I suppose it was enivitable but there hadn't been an rumours at all. This is great news, not only does it make an AppleTV appealing but actually usable.
Prices seem ok, not fantastic. But low enough to warrant even a test rental/purchase for even the most timid user. Apparently theres HD copies of some movies which cost $1 more, I can't find one yet. File sizes range from 0.8-1.2gb in the movies I looked at.
700 movies, Studios included off the bat
- 20th Century Fox
- The Walt Disney Studios
- Paramount Pictures
- Warner Bros
- Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. (MGM)
- Sony Pictures Television International
- Lionsgate
Rentals (30day rental, 48hrs to Watch once you press play, play across all )
- New Release - $6.99
- Older Titles - $4.99
- New Releases - $24.99
- Older Titles - $9.99 - $17.99
The usual peev's -
No TV yet, which is sad but understandable. I hope this means that theres at least an infastructure for real video delivery and hopefully mean that TVNZ, TV3 etc.. can start deals with Apple.
Listings No way of finding movies by price or quality.
Bandwidth - So I pay $7 for a movie, and then need to pay for the gb of data also adding, say, $1 more to the price. More than a DVD.
DRM - Everyones favourite. Apple only - no Zune users.......
All in all though this is a really big day for NZ media distribution, as big as iTunes originally launching music sales in NZ. You can finally sit on your couch, click through a big list of Movies and click a button and be watching a rented/purchased movie in seconds (or minutes knowing NZ broadband). You can have the iphone to play it on finally, and make use of the gimmick of an ipod with video - just like most of the developed world. Exciting stuff - if only I had money on my credit card....... :)
Read MoreWell, here we are again. Staring once more into the abyss that is the iPhone section of Vodafone's website. Only this time, rather than bang our heads against something sturdy, we give a low grunt and move on to something far more important.
Why the sudden change? Why am I writing it this way? The answer to the latter may never be known but the answer to the former is quite simple: The new iPhone plans are out!
Yes, Vodafone has released the new iPhone plans for New Zealand customers. However, is there any improvement?
From what I’ve seen so far, the answer is yes. But have they fixed it enough?
Well, the $250 1GB plan has been scrapped as an iPhone exclusive plan for one thing (now avaliable for any handset), replaced with the lowly 500mb $130 plan. Obviously there are now four plans, as opposed to three (two after a few weeks).
However, the greatest improvement overall is the addition of a $40 plan. However, at that price you'll have to settle for only 20 included minutes and 100 included texts. But for someone who isn't likely to be wanting to catch the latest 'will it blend' video on the move, this plan will be a godsend.
Of course, a few additional minutes would've been nice.
Well, at least the $40 plan phone is subsidized a fair bit
Anyway, here are the plans.
Read MoreMicrosoft treats us today to some new and improved (TM) licensing: Apparently, it is now allowed to move some server installations around a data center. Mind you, it was also technically possible before (because that's what you can do with collection... (more in the full post)
Read MoreI have noted earlier in this blog that Mythtv does not work with FreeviewHD due to lack of audio support. Well thanks to work of Paul Kendall (see his site here) and others it is now possible to use Mythtv as a HTPC delivering FreeviewHD. There are a couple of caveats to that of course; a powerfull CPU is required as there is no hardware H.264 accelration, and you have to be prepared to do a little bit of extra work in setting the machine up (not much different with fiddling with codecs with MP or GBPVR though).
So to test it all out with my machine I downloaded the latest version of Mythbuntu (8.04.1) and installed it onto my external hard drive. There are then a few step I had to go through before I could run myth-backend setup:
1) After restarting from the CD to the hard drive, I added the following line to the bottom of /etc/sources.list (open terminal, type 'sudo nano /etc/sources.list'):
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/paul-kcbbs/ubuntu hardy main
Then run:
'sudo apt-get update'
'sudo apt-get upgrade'
That will require confirmation and run for a while, after which the machine will be up-to-date with Paul's patches installed.
2) I have a Nova T 500, and according to it's wiki page it requires a cold reboot to be detected. Before this is done though, add the folowing to /etc/modprobe.d/options:
#enable LNA
options dvb-usb-dib0700 force_lna_activation=1
#disable 2nd tuner suspend
options usbcore autosuspend=-1
Now you are ready to run mythbackend setup and configure the tuners, sources etc. Also a guide will need to be setup somehow, I havn't got around to that yet.
With the configuration basically as above, I scanned in the digital channels to test out performance. With my 2.4GHz single core I could watch just TV1 and TV2, it would start skipping on fast moving scenes. TV3 was a no go.
From here, I plan on swap the CPU and graphics card out and put in my 5200+ X2. With a little bit more tweaking to get dual core being helpful (thanks to the mythtvnz list) hopefully I can get all the channels working. If I can do that, and get a guide loaded for all channels on my test setup I will do a reinstal and move everything over to Mythbuntu :)
Uni holidays are next week so this will be on the backburner with a very busy last week, will post again when I test things further.
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