The Media Viking

I wrote previously about a new set top box device that I was looking forward to, the PopBox from Syabas. Upon it initial announcement this little box sounded like it was going to be the great new end-all device for the home theater. Well as we get closer to its imminent release, Syabas has announced that the PopBox’s ship date has been delayed until July 23rd.

Sure. No big deal. What’s an extra month? Well that’s the good news. The bad news is that it won’t be shipping with Netflix support. The final released product will be “limited” to most of the common internet streaming content providers.
Straight from the PopBox blog:

“In terms of Apps – at launch the box will contain the following Apps that can be installed:
Funspot Games  Picassa  Livestation  YouTube  Blip.tv  Next New Networks  Channels.com  Photobucket  Twitter  ShoutCast  Weatherbug  Revision3  MediaFly  Clicker  Video Detective  MotorzTV”

Now, Netflix support is not entirely ruled out. There is nothing to say that it won’t be released at a later time. It just won’t be supported at the product launch and there is no confirmed timeline for expecting it. Although I would love to get my hands on one for testing, as it stands, I’m starting to wonder what, if anything, the new PopBox is going to offer over any of the number of already existing devices or even a basic HTPC.

Coffee makes the world go ’round…

Is anyone else as stoked as I am to hear Back to the Future is finally coming blu-ray!? As others recently reported, Universal Studios is finally giving us this classic trilogy in full HD goodness. What is even better though, is that they are apparently doing quite a bit to actually make the release worth buying instead of just renting.

The 25th Anniversary trilogy boxed set is slated to show up on October 26th with an all new transfer straight from the film as well as a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 soundtrack. In addition to a large number of useless BD-Live and U-Control features that no one ever uses or cares about, the set will also come packed full of the original special features content and two hours of NEW bonus content.

Not only is it about time, but it sounds like Universal Studios spent the wait working to ensure they released a damn fine product to avoid disappointing any of us Back To The Future fans! I’m really looking forward to this release; what about you?

Coffee makes the world go ’round…

Thank you all for your continued support here at The Media Viking. The site will be down for a few hours throughout the day for some maintenance and upgrades. We will be back as quickly as possible.

Thank you again!

Coffee makes the world go ’round…

So the majority of the parts of come in for my home theater PC build. I’m still need to get some more memory for it and some form of remote. A number of people have mentioned the Logitech diNovo Mini to use as a remote as well as a bluetooth keyboard and mouse if needed. Have you any of you had any experience with the diNovo Mini? What did you think of it?

The Antec HTPC case, HDD, and HD 5570 GPU came in this weekend so I’ve been planning out the exact build and wire routing. I did get the motherboard, hard drive, and DVD drive installed as you’ll see in the images below. I’m waiting to put the MSI R5570 in until I get all the cabling routed properly. To calm all of you that I’m sure are freaking about the DVD drive, I will eventually be swapping it out with a blu-ray drive down the road as prices drop. However for now, prices to benefit ratio just doesn’t pan out to warrant adding the blu-ray drive now. The Playstation3 still drives the physical blu-ray discs for my home theater and does such a good job that it is hard to beat.

So let’s get to the good stuff. Here are a few pics of the HTPC so far. I’ve even thrown in a pic of the Onkyo TX-SR607 AV receiver that I mentioned getting a couple weeks ago. And I must say, that receiver is working out VERY well so far! I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a nice “entry” level AV Receiver for their own home theater setup.

HTPC Front	HTPC Inside
MSI R5570	Onkyo TX-SR607

Well, I’ll be sure to keep you updated on how this HTPC build pans out. I’ll be getting the memory in soon and get an OS loaded up on this. I will be dual booting with Win 7 and Linux. That leaves just the remote control issue to pan out. So leave me a comment and let me know what you suggest for controlling this all.

Coffee makes the world go ’round…

This will be a rather short rant, but Sony has officially annoyed and pissed me off! Playstation 3 owners have been damn near begging and pleading with Sony for a firmware update that adds support for MKV files for…..well since the PS3 was first released basically. All of their pleading has been in vain and simply shrugged off by Sony in an apparent complete disregard for the desires of its customer base. However, they already have a firmware supporting 3D video out to beta testers.

So in all the years that the PS3 has been out, Sony can’t seem to add simple MKV support to their firmware, but can in a matter of months add full support for technology that hasn’t even been released. That’s just crap! Why does Sony refuse to add MKV support? Do they just not care about what we want? To be honest, I don’t even use MKV containers at the moment as ts files are working just fine for me and therefore this doesn’t prevent me from doing anything at the moment. However, MKV is a popular and widely used container that also happens to be open source and standards oriented. It is mainly for those reasons that I would love to move my media collection over to MKV files, but can’t because Sony has decided for some reason to be pricks about the issue.

The whole situation makes me even more mad since I already own so much Sony gear. Anyway, I just wanted to rant for a bit to vent some of my frustration at this whole issue. What do you all think about them refusing to support MKV files?

Coffee makes the world go ’round…

Well it would appear as if set-top boxes are popping up left and right around here. The sad part is that they all only differ slightly, but none get it all correct. That said, the Mvix Ultio Pro Media Center comes pretty close from my initial impressions. It will stream your media from across the network or allow for local storage on a user supplied 3.5″ hard drive (up to 2TB). The Ultio also fully supports UPnP servers and integrates with PlayOn or Tversity so that you can stream your Hulu, Netflix, or whatever other internet content straight to it.

From a first glance, this product looks awesome! It even supports sending both video and audio across the HDMI connection whereas a number of recent devices are only sending audio out via optical. I’m still not sure if it will allow for bit-streaming HD audio codecs such as DTS-MA or Dolby TrueHD, but it does support them. However, there are a few complaints. The first being the same 100Mb ethernet port that plagues the rest of the set-top box world. Is it really that difficult to swap that for a gigabit port? Or would that really increase production costs that much? And the second complaint is that the only integrated app is a bit torrent client. It would be nice to have some internet streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu, Revision3, or even youtube integrated into the devices OS. I don’t want to have to use a third party solution to stream the content from the internet to my PC and then from my PC to the device. Ultimately, I should just be able to stream straight from the interwebs to my device and be done with it.

Mvix is doing something unique though and it really impressed me. They are extending an “Ultio Challenge” to the developers of the world. Mvix has released the source code to their Ultio firmware as open-source code and challenged the world to improve upon it. Basically, you download the source code, improve it with your own code/patches, submit them to Mvix for testing, and if they like it they include it in the next official firmware release. On top of all that, they send you $500 for your accepted submission too! I’m a huge fan of open-source projects and it can’t get too much better than that.

The Ultio Pro Media Center can be picked up at Amazon for around $175.

And now, what you’ve all been waiting for. Here are some specs on the Ultio Pro Media Center, but be sure to check their site for the full spec sheet.

• Digital Media Player Supports native 1080p output and many video codecs including MKV
• HDD Compatibility: Supports 3.5 SATA hard disk (not included)
• HDD Format: FAT32, EXT3, NTFS
• TV System Compatibility: PAL, NTSC, Auto
• Networking: LAN RJ45 10/100M or Wi-Fi 802.11N (via USB dongle, sold seperately)
• Network Protocols: Embedded uPnP Client, Samba Client
• Video Codecs: H.264, AVC-HD, MKV, WMV9, MPEG 1/2/4, HD Divx , Xvid, FLV, RM/RMVB, Container: mkv, ts, m2ts, mts, tp, trp, wmv, Ifo, iso, vob, dat, avi, mpg, mp4, mov, rm, rmvb, divx, xvid, flv
• Audio Codecs: DTS-MA, Dolby TrueHD, MP3, WMA, WAV, OGG, AAC, LPCM, FLAC, AC3, Container: WAV [.wav, .pcm], ADIF, ADTS [.aac], M4A [.m4a], OGG [.ogg], ASF/WMA [.asf, .wma], FLAC [.flac]
• Images: JPG, JPEG, BMP, PNG, GIF
• Subtitle Playback: sub, smi, ssa, srt, idx + sub
• Audio/Video Out: HDMI1.3 (digital video and audio signals), Component (Y Pb Pr), Composite Video, Optical SPDIF (5.1Ch Dolby Digital), Stereo audio output (Audio R/L),
• I / O Ports: USB2.0 Host (for connecting external CD ROM/DVD ROM/External HDD/USB WIFI), USB2.0 Slave to transfer Media from PC, 10/100Mbps Ethernet port
• Torrent Client: Embedded Bit torrent Client
• File Management: HDD Format, Copy, Delete, Rename, File Transfer via hand-held Remote
• Language: English, German, Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, Dutch, Hebrew

Coffee makes the world go ’round…

I’ve been caught up with a few mini-projects the last week or so, as well as a new show. As I mentioned before, I am researching and picking the specs for my new HTPC build. For pricing reasons, I’m now considering reusing an old Athlon X2 CPU, mobo, and ram to drastically cut down on cost of the new build. The release of the new ATI 5450 and 5550 GPUs has greatly swayed toward doing so. I mean come on. Full 7.1 HD audio bitstream support; passively cooled; all for $70? That’s a damn good deal! One that I’m not so sure I will be able to pass on. So as of right now, the specs are looking like:

• Athlon X2 CPU
• An old MSI mini-ATX mobo
• ATI 5450 GPU
• 4GB DDR2-800 RAM

It’s not the biggest of work horses, but the GPU should handle most of the video decoding work and the bitstream the audio to my receiver for decoding. The only area I worry about that old dual core processor not being able to keep up is with online flash content. However, I don’t watch too much of that as it is. Netflix streaming is handled via the TV itself and Hulu just isn’t a major priority these days. As Hulu moves toward a pay model, it loses even more of my interest as well. This is more the fault of the content producers than of Hulu’s though. They just aren’t making enough shows worth paying to watch. Though I did come across Real’s (yes, as in the realplayer) new on demand TV streaming service, SuperPass. Someone had mentioned it in passing to me a couple of weeks ago and I see that they are offering the typical 2-week free trial. So I’m thinking about giving it a shot to see how it is. If anyone else has already tried it, let me know what you think of it. How is their selection and the quality of the streams?

I also mentioned, previously, that I was getting to work on my home theater’s lacking audio setup. And as promised, I have finally come through on that. I picked up my Onkyo TX-SR607 Receiver and a set of Onkyo’s SKS-HT870 7.1 surround sound speakers. I had been looking at a set from Klipsch as well as Onkyo’s lower SKS-HT570 5.1 set, but ended up going with their SKS-HT870 for a few reasons. To start, the price was great at just over $300. I also liked that the front L/R channels came with stands already. Then there is the size; they are pretty big and the sub is huge! I love it! I also really liked the fact that they were 6-ohm speakers as well.

The new audio gear is working well and they all play nicely to bring out an amazing sound! Movies seem so much more enjoyable now that they sound like they actually have a pair. The 7.1 is a new aspect for me and really changes the whole home theater experience. For example, my couch is in front of a garden window (so the window is to your back as you watch TV) and during the Snatch blu-ray there is a scene where they are in the car talking and it’s raining outside. Well at first it didn’t click, so I thought it was raining outside and had to get up to check. Needless to say, I’m loving it!

Like I said, a new show has caught my eye and been taking up some of my time. The new Starz show, “Spartacus – Blood and Sand” has recently come to my attention. I am still unsure on how I’m going to like this show though. It is a great Rome/Gladiator type show which I like, but so far it is a little lackluster. For starters there is a huge amount of CG. Blatantly obvious CG at that, which I’m not a huge fan of. However, it is done in that “famed” Sam Raimi comic book style. And that, I usually like. To put it simply: horrible acting, bad dialogue, gratuitous nudity, gratuitous blood and violence…..I’m rather torn, you decide if it’s for you or not. Definitely check out at least one episode though.

And of course, it is that time of year again. Where all of us “scholarly inquisitors” are herded back into the classrooms in stride for that highly coveted degree certification. So my security courses may begin taking up a growing amount of time. Either way, there is always time to sit back with a glass of whiskey and enjoy our home theaters!

Coffee makes the world go ’round…

It seems that one of the biggest struggles we face in the HTPC arena is getting our high definition audio codecs properly passed from our home theater PC to our ears with the absolute best quality possible. Typically this has been done via multi-channel LPCM over an optical connection to an AV receiver. Now that HDMI has come along and allowed us to take better quality video and better quality audio and send them both out across the same cable, there’s a whole new set of options (with their respective issues as well).

Until recently, the HTPC market hasn’t had much to offer in the way of getting video and audio out of a single HDMI cable except for some rather high priced fancy sound cards. And now we have two very strong contenders breaking out into the scene; Intel and AMD/ATI. ATI’s has released their newer 5xxx series GPU’s and Intel has their latest Core i3/i5/i7 series CPU’s with integrated Intel HD GPU on chip. Both of these offerings finally bring us the option to bitstream our HD audio via HDMI alongside our video stream.

In order to help get you up and running a little smoother, Damian over at Media Smart Server has a really great guide detailing how he got his ATI 5670 GPU and Windows 7 HTPC up and running with full bitstreaming support to his AV receiver.

Coffee makes the world go ’round…

Hollywood has plagued us with two major trends over the past decade: increasing prices inversely proportional to the amount or quality of offering and a complete lack of imagination demonstrated by a seemingly never-ending release cycle of (usually sub-par) remakes. Now I know a lot of people out there (mostly in the “Hollywood biz”) are saying “well if you think they’re doing such a bad job, why don’t you come up with something new?” And quite simply, because I never said I could come up with anything new and fantastical, nor am I in the business of doing so, and much less so demanding that you pay me more while I give you less! So what does all of this have to do with Psycho Killer Clowns? Well, let’s move on to that…

Stephen King is quite possibly one of the greatest horror authors of all time. He has also played a very large role in my obsessive disdain and fear of clowns throughout my childhood and even into present day. The made-for-TV adaptation of King’s novel, “It”, remains one of my favorite horror flicks of all time! As such, it only makes sense that I would love to see this released on blu-ray. So I set out in search of a possible release date only to find, not a release date, but rumors of yet another one of Hollywood’s planned remakes. While there is no official release announced yet, there are plenty of rumors pointing to a 2011 appearance. Stumbling across this news has made me, both, giddy with a bit of sadistic joy, as well as quite worried. I would love to see this movie adapted to a theatrical film and inevitably a blu-ray release, but worry that I would end up hating it even more if they ruined the original as most Hollywood remakes tend to.

Warner Bros. has signed on to go forward with David Kajganich screen writing and acting as director on this touchy epic reboot. The fact that Kajganich seems to be a rather unknown character and new face lent itself to my growing skepticism. Additionally, the guys at SlashFilms are predicting that Warner Bros. will most likely try to cut the originally three hour TV series down to a two hour movie. This greatly disturbs me, as there is no way they can manage to maintain enough of the original’s sanctity while cutting out an hour of it. It doesn’t matter what minute details they remove, the story will suffer at that drastic of a chop job! And this is a major reason why most of the remakes coming out are so crappy; because they try to change too much of the original story. It is as if they can’t come up with enough new material to warrant an entirely new movie and title so, instead, they just morph an older classic into some new horribly deformed bastardization and call it a remake.

However, Mr. Kajganich has increased his credibility with me after I came across a letter he sent to the folks over at Dread Central. Kajganich moves to assure us that the remake will definitely “be R. Which means we can really honor the book and engage with the traumas (both the paranormal ones and those they deal with at home and school) that these character endure” and maintain the utmost respect for King’s works. From the looks of it, Warner Bros. seems to at least have a writer that knows and appreciates the original work which will hopefully lend to a decent adaptation.

It will surely be a release that I am anxious to see. I only hope that it will not be yet another let down. What do you all think of them remaking this classic?

Coffee makes the world go ’round…

This post will be continuing on from my previous post about new projects to start the year of right. I mentioned that I would be addressing the lack of proper audio equipment for my home theater setup. In order to do so, I have locked on to purchase an Onkyo TX-SR607 A/V Receiver. That will give me a more than ample introductory/budget receiver for really stepping up my current home theater experience. Yet, it leaves me now needing a decent set of speakers to complement my new receiver.

I will admit that speakers are not my strongest point and that is why I’m turning to the community here for your advice and input. I am currently looking at two surround sound speaker bundles to go along with the new TX-SR607. The two options up for consideration are the Klipsch HD300 bundle and the Onkyo SKS-HT540 bundle. Comparing these two options will have an obvious obstacle, as the Klipsch is a 5.1 system and the Onkyo is a 7.1 offering. However, my home theater is in a fairly small and oddly shaped room so speaker positioning will be an interesting task anyway. With the positioning trouble and size of the room, the extra 2 channels are not going to make an enormous difference that it would make the 7.1ch Onkyo bundle an automatic winner.

So, overlooking the differing number of channels, what do these two systems offer? Here are some of the specs of each below…

As you can see, the Onkyo has a little wider response range leaning more toward picking up a lower end than the Klipsch. Additionally, the Klipsch HD300 recommends only a max of 100w/ch whereas the Onkyo recommends a max of up to 130w/ch. Now for one of the more important aspects, price. The Klipsch HD300 comes in at around $400, but can be picked up in a bundle for around $300. The Onkyo SKS-HT540 can be picked up for $280.

Given the above, it would seem to me that the Onkyo bundle comes in a little ahead of the Klipsch. However, I’m not much of a “speakerphile” so I may be missing something here. Do any of you have either of these bundles or experience with them? Let me know what you think about either or both of them. Or maybe you can recommend a different offering for a nice budget entrance into a proper home theater audio setup.

Coffee makes the world go ’round…