At the start of the month I gave a review of the iPiMP app here and came up with 2 things that would not only turn this into a must have bit of software; but strengthen mediaportal’s position as one of the best media centre applications available for windows users as well.
The first was the ability to stream live tv to the iphone - However, a bit more thought into that and I have come to the conclusion that it’s not such a hot feature after all. Too limiting and would depend on some structural changes to the mediaportal software itself.
The second one is the truly killer feature though… Remote control of a client.
Well, it turns out that I didn’t have to wait long at all after a comment popped up from the developer informing me that version 3.0.0 (latest version is now 3.0.1) now includes that very feature!
The installer now comes with a “client plugin” option that is required on every client you wish to remotely control.
Just remember to untick the server and transcoder options, this could be made a little easier for some people by having a menu before the component selections with 3 radio buttons offering “server and client”, “server only” and “client only” options to auto choose these; but then it isn’t really hard to untick the boxes.
Once installed, remember to enable the plugin from within the mediaportal client settings dialogue and add the port it runs on (55667 tcp) to your firewall.
After you have your server running and all your clients set up and enabled it’s time to fire up the iphone.
Oh, small change - the username field is no longer case sensitive so it doesn’t matter anymore about the recent auto caps’ing Apple included in the latest firmware.
And there we have the addition of “Remote control” to the home menu.
Before you can start controlling any of your clients, you’ll need to add them by tapping onto “administration”.
Tap through to the “MediaPortal clients” and you’ll see a very simple add, delete and edit screen. Tapping onto add will give you the following screen.
Here you can give it a friendly name that can be its location in your house, the name of the PC it is running on and the port the service communicates on.
Unless you changed this within the plugin options in the mediaportal config, you can leave the port setting blank and it will use the default setting; which is a nice bit of design by the developer - fewer settings for users to remember and fiddle with usually results fewer things to break.
Once you have configured your clients and saved the settings tap on the home button and go into the Remote control option.
Select your client and you’ll be greated with a two page interface (transitioned by tapping on the little guy holding a number) that is simple, if busy looking at first.
The little guys on the second page represent the different categories such as music, games, videos, pictures and live tv.
The first page is a simple navigation layout, not a bad first config but one I’m sure will be refined over time as people begin using it - the first suggestion that springs to my mind is having the tv guide button on the same page as the navigation buttons.
It is very intuative when moving around mediaportal with the iphone and this app, I can already see my logitech mx air getting even less use now!
As it is, the only fault I have picked up on so far while testing the remote control isn’t overly the fault of the app, instead it’s more to do with the responsiveness of the touch screen on my iphone - it has never been quick enough to keep up with the speed at which I can attempt to use it, causing many of my taps to not register.
The result, browsing a long list of video files can take a lot longer than a mouse to navigate around leaving you to tap, tap, tap, tap your way around. As I said tho, this is more a failing of the iphone than the app.
I wonder how difficult it would be to implement a slide scroll to it.
Anyway, time to navigate aside, this little applet just joined my list of must have apps where-ever I deploy a copy of mediaportal as it finally begins to make PC based TV’s a real and friendly replacement to a traditional TV and seperates solution without having to own expensive remote controls that are pretty much useless beyond the application they were designed for.
Convergence is always a good thing and if you ever lose this TV remote, you can always just call it and discover where they have been vanishing to all these years!
Verdict: If you’re running mediaportal and own an iphone, this just became a part of your standard install!
For those who don’t know what mediaportal is, shame on you!
I… er.. mean, it’s an opensource PVR solution for windows XP machines and in direct competition with others such as BeyondTV, MythTV and Microsofts own Media Centre. While not as feature rich as BeyondTV it does get the streaming of live TV across your network very well and all for the price of zero. Definately in my top 5 apps you must download if you run windows.
The iPiMP app has been designed by one of the community to provide you with a portable interface for recording shows and playing them back.
It’s not strictly an app that you install onto your iphone, you install it onto the PC running the TV server and it will serve webpages using the built-in apache server, saving you from jailbreaking it - which is nice. Just remember to change the port to something like 81 because it’ll fail to start it’s service due to the TV server already using this port.
When it asks where you store the logos for the channels you need to point it towards here
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal\thumbs\tv\logos
Sadly it doesn’t seem to pick mine up, so I need to spend a little bit of time troubleshooting this.
Once everything is installed without error, connect to your wifi network, open safari on your iphone and point it to the following
http://yourpcip:portnumber
When you reach the logon window to enter the default details, the lack of screen space gives you the only real annoyance when the keyboard covers the text input boxes until you enter something (and I’ve found the auto caps’ing of the first letter to be a pain too, since the default admin account is lower case).
Once logged in you’ll be greeted by a very clean interface with simple tasks allowing you to see what is currently on, schedule recordings and watch recorded TV (as long as you set it up to transcode them to the supported format).
Sadly you can’t stream the live TV feed to your iphone, which would have been the truly killer part of the app but it does turn your iphone into a handy mini EPG and recording unit.
The TV guide is split into days, a now and next lineup (which is a bit confusing when tv logos aren’t working) and a very handy search feature.
Clicking on an entry will bring up some show info and a record button, clicking onto it brings up the various recording options.
As you can see, the record buttons get skewed out of alignment, but it doesn’t stop you from following it.
Returning back to home and then onto the recorded TV section, you can choose what time frame the shows were recorded in and browse the list of shows.
Just remember, if you haven’t set it up to transcode the recordings you won’t be able to watch them. This section also allows you to delete recordings - sadly it doesn’t delete the transcoded files, you’ll need to do that manually on your server - which gives you a small degree of remote management over your burgeoning collection.
Conclusion
Overall, the app is very well put together and would be a very handy compliment to anyone who has implemented mediaportal and also happens to own an iphone. Sadly it is missing a few features such as live tv viewing and remote control of a client, add them and that would turn it into a truly killer app.
As it is, iPiMP functions as a very handy EPG and recording scheduler with the ability to watch your recorded shows if you make use of the supplied transcoder.
It’s my girlfriends birthday soon and I was stuck for what to buy her. Well, that is until she bitched about my decrepid digicam which is dieing a slow and painful death.
The lamp went on in my head and I decided to have a look for a new digicam as this years pressie - it’ll help her immensely since she needs to take photos for her game concepts and textures.
Off I went, scouring the web for good deals.
For a while I flitted between a couple of Fujifilm, Sony and Cannon compacts and the price was steadily going up with every "It’s nice, but this one it just that little bit nicer" comment. By now I had climbed to £180 and thought "fuck it, why don’t I just get her an entry level DSLR instead" it was only £60 more.
And so off I went, onto more researching. The Sony A200 is very nice but I couldn’t push myself to meet the asking price, the Cannons have a far better range of lenses but this is just a starter unit and she’s not gonna need them for quite some time yet.
Which left me with only one logical choice…
A Nikon D40 . I could have bought the D40X, but I figured there wasn’t really that much of a need to spend the extra cash for not a massive difference when this will be perfect for what she needs right now.
It turned up last Friday, and I had a quick little play around with it to make sure nothing broke during transit/manufacture - honest! The result of which can be found on my flickr account here .
I was also nice and gave the camera to her early so she could have a play and get accustomed to it as quickly as possible. Seems I have definately picked a geeky girl to fall in love with, she was as giddy as I get when around new tech. "I’ve never owned a DSLR before in my life" she gasped with a massive grin lighting her face.
It wasn’t long before she was out snapping pics all over the place - I’ve had a quick play with it, so many options!
It seems that she has gotten the hang of it quite quickly, as you can see from a selection of pics below.
The performance of the camera is stunning - click the button and *snap* the picture is there. Low light conditions are great when you bump it up to ISO1600 and it’s ready to go within seconds of turning it on. The kit lense, while only 3x zoom still brings up a fantastic amount of detail.
Definately recommend it as a starter DSLR camera. We just need to get the hang of this manual focus malarky.
Also, keep your eyes open for random pics dropping onto my flickr account because of it. Think I’m gonna need to upgrade my account to Pro if this keeps up!
Here’s the contents of a few messages as I was streaming my installation of Windows7, which I had to cut short the streaming because my GF entered the room and I respect her privacy. Just as I had people picking up the stream after my flatmate got it linked on EVE Radio .
Sorry for those who were cut off so soon!
urgh.. come on microsoft, why can’t I delete a dynamic drive from the setup? do I *really* have to go into another instance of windows to do it? BAD FORM
ok, after some jiggery and pokery with storage and moving data across I’m now *finally* moving with installing win7. Just got the 45 min copy of files to wait now :/
well, after having a play around with the settings and a nose about media centre, the damn thing packed in on me and wouldn’t boot back up again. I think it’s more down to a buggered HDD than the OS. Will explore tonight.
Had plenty of problems, primarily with the fact that I only had sata hdd’s at hand but the machine I was using didn’t have onboard sata. Sadly, the only sata card I have is an Adaptec 1210S which never had vista drivers built and win7 doesn’t have any native support.
I then tried a HDD from an old system, a tiny 10gb and was rejected “windows requires 12gb of free space”.
Found another, but was a dynamic disk and just like vista it refuses to deal with it. This is quite a bad failing really, there should be no reason why you can’t convert it within the setup interface! I had to boot to another OS in order to sort it out before win7 setup (winPE) would even accept the HDD.
To anyone with influence at MS, please get this looked at!
I will be continuing this tonight, as I try to resurrect the damn thing and grab some screenshots. One thing I did notice is that all the changes are very subtle right now.
I know the major interface changes have been omitted right now, but there are still plenty - something I noticed immediately is that the “explore” option when right clicking [my] computer has been eliminated because it is all one view - which it has been since vista.
The display settings interface has been tidied up a bit, I really wish I had got screen caps before it died. It looks a bit more friendly to less experienced users.
Win7 seems to accept vista drivers for hardware quite happily, so maybe the driver hell won’t be as pronounced with this version. I had my sound card (ADI onboard) and Hauppage TV card (PVR350) running quite happily from drivers downloaded from their respective sites.
Windows picked up its own drivers for the 6600GT I was using for the video card, I used an fx5200 when installing it. Wanted to see how it would handle a vid card swap. No problems.
Something I didn’t notice was the performance scoring system, it just let me go straight into the aero style without having to redo anything. Whether this will be in the final version or not remains to be seen.
Media Centre is very usable, with some tweaks here and there - teletext buttons onscreen was a nice touch that I don’t remember being there before. It seems to have lost the double right click to go back to the EPG for some reason.
I just plain didn’t have enough time to go through it as it crashed in media centre and wouldn’t let me get to the task manager before it rebooted on its own and complained about the boot device, halting my playtime.
Also, if you’re thinking about running the beta win7 in virtual PC don’t bother. The VM additions software will blue screen on you and stop it from booting. On the plus side, I got to see the recovery wizard that will run through a diagnosis for you and then spit out its recommendation - in this instance it suggested I do a rollback using system restore, don’t know if it will always suggest that or if it can do other things too.
Expect some screenshots in the near future, until now it’s text only
A few years back, the PSP had been launched in Japan and I was drooling at the pictures that adorned nearly every gaming site I went to. I even got to play about on an import model at my local CEX store and was mesmerised for a while.
It was a mix of “must have shiny” and “it’s like the gamegear had been thru the slimfast diet!”.
The only thing that saved me from buying it then was the poor line-up of games and the dearth of support for its media capabilities.
Fast forward to today and, while the game catalogue still hasn’t improved much, the media abilities of the now even trimmer PSP slim are very tempting indeed. Yet, I still held out from buying one.. That is, until I got my hands on a single game…
A friend of mine brought over his Japanese copy of Final Fantasy 7: Crisis Core (why do they get all the cool stuff!?) and I had nothing but “I gotta get me one of them” in my head for weeks.
I finally caved in to the voices in my head and bought one and, well I thought I’d put my experiences with it down somewhere!
The first thing you’ll notice is the total lack of a carry case in the box, and the sudden paranoia of “but, I don’t want my shiny to get dirty!” whenever you think about having to carry it around in your bag. For the price they are charging for this thing (the UK is getting gouged for a scary £130!) you’d have thought they’d be willing to give you a few extras to show they cared
If you didn’t get your PSP Slim with a memory stick then it’s certainly advised that you get one otherwise every game you load will scream about it and you’ll never be able to save any games, also things such as favourites and RSS feeds don’t work unless you get a card.
The type you need is a least a memory stick duo (if you have one of the big arsed original memory sticks you’re shit out of luck, if you have one of the tiny m2’s you will need the adapter that makes it big enough to fit into this thing), make sure you don’t get drawn into paying over the odds for a “gaming class” card cause, frankly you’re pissing extra money up against the wall.
To give you an idea of how much you should be paying, a 1Gb memory stick duo card should be going for about £20 and cheaper on the net, don’t get sucker punched by retail shops.
Once you have a memory card in your PSP, the full functions are available to you and allow you to get down to the whole point of it - enjoying yourself.
Having owned a DS for over a year the biggest problem is with the accept and reject buttons - they’re the opposite way around to the DS so I found myself accepting things I didn’t want and cancelling out of things I wanted to do, frustrating for a while but you soon get your fingers reprogrammed.
The extra memory onboard has improved load times of games and the various apps, but I still notice a rather sizable load time when the PSP has to read from its UMD, which does leave you feeling a bit let down - after all, it’s the whizziest and shiniest portable around, which makes you wish this thing would move a bit quicker when loading your game!
Beyond that, when you do get your game going you certainly notice just how much more grunt under the hood the thing has compared to the DS, even though you’ve prolly grown accustomed to better graphics on your consoles and/or PC you still catch yourself being blow away by just what the small thing can do.. You also begin to wonder how the DS is kicking it’s arse in terms of sales until you remember about the choice of games you have and you quickly remember why, even without homebrew titles the DS seemingly has a better selection of games that are fun to pick up and play (you remember fun right?).
I’ve not had a chance to try out the wireless play, partly because I don’t know anyone else with a PSP and partly because I’ve found its wifi to be quite dodgy at times – randomly telling you that it can’t find your access point, telling you the security settings are wrong and then randomly actually getting onto your wifi network – not very helpful in the slightest but something that I chalk up to the intrinsic problems of wifi, tho I did get it complain to me about my dedicated DS wireless network that the key I’m using isn’t a valid WEP key… I think sony have some problems with their wireless comms modules!
Also, with the power of a wifi enabled device that has a web browser on it, I have to say that I quite often caught myself doing a bit of naughty war walking and it not only scares me but makes me concerned just how many unsecured wireless networks there out in the wild.
This leads me quite neatly onto the web browser functionality (funny that ).
The browser powering the PSP’s access is known as NetFront and is quite lacking in features – it has a basic support for flash but not enough for the likes of youtube, revver, break or your other fav flash video sites.
It has problems with displaying other sites (CSS issues etc) and you can often fall foul of the poor space for caching, which can lead to you having to close the browser and open it back up again.
Many of your fav “web 2.0” (I hate that buzz word) sites won’t work if they’re running stuff like AJAX and ruby-on-rails.
That’s not to say that you can’t browse anything, but be prepared for many things to not work at all or to not be fully supported by your PSP.
The way in which you navigate makes good use of the limited interface, you can either use the D-pad to hop from one link to the other or you can flip to a bigger screen and use the analogue stick to move the mouse pointer around freely, hold down the square button to scroll from left to right and up n down.
The text entry is quite tedious, but with some handy quick choices to reduce the number of buttons you have to mash in order to get down the address you want.
Possibly the single biggest letdown is just how painful it is to browse the net using the very small resolution that the PSP’s screen runs at.
When you take the performance, it shows that the PSP is crying out for some opera muscle to power it rather than the limp NetFront. The interface is as good as it’s gonna get on your PSP tho and the lack of a touch interface (I occasionally found myself tapping the screen if I had been messing about with my DS prior to whipping out the PSP) does quite knock back the experience.
With the browser out of the way, we’re left with the movie, music and photo side of the device.
Starting off with the music abilities, it’s pretty simple and easy to use. I did notice with mine it created an MP3 folder on my memory card but it helpfully doesn’t pull the data from there creating a folder called “MUSIC” in the root of the card did the job.
It picked up the album art and displayed it and there is pretty much nothing else to go wrong, it took my test mp3 and played it without a glitch.
For video you have 2 choices, you can use the UMD slot and buy videos – sadly they can’t be used anywhere else and while they have dropped in price quite a lot (many titles are now £4.99), there are still too many with a price tag of £10 and higher that just will never shift.
Your other choice is to go with the memory card by loading up your memory stick with either mp4 or H.264 encoded videos – just make sure to dump them into a folder called “VIDEO” otherwise you’ll be told that there’s no video on your card, chances are you’ll have to guess that it needs this folder and create it yourself… To a not very savvy member of the public, this could prove to be a difficult task and lead to them only ever using UMD’s for their videos (I wonder if this was the plan all along).
I do think that UMD’s are due to die a horrible death anyway, especially with the news from the 2008 CES event that you can use a PS3 to transfer a copy of a bluray movie to the memory card of your PSP by simply inserting the disc, connecting up your PSP and hitting transfer. This is a master stroke and is certainly putting their machines to good use as well as catching onto the fact that we consumers want to be able to take and use our media when, where and how we like!
If only they had figured this out with DVD’s too!
The photo section is pretty much self explanatory really; if you have any pictures in the DCIM folder it’ll simply display them. This is the part of the PSP that I haven’t really used and seriously doubt I ever will too.. some people might find it useful, most people I reckon won’t bother with it either!
My final point on the PSP Slim is with the charging, you have the choice of using the supplied charger or using USB to charge the device. As anyone who has seen my youtube video can attest, I love the ability to charge devices using their built in USB ports. It reduces clutter and pointless unplugging and plugging in of items into and out of my power strips.
Yet, as ever with sony, it’s never as easy as plugging in the USB port and leaving it to work its magic on the battery. Oh no, sony forces you to first enable the setting for USB charging and then you have to activate USB communications before it actually begins to charge the device, breaking the number one rule – keep it simple stupid!
Why they thought it would be necessary to have the device on (so if it runs completely flat you’re in trouble) and to begin talking to your host device (quite blissfully ignoring the potential to simply use a plug with a USB jack on the end of it) is totally beyond me and just smacks of a half hearted effort at what should be a pretty standard feature.
I never bothered to buy the webcam as I don’t really see much of a use for it (plus it’s a bit of a rip off for what it is too).
I have, of course, not even mentioned the promised features that are to be coming in the future – the addition of Skype (tho you need to buy and use a sony headset in order to communicate) and the launch in Japan of a digital TV tuner, which I can only hope makes an appearance over here in the west (stop keeping all of the cool toys!).
Sadly, even tho the PSP has great media features and a handy browsing feature, it still remains quite ignored compared to my very loved DS and this is purely because I’m struggling to find any games other than the Mega Drive collection that actually gets my attention…
Until the time comes for crisis core to be released in the UK, my poor PSP will no doubt gather yet more dust until it gets to show how bright it can shine.
Since my trial period of vista came to an end (and the feature cripple that comes with it) I decided to give the other major DVR (digital video recorder) application a try.
This software is known as BeyondTV and is released by a company called SnapStream andcosts about $70. You can trial the software for 21 days free of charge.
After running through the installer and getting the channels picked up it became apparent that the interface is a hell of a lot more muddled and less polished than that of media center - the ability to retune the channels is somewhat obtuse and program guide doesn’t exist unless you sign up for an account (why the hell I would want to do this with a trial is beyond me).
Once the application is up and running and you are on live TV, the channel changing mechanism is somewhat poor and actually caused the application to lock up requiring a good old fashioned task manager end process. Because I didn’t sign up for an account there was no program guide and no obviously easy way to assign listings to a channel either.
Simply using the app is a bit of a poor experience, even tho some of the options such as the ability to change the recording format to a different codec that is installed, remote programming of shows you want to record - which is unavailable if you don’t sign up for that account - and a web interface for dealing with a lot of the settings is certainly an improvement over media center not to mention the capacity to easily re-encode recordings for portable media players (PMP) such as the ipod and the psp. I must also point out that the assumption that you want to run the application the moment you log into windows is a bad decision - applications should only load when I request them to.
However, while I admit that this is basically my first impressions of the app before I dig into the real workings of it, the initial impression is that it suffers from the usual problem that a great deal of windows applications suffer from - simply not slick and easy to use out of the box. Media center definately shows the extra resources at hand compared to beyondTV I’m afraid, even if the feature set is (in the bigger picture ) superior to the microsoft offering it just simply falls short of the ease to use and even the stability shown within media center (and this feels like a very strange thing to say about a microsoft product!).
The fact that I have to sign up for accounts gives it a very big black mark - I hate services that demand me to sign up for things to get basic functionality out of the application.
So far, on first glimpse I have to say that media center is actually out in the lead against beyondtv - which is a confusing situation let me tell you! - tho this is just the beginning of my playing.. over time I’ll explore the app and figure out where the strengths and where the deeper weaknesses are.
Some small amendments:
The codec is MJpeg not MPeg.
The HD res is actually the res your game runs in.
Other than the minor factual faults, WeGame.com looks like a good, and free, alternative to fraps.
You just need to bear in mind that you will be restricted with which games you can record, but that is something that can be and is improved over time
Check it out and start recording those gaming memories!
A month or so ago, I noticed that my Wii had a nice little blue glow from the cd tray.
This is the Wii’s oh so subtle method of informing you that there is an unopened message sitting in the message board.
So, curious to know I powered it up and checked the board out. Sitting there was a note from nintendo saying that they were offering free wii remote jackets to people who qualify for them.
A swift trip to the address supplied in the message and I had put in my request for 4 of these things and all I had to do was wait for nintendo to review the request and give me a yay or a nay.
A couple of weeks back I got a message telling me that I did qualify
and that they will be shipped to me shortly.
It has taken a couple of weeks (I wonder how much the recent mail strikes affected this) but today they finally arrived.
The envelope they were in was already ripped, but a quick count showed all 4 were indeed in there, along with a sheet of paper informing you how to put them on (which is pretty obvious really!).
They are comfortable in the hand as well as provide a good amount of shock absorption. They will certainly help out the more sweaty palmed players when it comes to griping the remote, which is always a good thing
Final note about them.. they have a feint smell of lockets or tunes on them.. t’is strange!
The result of which can be found on my flickr account 
