So I bought a new LCD TV for my bedroom, the old Sony 21″ 4.3 TV had finished it’s tour of duty.
I ended up with a LG 22LU5000 22″ LCD tv YouTube video here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pt8s_m6dFi0, mainly because of the price I have to say (DKK 1.750,- aprox € 233).. So how is it?; well picture quality is a big thumbs up, the menu system is fair (I miss being able to name the channels myself) but the sound is dreadful (yes it really suck when it come to sound, it’s something they call invisible speaker ….. yeah, it almost sounds like they forgot to include a speaker)… Oh well, as mentioned the price is very fair and it is only for my bedroom, so I guess I can live with a bit poorer sound.
What however proved to be really cool and a total surprise was that the tv/firmware was hackable, it allowed for a hack that enabled a USB mediaplayer within the tv.. So now I can plug a usb disk into the service USB port on the TV and play xvid, divx and mkv files now that’s cool… I had even bought a WD TV Mini for that job (before I learned about the hack) but hey I guess I can use that in the living room
If you have a LG tv, take a look here, maybe your model is equally hackable cool… http://lgusb.wikispaces.com
I somewhere read about this software a while ago called “Boxee”, it’s a new mediacenter software which can be downloaded for free from http://www.boxee.tv But with so much mediacenter software out there it got lost in the masses. Anyway, recently I was reminded as D-Link is rattling their sable with the forthcoming release of the Boxee Box (well that is hardly going to be the name but still).. It looks VERY interesting especially with a full qwerty keyboard being merged into the very neat remote that come with it, and it does seem somewhat more interesting than the WD Live TV (A LOT more apps/widgets) and a more finished design overall.
It does indeed look interesting. Boxee seem to be based upon XBMC (X-Box Media Center) http://xbmc.org/download (which I btw still use on my old trusty X-Box 1 Classic)
Should you want to preview the experience you can download the free software for your pc/mac here http://www.boxee.tv/box
The box is generally good at recognizing your video and music files (even series etc), BUT if it does not recognize the media file (it does so from the naming of the file) it wont show it :-/ thus you will need to rename it to a naming convention it understands which seem silly and acquad. From what I can tell it will be getting the data (including photos) from IMDB.
I had some issues getting it to accept a share on a Windows 2003 server, I could ‘bypass’ this by mapping the share as a drive letter on my Win 7 machine where I ran Boxee but I am still puzzled as to why it did not seem to accept a simple Windows Share.
A further cause of concern is, what data is reported back to the producers of this software!? Do they get the complete list of my music, video etc. archives? Sadly I don’t know which concerns me as you have to register to run the software
So if you want to be totally up-beat or perhaps are testing out Boxee then you will want to install the latest Adobe Flash Player (Boxee actually seem to require this), but no worries you can get it right here;
Among other things this version will add HW acceleration, neat for Netbooks as compatible GFX cards now can assist in playing video and thus perhaps adding HD playback to your otherwise slow Atom processor (however this DO require a compatible GFX card to work like the Nvidia ION and others).
If you live in Europe you are bound to have experienced being rejected, when trying to watch your favorite TV show on a US web-site – something in the line of “We are sorry but your IP seem to come from a country outside the USA” bummer – this is annoying as some US TV stations have cool tv shows available for free viewing (but restricted to the US).
So, as I have mentioned before you can use the TOR network (http://www.torproject.org/) to proxy around this problem – but TOR is an install package that may not always be appropriate to install on a company/school pc etc, along comes UltraSurf (http://www.ultrareach.com/) a simple little portable application you can put on your USB stick.
UltraSurf will once it is started open a browser and you can browse the net with a US based IP (by proxying your traffic) thus giving you access to US based webservices. Speed is not great but seemed acceptable and I managed to get an ok mediastream from ABC (note you may have to restart the browser when installing activex components).
A word of caution, I would not share creditcard or other confidential information on a proxyed connection, you never know who/what is inspecting your HTTP traffic, HTTPS/SSL/TSL traffic should be secure though (but still think about what you are doing).
How neat is this, the A-Team series from the 80’s (1983) will be ‘revieved’ for a movie, sadly not with the original actors (most known is likely Mr. T., but also Dwight Schultz is very well known for his roles in Star Trek) but with a new cast and perhaps with a newer up-to-date finish ala 2010..
I for one found the show very entertaining, it was so quirky and fun – no one ever got hurt in the show, and the ‘punchline’ was always the same – build something out of nothing (a bit like McGyver) and help the underdog..
During Christmas I visited a friend of mine, he had just invested in a “Western Digital WD TV Live HD Media Player” and ran a quick demo for me.. It actually looks quite nice with a lot of useful features, it streamed perfectly from his NAS even HD ran perfectly and it had YouTube support and whatnot The remote seemed a bit toy-ish but was very responsive and worked much better than how it looked..
I have the XBOX 1 (Classic) with a boot chip and use XBMC on it, so to me there is little need to invest in this new box, that is until I get a HD tv then things might change
Like to know more about this box? Here’s a YouTube review for you;
At last, Tomorrow is the day when a new Sci-fi series airs Yeah… it is the new offspring of the Stargate saga named “Stargate Universe” – and I do have high hopes for this.. The other two series Stargate SG1 and Stargate Atlantis both was great, and the new replacement will hopefully be equally good. The plot as far as I know is that one of the Stargate builder ships is discovered, and upon a group of Stargate personnel investigating this they are caught on the ship as it travels the universe, lets see how that turns out…
So if you are in the US, you’d better reserve 2 hours on Friday October 9th 2009 for some Sci-fi
The Danish CableTV provider YouSee.dk will as of September 2009 cease encoding their digital tv signal, thus you will no longer need a decoder card for your DVB-C enabled TV/box. Now sadly this does not mean that you can view more channels, only that you now can watch them in digital quality something that earlier would require a separate subscription. Indeed good and interesting news for those of us that has YouSee.dk
I always wanted a video camera, but to be honest have had very little use for one.. But some day I came across IronGeek.org’s site and was intrigued by this cheap HD camera, and as it proved to be even cheaper in Denmark and I had just received a small bonus check from my insurance company on just that amount, well I ended up buying one..
So how is it really? Well it’s small very light weight and I’d say good value for money, it lack optical zoom and the sound could have been slightly better (but it’s not bad at all).. I’ll see if I can’t record a small demo video and put it up here for you to see some time in the future. Recording is done in .mov format and thus you need to convert it if you wish to transfer it to DVD, but computerplayback works like a charm with Apple Quicktime (which also let you stick to HD).. Recording of 1h full hd is 4gb, so I added a 16gb sd card which leaves plenty of space for recording. All in all I am satisfied.
Update; I had some minor problems with video’s I transferred from this camera (they would ‘pixelate’), I actually thought the camera might have been broken – but it turned out to be quite a trivial matter see the explanation here http://www.kanmandet.dk/?p=813 now video’s transferred from the camera is crisp and sharp..
Pioneer has announced that they will halt production of laserdisk players once the production of the last 3000 units has finished.
My my, Laserdisks was introduced in the 1980’s and I actually thought that production of players had stopped long ago as laserdisks (the media) was no longer being produced.
I sadly never owned one which is a bit of a shame as the quality was supposed to be better than DVD, but with the introduction of HD, I guess time finally caught up with the aging Laserdisk.
Anyway if you just have to have a Laserdisk player then this is the last call unless you are Ebay’ing, or maybe you should join the new millinium and try on Blueray.
now that’s cool… I had even bought a WD TV Mini for that job (before I learned about the hack) but hey I guess I can use that in the living room 
So if you want to be totally up-beat or perhaps are testing out 
So, as I have mentioned before you can use the 
How neat is this, the A-Team series from the 80’s (1983) will be ‘revieved’ for a movie, sadly not with the original actors (most known is likely Mr. T., but also Dwight Schultz is very well known for his roles in Star Trek) but with a new cast and perhaps with a newer up-to-date finish ala 2010..
The Danish CableTV provider YouSee.dk will as of September 2009 cease encoding their digital tv signal, thus you will no longer need a decoder card for your DVB-C enabled TV/box. Now sadly this does not mean that you can view more channels, only that you now can watch them in digital quality something that earlier would require a separate subscription. Indeed good and interesting news for those of us that has YouSee.dk 
I always wanted a video camera, but to be honest have had very little use for one.. But some day I came across 
Pioneer has announced that they will halt production of 
