Posts by Aidan
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Hard News: Cheer Germ, in reply to recordari,
I friggin' love that song (Marsha). Always have since I bought It's bigger than both of us as one of those fugly double tapes. Has a great space about it and a really catchy guitar line. How YOUNG AND SKINNY is Don MacGlashan! Heh.
Wrt to that triple backflip. WTF!? I've seen it half a dozen times now and it still gives me the heebees. Every time I think "what if he doesn't make it and crashes into that ramp!?!". Could they have made that any MORE unsafe in case of an accident?
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Hard News: And we may never meet again ..., in reply to Paul Williams,
Aidan, the Church had an ok song? Under the Milky Way is brilliant.
I was being ironic. No tag for that.
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Icehouse ... GSL was pretty big when I were a kiddie
The Oils ...
My memory of that song is being a lot heavier. Sounds sort of pussy now.
The Church had another sort of ok song
Aus did produce a bunch of pretty bland pub rock outfits. I recall being in the booth at Radio Massey in the early 90s (was either 1am or some shitty weekend slot, that was all I ever did) when the phone rang. It was the manager of the "Lime Spiders". They were touring apparently. I think he wanted to talk to the station manager. He was a little surprised that I had never heard of them. I did manage to dig one of their albums out of the bins, but jeez it was so awful I put it straight back in again.
I see they are still around, though not making enough to keep their domain name registered.
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Hard News: Chasing the Trans-Pacific Express, in reply to Paul Campbell,
Knowing nothing about Oz I assume the same dynamic has kicked in there
Does seem to be the case. It could (rampant wild-arsed speculation alert) be because the TV landscape is an affiliate model, like the states, that has gradually got less and less distinct. It used to be that the local stations would be affiliated with a major broadcaster, but have a quite distinct program. Not now. They ruthlessly cut local current affairs and news a few years back, so there is sweet FA difference between Southern Cross Ten (my local Ten affiliate) and "national" Channel Ten (whatever the hell that is).
Curiously, the proliferation of digital TV channels has tended to accelerate this process of assimilation. They barely have enough staff to shove local advertising in between the pap, producing any independent TV is basically off the radar.
BTW probably the easiest way to reverse engineer the EPG stream is to open a cheap freeview box and dump the roms – who knows maybe there are crypto certs in there …. (security by obscurity is not security even if things are very very obscure)
That would be very cool. EVEN COOLER .. if there was a cheap box that could be modded with custom firmware with the ability to grok the freeview EPG.
Freeview Aus is being really really really (really!) slow implementing their EPG. For a start they've done a 2-stage release, the first lot of freeview branded boxes did nothing but take features away from PVRs (no skip, max ffwd speed, no transfer of recorded content) and offered precisely NOTHING to compensate. No nice EPG, no series record. Nada.
Now they're supposedly into stage 2, where boxes have a "Freeview EPG" sticker on them (how confusing is that!) and must be MPEG4/h264 capable. Apparently the much touted CRID tagging (allowing series recording) is not really working. Bit of a dog's breakfast.
The free EIT EPG will remain. Thank goodness.
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Is there some subtle variation of Poe's law that applies to fundy christian nutbags and horrorcore clown rappers?
Maybe I need to have a lie down ...
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Hard News: Like being there, in reply to Russell Brown,
OTOH, I’ve tried other media servers – Vuze and the open-source PS3 one – and they weren’t great enough over WiFi to beat walking around with a flash drive.
But … the Cat 6 cabling that was supposed to be done in December with the rest of the house was finally finished last week. I think I need someone to tell me what to do now.
Broadly speaking (and bear in mind I don't own an Apple TV and could be talking out my arse) there are currently four options for an AppleTV:
1. Don't JB it. Convert everything and load it into iTunes. Take the blue pill and be happy.
2. Don't JB it. Use air-video (which now has an airplay button on it's beta), find your media by browsing for it on an iOS device (iPod touch, iPhone, iPad) and hit the magic button to send it to your AppleTV.
2. JB it. Install XBMC (or something similar) that attempts to add codec support to the AppleTV and play away.
3. JB it. Install the Plex media player front end on the AppleTV and the server on a mac computer. Play away.Jailbreaking is a pit of a pain, with every new release there is a wait until the updated JB is released. In the case of XBMC, the iOS update broke their H264 hardware decoding as they were using private APIs.
If you already use AirVideo (I do, excellent product) then that might be the easiest way to go in the short term until things settle down.
Considering you have a wired connection the Plex app and media server might be the best bet in the long term. Requires an always on mac server, or on when you need to use it, then it is ok. If you have a laptop that disappears from the house then that is a no go.
It is miraculous that they've managed to get XBMC to do what it does on the AppleTV, but the hardware is a little limited which potentially means being quite careful with encoding parameters etc to make sure it works. But what do I know.
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Paul, thanks for contributing. It is rare for internet discussions to include people who actually know what they are talking about.
In Aus I believe (could be wrong of course) that the EIT info for each broadcaster is localised to their own mux. I have to change to a channel in a mux and it populates the EPG for all the channels from that broadcaster.
It is entirely feasible for the Govt. to require an unencumbered EPG to broadcast. They have this information already -- there is an unencumbered EPG (EIT) transmitted on the Freeview Satellite feed. It seems quite popular for NZ geeks to use this to populate the EPG in their favourite media centre/PVR apps.
The freeview EPG stream is probably living in private sections somewhere – maybe we should track down a stream and reverse engineer it ourselves – they can’t change it without trashing existing boxes
Whilst I think this would be a really valuable thing to do, it would mostly be used by the HTPC (home theatre PC) geeks and of little use to the average consumer.
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Also, $170 is the kind of price where I’ll consider jailbreaking my puck, if it’s easy and there are good reasons to do so. Anyone got the good word on that?
I guess http://www.appletvhacks.net/ is your friend.
Looks like there are untethered hacks now. I'd be taking a peep at plex and it's media server, but if you're in the iTunes ecosystem I guess there wouldn't be much point for you.
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Hard News: Chasing the Trans-Pacific Express, in reply to 3410,
This seems a problem:
Please note: Freeview Compatible = Limited EPG function[. I]nstead of showing all TV programmes in next 7 days, it only lists TV programmes in the next 3 hours.
Potentially. Depends what you want to use it for.
Maybe it wasn't clear when reading the comments in the thread, but I was lamenting the lack of an unencumbered EPG in NZ. Speculating that this has led to a real lack of competition and hence high prices for digital TV equipment.
The Akai STB with PVR function is exactly the sort of thing I was thinking of. Cheap and cheerful. Unfortunately the "free" EPG (EIT) only has now/next information, which is probably one of the reasons a box like this is not imported by large retailers.
This product is fine for me old Mum. She just wants the equivalent of her VCR, to record things that are on right now and she has to go out, or has visitors and can't watch at the time.
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Hard News: Chasing the Trans-Pacific Express, in reply to 3410,
Mighty ape have the AD185X for $90. I'm really after the DVD/STB combo, to make it easier for me poor old mum.
You're right that the model numbers are confusing.