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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

New Year With a new year comes new projects (and after Christmas specials)! I apologize for the pause in updates. We took a short, unexpected vacation to get all prepared for 2010. Hopefully everyone had a safe and wonderful holiday and took time to be with family and friends. Well, now we are settled back [...]

The guys over at the Ember Media Manager project have released revision 1102 with a number of bug fixes. Ember Media Manager is one of, if not the, best applications out there for managing your movie media collection and producing XBMC compatible NFO catalogs. Some of the more notable changes are: Many of the scrapers [...]

XBMC will now have the ability to decode and playback full 1080p streams with ease. And the best part about it, is that it will have full cross platform support! Previously, anyone looking to decode any 1080p streams in H.264 or VC-1 would need a nice beefy processor to do all the heavy lifting. Then [...]

XBCM has released version 9.11 of their Xbox Media Center with a whole slew of updates, changes, and tweaks. The most noticeable difference is the new default theme. XBMC switched over to the new Confluence theme as the default with the recently updated PM3.HD set as the secondary default. As part of their cleanup, XBMC [...]

I’m always interested to hear about people’s “extreme” projects, whether it be an extreme media server or some interesting computer mod. The home theater does not need to be relegated to a dry or boring niche of nothing but HD televisions, HTPC’s, and Onkyo audio receivers. Media has be stored somewhere and with the growing [...]

The other night, D-link showed off its upcoming Boxee Box. It is a custom built appliance running Boxee on Linux. It comes with: SD Card Reader HDMI output port S/PDIF Digital Audio Out Stereo Analog Audio Out Ethernet RJ-45 connector 2 USB 2.0 ports Boxee has mentioned that they are pushing to get support for [...]

So earlier, I mentioned that development on one of my favorite media managers was being halted by the main developer. I have been following the thread over at XBMC Forums in hopes that some generous users will revive this promising gem. After 200 some odd pages, it appears that some have done just that. Well, [...]