Review: Roku SD

I bought my girlfriend, among other things, a Roku SD for Xmas. I had a chance to play with it for a few hours yesterday. I streamed a few Netflix titles and a few Revision3 shows. I have to say that I'm VERY impressed with this little box. It just works. The shows stream in great quality video and audio. The user interface is intuitive and attractive. The remote is simple, accurate and responsive. The content, while somewhat limited now, has room for expansion, which is inevitable. If Roku got Hulu on this thing, it would be unstoppable. XBMC might be nice too. The only downside is the rewind and fast forward functions. When performing these, you cannot see the video move accordingly, i.e. a blind rewind. This stinks, but is easily correctable with a firmware update. All in all, the Roku is a great buy. It should score very highly in S.A.F., or Spousal Acceptance Factor. Give it a try, you  won't regret it.

Boxee (Alpha) for Windows

Boxee (Alpha) for Windows is probably the best free streaming media application out there. Nowhere else will you find Digg, Revision3, Hulu, Netflix, NPR, Comedy Central, Apple Trailers, Pandora, Last.fm, etc. all in one place. If it's good streaming content, it's on Boxee. Originally for modded Apple TV units, this app is now available for all Windows, Mac and Linux. There are video channels, music channels, and picture channels as well. I tried it out for the first time last night. Wow. The interface is clean and easy to use. The video quality is great. The sheer amount of content available is enough to quench anyone's entertainment appetite. I liked it so much that I immediately installed it on my netbook as well. Boxee is perfect for travelers who either miss their favorite shows, or need PC based entertainment because that's all there is. Ah, if only it was available for modded Xboxes. One can only dream...

PS3 Media Server Continued...

My initial reaction to the PS3 Media Server has been right on so far. I tried streaming a variety of HD-encoded movies to my PS3 over wired and wireless connections. Only videos with the lowest HD bitrates will stream seamlessly over 802.11g, which makes perfect sense. G-woreless does not have the bandwitdth for that amount of data. 802.11n might work, but I don't have any N-based equipment to test on. The wired connection, however, streamed like a dream. This is a 100Base-T connection, not gigabit. I was able to stream every movie I had without hiccups, including an uncompressed Blu-ray rip, complete with 5.1 surround, which I'm pretty sure was the Dolby lossless primary audio track. All in all, very impressive. I should add that proper decoding/demuxing for streaming requires a newer PC to do the heavy lifting. I have a Core 2 Duo (3 GHz)-based system that decodes/demuxes an uncompressed Blu-ray using 75% CPU. Hardware a bit lesser than this should work fine, but not to much lower. If your living room is lacking an HD streamer, but not a PS3, and you have PC with newer hardware, then PS3 Media Server is where it's at.

PS3 Media Server: Streaming HD at last!!!

I've had a PlayStation 3 since December. While I enjoy watching Blu-ray movies on it, I'll admit I don't use it for much else, as I'm not a huge gamer. The game that I play the most is Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix, and that's a vintage remake and a download. Torrent sites are flush with HD rips of movies and TV shows, but my HTPC is standard definition only at this point. I've been looking for a way to stream these downloads to my HDTV wirelessly with minimal hassle. Enter PS3 Media Server. This is exacly what I was looking for. PMS (an unfortunate acronym, I know) allows me to stream any HD content from my PC to my PS3 with minimal overhead in perfect quality, including surround sound. I highly recommend this for all HD streaming. Setup is a snap. I haven't tried to stream very high bitrate stuff yet, like a lossless Blu-ray rip. I have a feeling that my existing Wireless-G setup will choke on it, but we'll see. A more through review is coming soon.

Blu-ray ISO's are the way to go.

I recently built a new PC for general use. It's the first Blu-ray capable PC I've ever owned, and man, is it sweet. I have a PlayStation 3 already, and since I enjoy the HD movie experience so much, I thought I'd try my hand at ripping a Blu-ray movie. My goal is to preserve the entire disc in full quality via the .iso format, just as I'm accustomed to doing with DVDs. This is very easy to do with AnyDVD HD. It's basically a 2-click solution. The question remains though: how does one playback a Blu-ray .iso file? PowerDVD 9 Ultra, the king of software Blu-ray playback, won't touch it. Nor will VLC. Enter a freeware solution: Virtual CloneDrive. Brought to you by SlySoft, the makers of AnyDVD. This software allows one to mount a virtual optical drive from any .iso file, including Blu-ray rips. Awesome. PowerDVD plays very nicely with a virtual drive. So there you go. But can you stream it? Don't know. Haven't tried. I actually don't have the means to test that one out at the moment. Stay tuned.

Streaming Videos to the Wii

After having successfully hacked a Wii a couple weeks ago, I managed to get wireless video streaming working as well last night. I was able to stream just about every movie file format (with the exception of a DVD .iso file) from a Vista PC to the Wii over wifi. The app I used was MPlayer CE, available via the Homebrew Channel. Not too shabby. Mplayer supports Windows shares, which makes life easy. Video quality was adequate. It would be improved significantly if we were using the Wii component cables. For those looking for a way to view downloaded movies and TV on your Wii from a PC, this is currently the best way that I've seen. There are other media streamers that work with the Wii, like Orb, but they require transcoding to Flash, which degrades video quality significantly and takes extra CPU cycles.

Navi-X + XBMC = Streaming Bliss

If you were to ask around, you'd find that more and more people are getting their news and entertainment content from the Internet, and many from Internet-only sources, like podcasts and Internet radio. There are lots of Internet-only TV shows out there. Some of the bigger players in the streaming game are G4TV, Revision3, NPR, CollegeHumor, YouTube, and Apple Trailers just to name a few. It would be nice if there was a place that all of the popular streaming content on the Internet could be found under one roof with an attractive and customizable user interface.

Enter Navi-X, a script (plugin) for XBMC. I've mentioned XBMC, the open source media center powerhouse, several times on this blog before. Navi-X is a small downloadable app that allows me to stream all of my favorite shows, audio and video for playback on my TV. Installation is plug and play. Simply dump it into XBMC's "Scripts" directory, and it's installed. From there, browse to it in XBMC's Scripts browser. Not only can I stream all of my favorite shows and podcasts, I can download the streams for offline playback and cataloguing, if desired. I can also create my own "playlists" of streaming content, where I can share my favorite streaming media with other Navi-X users.

The shows I watch the most via Navi-X are Revision3's Systm, Tekzilla and G4TV's Gadget Pron. Sometimes I'll check out Apple Trailers, which is a great place to look at upcoming films, although the standalone Apple Movie Trailers plugin for XBMC is arguably better. Overall, I'm more than satisfied with Navi-X's streaming abilities. I highly recommend this app to any current or would-be XBMC users that need a neat and convenient way to access streaming content in their living room.