nullstream weblog - Cool Tech

Do you notice any lag with the Wi-Fi connector when playing on XBox Live?

Let me ask you that question: Do you notice that I have any lag when I'm playing with you on XBox live?

Nah, it runs very well. The only time it has ever given me problems was in streaming high bandwidth recorded shows from my media center server last summer. But I found later that my Wifi router was dying. Since I replaced it things have been pretty smooth. When I move my projector setup to its final location however, I'm going to hard wire it. As much as I like 802.11G, I don't think it's going to cut it for streaming HD content in the future.

Coming Nov 22nd.

Link?

Here you go. I have also seen this date on other sites, and on the 360 itself. Nov 22 is the one year anniversary of the 360. There is a link to the official press release on that page as well.

I'm pretty excited by this, even if I don't use it very much. Currently I only watch a couple of shows on TV. Most of the time I just record them with media center. But occasionally I miss something, like this Wednesday when my power was out and I missed Jericho.

So the next day I had to buy it on Itunes to get caught up. That sucked - for a couple of reasons. First although I'm very happy that Steve decided to grace us with 640x480 content recently instead of that postage stamp stuff. But I normally watch all my TV on the projector via the 360. Having to sit in front of the computer monitor is a bit of a drag. Second, ever since the new ITunes upgrade the thing pegs my CPU all the time. Just bringing it up and viewing my library in list mode (no graphics at all) will hover between 80 - 100% (unless I minimize it). So we started downloading Jericho, and usually you can start to play shows as they are downloading, but when we tried that Itunes was already sucking down the CPU so the video would barely even play. In fact it got so lagged out I could not even close the video and had to kill Itunes altogether. Which meant I had to start the download over and this time wait until is was completely done.

The MS guys are talking about distributing HD TV shows as well as movies. This could be pretty cool if the price is right. Since it might be cheaper for me to buy seasons of the two or three shows I watch, than to upgrade to either digital HD cable or Satellite with an HD DVR solution. Of course they will need to release a larger hard drive to make this practical.

They don't list any prices, but likely, it'll be "points". Yay.

I have a season pass on iTunes for BSG and "The Office", and those files get pretty big: a one hour show like BSG is around 500 MB. That's a lot of data to suck down if you aren't on a good connection. I think that, and the original video iPod screen size made the initial video size what it was.

One more day. Time for a rumor update. Yes of course points will be the currency. Rumor says that Movies will be rental only at around 4.00 equiv. After download you have a limited amount of time to watch the flick before it expires (14 days I think). Once you hit play you have 24 hours to watch it as many times as you can / want. TV will be purchase only at around 3.00 equiv. I hope the TV turns out to be cheaper. It would be good to compete with Apple's price. The current uproar is more about hard-drive size than price however. The 360's 20G drive won't hold that much HD content. One way that MS is going to offset this is that they will allow unlimited downloads of the content you own. So there is no big reason to hoard all the shows, watch and delete. Download and watch again in the future. Just like Audible. (Are you listening Apple?) Of course indications are still pointing towards a larger HD option as well. Although I expect it will be a pain to transfer all your existing save games etc. from your old drive to the new one. (I wish they would just support downloading to an external USB drive). One use case scenario I heard mentioned was that you could download a show, then remove the drive and take it to your friends house to watch on their 360.

Why not just allow the Xbox to save paid content to and stream it from a Media PC (with its nice 500 GB disk)? They could certainly DRM up the files if necessary, but any determined hacker could probably get them off the 360 disk anyway. That certainly seems more reasonable than re-downloading HD movies.

Yeah I agree that would be pretty cool. And who knows, maybe they will get there with Vista and Media player 11. I hear the Vista gaming experience is supposed to be like Xbox Live - so maybe the marketplace will show up as well.

But for now I can see why they would opt for a complete stand alone solution. You can buy, download and watch movies from your couch, no computer required.

I took a quick look. The interface is very nice and easy to use. It looks like they have 45 movies available and around 47 TV shows. They also offer music videos and trailers etc. Currently the servers are very full so downloads are pretty slow. Also the video sizes are large so we are going to need another storage solution soon. 2G for an HD TV show, and 6G for an HD movie typical.

Here is the pricing breakdown in dollars:
TV: $2 SD, $3 HD
Library Movies: $3 SD, $4.50 HD
New releases: $4.00 SD, $6.00 HD

My understanding is that Apple and Sony are going Blu-ray, so the format wars have just begun. $200 for the HD drive sounds reasonable if Netflix gets more selection (it seems to be all older, big name films at the moment) and even if Blu-ray eventually wins.

However, I refuse to purchase any HD / Blu-ray DVDs until the format war is decided. My family got burned by Beta, and while it was reasonably cheap to replace the machine, the video library was not.

The nice thing about Netflix is if you tell them you have an HD-DVD drive they will ship you the HD version of any title in your queue if it is available - DVD if it is not.

Other than playing HD-DVDs, what will this drive do? Will there be super high-def games?

My understanding is no.
All games will continue to be developed on the existing standard - DVD media. Actually this makes sense. They went with what was readily available at the time - DVD. This add on approach to HD movies, while ugly and clunky, is low risk and only incremental cost for consumers. And if Blueray wins the format war, oh well, they will just release a Blueray add on drive.

Joel has a good article that talks about the non-replaceable battery in the iPods.

Ok I get it, he really really loves the Ipod. And I just got tricked into reading another Joel article, since the Ipod battery reference was at the bottom. -Good article though.

yawn. Yet another mp3 player technically superior to the ipod that offers a better value propisition. And which won't make a dent in the iPod market share because the mass market isn't calculating the mb/$ ratio or TCO assuming one battery replacement. The mass market is buys a story.

Thing is: Sandisk is currently number two in the mp3 player market (abeit a distant number 2). I bet these devices actually do make a dent in Apple's market share. I personally own an early Sandisk (and use my wife's Nano from time to time), so I know that the value proposition is wildly in favor of the Sandisk devices. The masses will eventually clue in.

To answer George's comment: Yes the mass market buys a story. But surely Apple can't be the only one who can tell a story.

I have also heard that Sandisk is in 2nd, I'm not sure how they got their though. How is it that Creative blew things so poorly with the lead that they had?

Does it support group chat?

You wish. I guess they'll get to it eventually.

Unlike Microsoft, Apple or Google, it appears that Sony is a bunch of companies run under the same name. Why aren't some of these features in the PSP for example? Or how Sony computers regularly gets into fights (over DRM, etc) with Sony Music & Pictures. I'm not sure these guys have any strategy except 'random'. (And nope, I wouldn't buy it, I'm waiting for iPhonePod).

It looks like it might be kind of cool for kids... if it was around $100, or supported cellular too.

With the DS having Opera and voice chat over wifi, and the PSP with a sweet screen and games, it's hard to imagine where this fits in.

Why didn't they just come out with a "PSP Chat(TM)" that was either a new version of PSP with keyboard, or just a slide out keyboard attachment for the PSP?

See what I mean about Sony fighting themselves?

Wow, pretty crazy.

You mean the holy grail of bookmark synch that we are looking for! Sage uses RSS feeds in your bookmarks, so this could also be a good way to synch RSS feeds without using a web based reader. It synchs the history too, so it should know what you've read.

I just wonder how tricky things like simultaneous use of two synched browsers will work (like if you're at home and logged in on remote access to work).

I've been using Sage religiously on my home Windows machine up until a week ago. I've never been able to get it to work on my Mac: it would install, but it would never detect RSS feeds on a page. Very annoying.

For the last week or so, I've been using Google Reader since it keeps all state on the server (and by definition, you have to be connected to the net for reading RSS to work). The UI has grown on me, although I wasn't too impressed when it first came out. Now I can pick up where I left off in my RSS feeds regardless of which machine I'm using, which is a really nice thing. The other useful feature is being able to "star" an entry, like in Gmail, so you can re-read the star'd entries anytime later. I'm sure that most other online readers offer a similar feature set.

This, combined with server-side storage for bookmarks and cookies is great, no more manual synching.

<TinfoilHat>All you cookies are belong to Google.</TinfoilHat>

Well the first thing I discovered is that I need to really organize my bookmarks better. My bookmarks are a real mess now that they are all merged together. It will take some work the clean it all up, but it should be nice when I'm done. I'm also starting to think that I won't sink my work machine to my home machine. My work bookmarks contain a lot of local intrAnet links and stuff specific to work. At least I don't think I want that stuff merged in at the same 'level' as my other bookmarks.

To answer the question about how sage deals with simultaneous use - it doesn't. You must 'log on' in one browser and then the other says that you are disconnected. You must then log back on in the first browser to get any changes that happened.

Also, I had still been using the Sage RSS reader extension to Firefox and Google did not sync those bookmarks very well. Now my reader is empty.

Are your blog bookmarks still somewhere in your bookmarks tree? The firefox update I did before the current one nuked the settings for all my extensions (including my entire list of saved tab sets). I still had my bookmarks though, so I just re-pointed sage at the right bookmark subfolder and it was back in action.

I'm finding that tab sync seems to be disabled if you are using session manager. Probably assumes you want to do that yourself. But if I disable session manager, then it syncs tabs.

You don't have to close the browser. If you move from your 1st machine to a 2nd and open Firefox it will 'log you out' of the 1st machine. The new firefox will then give you the option to open your previous tabs. You can then open some new tabs and you can pull them over to the 1st by 'reconnecting' or logging in which will log you out (disconnect you) from your 2nd machine.
The 'connect' logic is a little bit goofy but it lets you control when to update your tabs.

When I installed the Google plugin, it recognized that I was running session saver and said that it might cause problems with the Google plugin. It asked if I wanted to disable session saver so I said yes.

I think I'm with John about syncing work and home machines though. I don't mind the bookmarks, but that tabs are a problem because I have different subjects up at home and work. I haven't figured out how I want to use those yet.

J- I found my sage bookmarks folder after I made that post yesterday. I actually had two sage folders because sage had lost them a while ago and I hadn't fixed it, I just re-added them. Is the Sage reader still the RSS reader people have are using on Firefox?

I had previously commented that browser sync was not keeping my hotmail tab open across machines. I speculated that this was on purpose in an attempt to promote Gmail. Recently this comment was 'accidentally'? deleted someone affiliated with the search giant. Well to make it up to me, for the last few days browser sync has been retaining my hotmail tab and killing my Gmail tab! I guess it will all work out in the end.

Dude, we are getting spammed to death, and our spam removal tool has an "off by 1 error" where if you specify "show me the last 4 comments" it only gives you the last 3. Except that it doesn't always fail like that! So when I was cleaning out the spam, I factored in the "off by 1" and hit delete which nuked your comment. At least I told you I accidentally deleted it and asked you to re-post it. No need to get all anti Silicon Valley, jeez.

Sure.
But you missed the current point. I just thought it was funny that it has gone from regularly dropping hotmail, to regularly dropping gmail. All of my other tabs survive the sync just fine. I wonder why that is.

I'm thinking of just turning off the ability to do hyperlinks, although I'm not sure it will stop the spamming morons. Maybe a common shared password that people type into the email address field? What do you guys think?

I don't think they'd really care if links were off, and I really like putting links into comments (especially with a breaking news story, like all the Apple news).

It's not like there are that many readers here that a password would be so hard. Comment moderation would hinder the speed of discussions, I think.

Yeah, I'm just thinking of re-enabling the email field and people can enter a commonly known password there. It means we'll lose random commenters, but oh well. I could do something as dumb as putting an image here listing the password, but it's not spambots that are commenting.

This seems pretty cool, but I'll have to think about it for a bit. It reminds me of the Black Dog Linux Device a bit... Cool tech, but not sure how practical. Don't we just need some cheap virtual KVM hardware and a wireless connection?

how about create a pc which have the similar size as the jack pc