Microsoft has released a beta of an Internet TV add-on for its Windows Media Center.  Rather than “record” shows via a TV tuner it downloads them over the web. and adds them to a users’ collection. From the Engadget article:

According to Microsoft, US-based users of Vista Home Premium and Vista Ultimate will soon be able to download a simple update that will enable them to “enjoy a range of television and video content on their PCs and TV sets [with a Media Center Extender of some sort] without a TV tuner in their PC.” The streaming content will all be ad-supported “by an advertising platform provided by YuMe,” which means that you’ll be getting it gratis.

I wish the devs would update MythIPTV so we could get something as seamless as this in MythTV.

I saw over at PVRBlog that Tivo has announced TTG and MRV (Transfer shows between boxes) support for their HD line of receivers, due in November.  About time, I just hope they’ve sped up the transfer rate for the mammoth HD files - Tivo To Go on my Series 2 box is slow as all hell. Info here.

There’s a new front end for MythTV designed for the Nokia N800 tablet. It’s call MaemoMyth and interfaces with MythTV via the Gmyth libraries. The N800 is pretty low powered as far as computers go, so this could be a great starting point for MythTV front ends on low powered machines.

Check out the project page for more information, links to source code & binaries as well as a video of MaemoMyth in action.

Want to play movies on your TV over Wi-fi? Got some soldering skills and don’t mind voiding the warranty of a few devices? Then do what this guy did: Flash your Netgear router with OpenWRT, hook it to a Dvico portable media player, and get streaming!

The author was quick to point out that he doesn’t use Wi-Fi to stream movies to his TV a la Apple TV, but rather uses the Wi-Fi to load the video onto the Dvico device. Personally I’ll stick to my $100 XBMC and wired Ethernet, but this is still a cool “just because I can” project.

Found at Engadget.

MythTV overhaul: The Switch from Fedora to Ubuntu

Part 1:
- Background:
- My current environment is this:

• MythTV .20 (no patches) installed on Fedora Core 4.
• 1 WinTV Go tuner card (analog NTSC bttv software encoding)
• 1 WinPVR 150 tuner card (analog NTSC ivtv hardware encoding - mpeg2)
• 1 Air2PC tuner card (digital ATSC ?? maybe QAM updatable) - not setup
• ATI Radeon 9200 w/ S-video out
• 160 GB HD w/ Fedora Core 4 on it. Using LVM for the entire drive.

- So I started on this little adventure switching from Fedora Core 4 to Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Long Term Support) for a few reasons:
- I’ve never liked Red Hat’s package management system
- I wanted to use Ubuntu originally when I first setup MythTV, but there was very poor support for MythTV on Ubuntu back in 2005.
- In my opinion, apt-get on debian based systems is far more stable and usable than yum on Fedora. I’ve ran into several problems with yum, and very few issues while using apt-get on Ubuntu.
- They dropped support for the yum repositories for Fedora Core 4. Yeah, I understand that they can’t maintain it forever, but upgrading to Fedora Core 6 from 4 is just as scary if not moreso than switching to Ubuntu. So I might as well just go with what I wanted in the first place.

My adventure begins after the break….

Read the rest of this entry …

According to this post on xbox-scene.com, the free60 project has built a live CD that lets you boot Gentoo Linux into a Gnome desktop on your Xbox 360, complete with an X.org driver. No sound or Samsung drive support yet, but this is still a big step forward.

An Engadget reader was able to load a clean install of OS X 10.4.9 on his Apple TV, and he’s posted benchmarks to compare its performance with a Mac Mini with 2GB of RAM. The Apple TV gets its ass beaten by the Mini, but not by as wide a margin as you’d think. I think they should have lowered the RAM of the Mini to the default 512MB to have a more “stock” playing field, but that’s just me.

And.. this is the only blog on the whole intarweb that has multiple bloggers.

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