The Media Viking

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 [...]

For the Linux fans out there, today is a great day! Up until now, blu-ray playback support in Linux has been very complicated and quite an aggravating experience. First you would have to hope you had the right BD-ROM drive and that there was a hacked firmware for you to flash it with. Then you [...]

Syabas Technology has said today that it will be shipping a new set-top box in March and is rumoured to be offered around the $130 price point. Targeting the internet streaming media arena, Syabas’ set top box, dubbed the “PopBox,” is aimed at competing with Roku’s offering and the recently announced Boxee Box by D-Link. [...]

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 [...]

It has been a few weeks since I first mentioned my plans to review the Netflix and Blockbuster rental services. As promised, here is the first of those reviews detailing my experience with Netflix’s free two week trial. So let’s see how things went… Netflix quotes an average 3 day turnaround on their shipping, but [...]