Be Excellent To Each Other

I'm fairly certain that my two year old Samsung telly does that.

I bet it doesn't. It can only work with a HDMI Return Path config, which is new.

I don't have my amp anymore (left it behind), so it's not a biggie for me at the moment. And I only ever watch TV shows and don't have my PS3 anymore either, so Blu-Ray isn't an issue either. It's something I might get back into, but the convenience of being able to watch them directly on the TV without having to plug my laptop in is quite a nice bonus.

And tonight my Boxee has totally fucked up and won't even boot up anymore, not even to the restore menu

Looks like I have the joys of d-link support to deal with.

I'm still pretty pleased with XBMC on my revo, and using the ipad or iphone as a remote.

How's the Roku, Cras?

A bit shit.

Even Angry birds?

I'd eyed up some of these dedicated players a while back when we needed something to do media duties in the bedroom but I'm always worried about future proofing, in terms of codec support, so in the end we picked up one of these (which was about £350 when we bought it) as it's a very similar model to my netbook/mini-laptop thing which I'm pretty happy with. The fact that Mrs B can take it away with her as an actual laptop is a bonus of course. We're just hooking is straight up to an older flat screen TV via VGA/stero input with no worries about surround sound and whatnot admittedly but, if need be, it could be easily HDMI'd in to our proper living room setup if the PS3 ever stops being useful in the regard.

Which is something else I worry about as our up-until-recently standard approach to converting MKVs to a PS3 suitable format (MKV2VOB spitting out a PS3 compliant AVCHD folder sets in about thirty seconds) has begun to go a bit wobbly, presumably as encoding methodologys evolve. It's still not a deal breaker as it just means pulling particular stream files out of the AVCHD folder set (and then knowing that the bloody PS3 forces you to choose 'View All' before it'll properly show the contents of a USB stick!) but it's a worry because one day it is going to stop working no doubt. Although, interestingly, I'm seeing a lot of shows being uploaded as mp4 now which is a change to what I usually see. Again, the PS3 currently handles those okay but that could change...

Um, anyway, apologies for all that off-topic rambling folks. A bad habit of mine it seems.

I know what you mean. The Revo doesn't like newer MKVs with a certain type of encoding (the specifics escape me for now) and can't enable hardware decoding, so I've had to use MKV2VOB a fair bit. Shame that it can't decode the 720p versions of Game of Thrones that I manage to get.

I don't actually mind using MKV2VOB because it's incredibly quick to convert and my network's too shite to stream HD files across it anyway (which is another thread I keep meaning to start) so I'd be manually copying stuff onto USB sticks for playback on the PS3 no matter what else was going on. I just fear the day that I can't easily get downloaded stuff to playback on the PS3 at all because then we're looking at buying yet another laptop (or similar) to replace it in that regard. I had looked at a Revo at one point but they always looked to be verging on the underpowered and I wanted something pretty well futureproofed so getting an almost full spec mini-laptop like the Pavilion just made me feel better. It's still a relatively wee thing as well so doesn't clutter the place up much. The only thing that really does bug me is that you actually need to open the clamshell to hit the power button which is an annoyance and isn't very neat, it would be great if there was an external way to wake it up.

I've brought my HTPC back out of retirement till I can get the Boxee replaced.
Now I know exactly what I want from a streamer, after having used the Boxee Box for the past 18 months (i.e. exactly what it does, but less buggy), i'm planning to see how the HTPC software world has moved on in the past couple of years, and if there is anything out there that I can install that does everything I want easily.

I'm going to install XBMC and Plex, is there anything else that has turned up while i've ignored the scene?

I would have suggested Boxee for Windows, but it seems to have been discontinued.



Reuse, recycle

Indeed it has. Looking around the latest version of XBMC seems perfect for what I need. I'll install it tonight and see if I can make it do what I need with minimal hassle. Last time I used XBMC it couldn't play my 1080p MKVs smoothly, whereas media player classic was fine with them. (I realise I can write some xml to force xbmc to use a different player for certain file types, but it is precisely that sort of shit I'm not interested in )

Well, bless my cotton socks. RMA number allocated already, all done via online and email. They wanted proof of purchase, I emailed them a pdf of my original amazon order from the amazon website, and had a RMA authorised email 4 minutes later.

Very efficient, I know all places should work like that, it's just a pleasant surprise to find one that does. Props to d-link, word, brother, for shizzle.

'Brap'

So Xbmc still can't play hd content efficiently, and the XML to make it use something that works, doesn't work. Fucking thing

I hope my boxee box gets fixed soon, come back boxee box, all is forgiven

Amazon are selling the Boxee for £129 at the moment.

Hmm.

I have fixed XBMC in terms of playing with a proper video player! It crashed overnight though and gave up importing my library

Adventures in XBMC continue.

All setup now, MCE remote bought, custom xml installed to make it work properly, custom xml installed to make 1080p work properly, a billion different settings set to make it actually look nice, rather than the dog's breakfast it is by default (Aeon Nox skin, with low list settings on everything), added in the addons necessary (MCEremote mapper, auto scheduler for library scanning) And do you know what? I really like it

The extra info it gives over the boxee is very nice, and the scanning and identification is 100% right so far, which is much better than Boxee can manage (Boxee licence their own film and TV database, which is good, but not as good as the open source ones). It's much faster to respond in general use though, and I should be able to get my logitech remote to control it all pretty simply, so I won't need a separate remote any more.

Time will tell on how stable it all is though, but if it manages to stay up for more than a couple of days at a time without needing a reboot, it'll beat the Boxee on that front too

One thing that is really annoying though, I can't get it to order my tv shows by date added, which seems to be a bit of an oversight. Sure I can list the latest dozen episodes added, but if I'm adding back episodes of a series, that doesn't help me.
It was however, extremely nice to be able to set whole seasons on shows as "watched" in one fell swoop, rather than having to go through them one by one as I will when I get my Boxee back.

XBMC Commander on the ipad is pretty swizzy too.

All in all, it was a major faff to setup, but once it is setup it is very nice. I've ordered a £25 graphics card to brute force my way through the shitty codec efficiency it has (a couple of years back that would have been an expensive fix, but now a HD5450 can be had for so cheap, I thought I might as well), so we shall see how well it plays with that.

Currently it looks like the Boxee is going to be relegated to the bedroom tv...

Hmmmm. Interesting.

Don't underestimate quite how much of a faff it is to get setup properly though! It took me pretty much all of Saturday off and on, and I know what i'm doing when it comes to this crap (not that you don't, but just to highlight the faffiness).

MCE with Media Browser is ticking all of my boxes now.

I tried MCE ages ago, really didn't get on with it at all.

As a simple conduit to Media Browser, it could work.

Quite possibly. I've reached my quota of HTPC faffing for the next year at least though

I think I'll probably end up having to add a card to my Microserver since the default can't decode DVDs in real time (the CPU just can) - albeit that's VLC which I've always found to be turd slow compared to other software.

Has anyone done video encoding in shaders yet? Seems like that'd be more efficient than hardware decode to hardware framebuffer, then read the uncompressed thing back to compress it. But also a massive pain in the tits to write, if it's even possible.

Edit: Apparently yes, at least on nVidia cards.

Hmmm... A slight mistake on setting up the sources (adding in a source which was the root of windows drive, due to a dodgy remote button press) has led to a database with 22 films in them which I haven't actually got*. Which can't be removed from the library for some reason? The "remove from library" option in the menu does fuck all.
A total wipe of the database and start again is the only solution, which means the 30 minutes I spent last night setting up my watched flags was a total waste of time.

Yay for HTPCs!



* XBMC saw a folder called Drivers and a folder called Windows, and any bin file in those was identified as the film "Windows" or "Helldriver".

This will fit and work fine in a HP microserver apparently (assuming that is what you have)
http://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/novatec ... re-1177480

£20.99

Back to where I was last night, with no corrupt database this time. However I also have my logitech remote up and running with it now, so i'm done with fiddling till the new graphics card comes!

What IR receiver are you using with your Logitech remote?

It's the one that came with the vista mce remote from maplin, which was £14.99. Turns out it is a rebadged Ortek VCR-1100 remote.

Yep, that's what I've got, cheers trooper. Not yet though, I'm stringing cat5 around the house first.

All that and again it turns out to be an utter waste of fucking time.

New graphics card will not bitstream via hdmi, no matter how many reinstalls of various drivers etc... And in trying to make it work, it has broken the drivers for the onboard graphics.

So i'm back to square one, needing a full reinstall from the OS upwards, to get to what is likely to be the same position, a media pc with no 5.1 surround sound.

Great, just great. Well done driver developers, you rock. Copious amount of forum postings on google with similar issues.

Not sure what you are using for hardware, I use an ION 330 with OpenElec (Linux based XBMC) and don’t have any issues. Install takes 2 minutes and aside from a couple of changes in the sound settings for HDMI it all works fine.

Only thing I’ve had playback issues with are some cartoons in MP4, they play back ok but the sound is out of sync.

I have 1Gb network between my NAS and the ION and it plays 30GB MKV with no issue.

I watched the XBMC forums for a year before the ION emerged as something that worked with XBMC.

Well, yes. It installed fine on my machine. Then I changed the graphics card and it all went to shit. It isn't an XBMC issue, it's just the usual HTPC configuration and driver bullshit I gave up on when I got the Boxee Box.

Tonight is going to be a reinstall from scratch, which I half expect will fix it, even if I use all the same drivers as before, because that is the way with these things

When I run the world, every device that plays video, from your TV to some your mobile phone, will need to have options in the software to jog the sound sync around until it fits the picture.

A full reinstall of everything from scratch and we are back up and running with no issues

New Boxee Box has arrived too! So that is busy scanning away on the bedroom TV.

I like you and all, but I'm not sure you could walk the world, let alone run it.

I bought one of these this week having had the Mac software running for quite a while. The Boxee UI was the only one (from XBMC and Plex) that I could live with. And I've got to say, thus far this tiny little box is pretty bloody awesome. There are lots of little glitches and it's not perfect by any stretch but it's very very close. I cancelled my CableTV sub this week, and quite honestly with this thing hooked up to PlayOn and the (annoyingly awkward to set-up) Sick Beard thing, it seems to me to make regular TV rather redundant. Plus with only a few edits, all my existing stuff was scanned and catalogued nicely. I'm even thinking of getting the LiveTV dongle as my little antenna picks up local HDTV perfectly. (I'm in the US btw.)

Very impressed, and for me at least, a bit less arse-ache than running a PC under the TV. Oh, and the remote with the keyboard on the back is very cool, as is the Bookmarklet function which allows you to send video links from any browser back to the Boxee in a Watch It Later queue. It's quite fun[*].

[*] Apart from the frustration of not having a working remote for two days. Ten minutes with D-Link technical support confirmed I had put the battery in upside-down. How we laughed.

Adventures in boxee and xbmc land continue.

The fan noise on the new Boxee is a lot louder than the old one, too loud to have it running constantly in the bedroom. Not the end of the world, but annoying. Also, I connected up via wi-fi originally, but the boxee box can't stream 720p content without buffering on wireless, so i've grabbed my old powerline adaptors and all is well again

XBMC continues to piss me off, when it works it is awesome, but current fun involves the ATI drivers. Overnight, the ati tray icon process goes mental, and slows the whole machine down to a crawl. I killed the process yesterday, but have yet to check as to whether it has fired up again. I'll have to find a more permanent solution if it has, or each time I reboot i'll need to kill the process each time.
Luckily I don't plan on rebooting if I can help it, especially as Windows 7 refuses to store the user credentials for the network drive, so I have to put them in every single time I reboot.

Boxee CEO did a livestream, upshot is:



No new SDK in sight, which means HD sound formats will stay broken, and no support for 3TB drives.
No fix possible for flash video that needs the latest version of flash.
The chipset isn't going to be supported by Intel for very much longer.

Not looking good for the future of the current Boxee Box. So don't buy one if you are expecting it to get better...

Was there no good news?

Well that's legitimately disappointing.

I haven't actually watched it myself, just seen the list of what was mentioned. It is possible there was some good news, but it was probably drowned out by the doom and gloom!

The most disappointing thing? Even with the current state of the problems, and the unlikelihood of it actually getting any better, The Boxee Box is still the best streamer on the market!

https://twitter.com/#!/boxee/status/190115217303289856

200k Boxee Boxes sold, worldwide, in 18 months...

That's not very good. I'm surprised they admitted to it.

It's awful, all signs are pointing to the end.

Thumbs-up-friend and Beex-lurker The Egg has a Raspberry Pi he has successfully deployed Raspbmc onto. All initial reports sound very promising. This may be what replaces my Boxee, when RS Components eventually decide I can have one.