut
25. William Shatner - That’s Me Trying

So as you can see, not only do I have a pretty diverse selection of music on my iPhone but the Genius Playilst generation is pretty smart! Big ups to Apple adding this because it’s 2008 and the ’shuffle’ feature is soooooo 1995

I suggest everyone give it a shot! It does take a bit of time though. My modest selection of ~600 took about ten minutes to generate the information for. I’m not sure if this had anything to do with data transfer speeds because I was using my MacBook Pro over wireless while the music resided on my NAS.

Also as an additional point I have to also say that I’m a big fan of the new Ben Folds album, Way To Normal. This is probably one of the more FUN records he’s put out since Rockin’ The Suburbs in 2001. A few choice tracks are (of course) Hiroshima and also Bitch Went Nuts.

Also as a little window into my life, Ben Folds - The Luckiest was our wedding song. It WAS going to be Andrew W.K. - Really In Love … but we changed it at the last minute in an effort to not take years off my in-laws life

Good News Everyone!

I finally got off my butt and purchased an actual web hosting account!

I felt bad that I kept mooching off my friends bandwidth and had to keep asking them for help in setting up my services and whatnot. This way is going to be much better!

Also, I thought I’d pimp out the name of my web host because so far I’ve been super pleased with the service. The company is InMotion Hosting and what totally sold me on them was that they offered a hosting package with freakin unlimited bandwidth and storage for only $8.95/mo! This was dirt, dirt cheap compared to other hosts. Check them out if you’re looking for some sweet affordable web hosting.

I also Google-Fu’d for a bit and found a grip of positive reviews! So here’s hoping!

Cheers!

Does a DVD player that outputs 480i over HDMI really need to be more than $100?

I mean seriously!

There is no simpler a solution than a DVD player that outputs the 480i signal decoded from the DVD to an HDMI output. There’s no processing, no deinterlacing, no scaling. Just decode it and output it. Bam! Done!

My current home theater is based around a Denon AVR-2308CI Receiver which handles all my video processing thanks to it’s magical voodoo (and a DCDi video processor :P). When searching for a DVD player to solve my previously mentioned DVD watching dilemma, I wanted just a simple DVD player that can output 480i over HDMI. Why should I waste my money on an upconverting DVD player when my receiver can do the same function (and probably better). Seemed simple, right?

WRONG!

It seems the internet defacto DVD player that does 480i is the Oppo Digital DV-980H which weighs in at $169 MSRP! :( There are a couple other options as well, including the previous Oppo Digital DVD player model, DV-970HD which was specifically marketed as a ‘cheap’ player that supports 480i over HDMI. The problem you ask? It’s no longer offered directly from Oppo and it still sells for > $100 in the secondary used market.

An hour or so of Google-Fu later I landed on the Pioneer DV-400V-K DVD Player! Pioneers own website lists its MSRP as $99 and with some luck I found it refurbished through an Amazon reseller for $49! :) EURIKA! At last the lords of the Internet blessed me with a little devine intervention on my search results

I got to wondering after my pilgrimage to find this DVD player, why does it have to be so hard? I mean, if manufacturers like Denon offer Receivers with video upscaling and deinterlacing already included, why do they also sell DVD players with the SAME functionality? You’d think they’d try to offer a family of products that not only work well with one another but don’t waste your money on duplicate hardware that you won’t be utilizing. Denon is a prime example of this because even their ‘low end’ DVD player still carries an MSRP of $169 (and even then, it uses the built in DVD hardware deinterlacer without offering pure 480i output).

So as I said, there HAS to be a good quality family of products out there that are symbiotic and AFFORDABLE because they’re saving money on not having to waste it on unused hardware.

XBox 360 freezing while watching a DVD movie == SAD PANDA!

I’ve been on a minimalist kick recently regarding my home theater upgrading my receiver to an upscaling Denon AVR-2308CI receiver and then removing all components I never really use. Part of this process was eliminating a DVD player when my XBox 360 is (or at least should be!) capable of playing standard DVD movies. Sure, it only puts out a 480p signal but the Denon handily upscales the incoming video to 720p for output to my TV.

Sounds simple, right?

So of course now when my wife and I actually sit down to play a DVD movie, randomly it’ll just freeze the picture and appear to lock up. It’s not a hard lock as my XBox still responds to IR commands (open/close the tray, power on/off). At first I suspected the Denon receiver as it is taking the video from the XBox in using component and scaling it out via HDMI. Multiple restarts and power on/offs of the receiver and the picture wouldn’t unfreeze meaning the XBox 360 itself had locked up.

What the hell!

I’m sure there are some who are at this point thinking, “Your XBox is defective!”… I would completely and 100% agree (as I’m on my 3rd one), but I can play titles like Bad Company and Arcade games for hours with no problems, so I doubt it’s a hardware defect within the machine itself.

I suppose I’ll swallow a big ole’ slice of humble pie tonight and call Microsoft Support, BUT, just in case they find nothing wrong I’m curious if anyone else has had this issue!

Thanks!

Back Online!

Hey Folks!

Sorry about he exended downtime of my website. My buddy who was hosting the site had a major hardware failure on the box so I had to ask another friend who’s in the same datacenter to host my little corner of the internets on his machine for the time being!

I know, I have such a homless begger of a website (BANDWIDTH? DO YOU HAVE ANY BANDWIDTH TO SPARE?)… but that’s OK

So, back online! YAY!

Any new news? Not really. My major project at my full time job just finished but the school year started up again so things are a little hectic around my house. I’ve been trying to take time away from my home programming to get into other hobbies such as Astrophotography

Expect some posts on that topic and as always, if there are any technical issues or feature requests for applciations I’ve developed, I’m all ears!

Let’s take a dive into XCode and Objective-C!

So, I’m diving into the pool!

I recently purchased a MacBook Pro for the sole purpose of developing software for the Mac/iPhone platform. It’s completely unknown to me and currently the XCode IDE looks nothing if not completely confusing compared to the friently intuitive interface of Microsoft Visual Studio that I’m used to

What brought me to this point? Well, two things.

First, I’ve been wanting to dive into Objective-C for a little over a year now and started dabbling with it a while back on my old G4 Powerbook. I was impressed with the coolness of it, but being that I was developing on a G4 Powerbook, I was limited as by this time Apple had begun the mass migration to Intel based systems.

Second is that I want to develop applications for the iPhone. Not to make a mint or anything, more or less because I think I have some good ideas on programs people would use. Like how Apple provided the iTunes controller, well, hows about a WWWinamp controller for the iPhone? Perhaps one that lets you search your library locally on the iPhone without even connecting to WWWinamp?

I started down this path because there’s currently a program for sale on the iTunes App Store that lets you control your instance of WinAmp remotely… for $4.99!!! What the crap?! I was floored that the author would expect that kinda money for a program when there are PLENTY of other FREE alternatives out on the web (like WinAmp Remote, AjaxAmp or WWWinamp). I made it my mission to release a comperable program

It’s just going to take a month or so to ramp up on the new IDE and learn how to do SOAP calls and whatnot. Should be a fun adventure though! My wife begins the final semester of her Teaching Credential program in a couple weeks, so I’ll have four nights a week alone to myself to nerd out and gorge on Hot Pockets!

I have another version of WWWinamp in the works as well. This is basically some code modernization for sections that I wrote over a year ago. Updating things to use Generic Methods and whatnot. You know, fun .NET stuff

Cheers!

WWWinamp V4.2 Build 3109

UPDATED: Fixed the download link! Sorry I had the wrong URL in there

Well, as promised on this fantastic 4th of July weekend I’m delivering everyone a great new version of WWWinamp

Mostly a bug fixer with some improvements to make it easier for people creating their own scripts! There are several users active here on my blog who are creating AJAX enabled skins and it was confusing the rules as to which files were passed to the Scripting Engine and which files were just treated as is.

Well, the rule of thumb in previous versions was that if the file was consided to have a MIME type of “text/html”, it would be sent to the Scripting Engine. This pretty much meant only *.htm and *.html files. At users requests, I’ve added a new configuration key to the WWWinamp.config file (WWWinamp.HTTP.ScriptFiles) which allows users to list which files are actually passed to the Scripting Engine.

Also in this version, I fixed an issue in the WWWinamp.config file which would keep the WCF service from starting.

Because of these changes, I suggest everyone use the WWWinamp.config file packaged with this build and just set back up your default configurations.

If you don’t feel like updating your configuration file.. well.. your WCF service just won’t work and WWWinamp will default back to using “text/html” MIME typed files as scripts.

Here’s the full changelog:

• [HTTP] Better handling of malformed HTTP Requests
• Added more user friendly help to some of the most commonly reported errors
• Added ability to specify file extensions that are sent to the Scripting Engine
• Increased performance of the Scripting Engine
• Fixed issue with WCF endpoint being misconfigured in the WWWinamp.config file

Cheers!

WWWinamp v4.2 Build 3109 - Download (60k)

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