The world as frankps sees it!
Posts tagged Connect360
From AirPort Express to Apple TV
3I have just bought Apple TV 40 GB (previously known as the “iTV”) as a replacement for Apple Express, and spent most of the weekend to rip my CD collection (320 Kbps) and synced it over to the Apple TV, and then packed down all the CDs in plastic boxes and put the CD player in the bottom of a locker. They are not to go back up on the shelf!
Aardman Production on Joost!
14 years ago
I was quite fast on signing up on Joost. The project was called “The Venice Project” in it’s early days, and it is another project from the guys behind Skype. In the beginning the service was lacking intersting content, but as this is now changing I am using it more and more. Today I discovered that there was even a Aardman Production channel, the studio behind the successes Creature Comfort and Wallace & Gromit.
I find Joost far more interesting then videocast services like the Democracy player, and I have by now more or less stopped using the Democracy player. The technology behind Joost is impressive, it is in short P2P (peer-to-peer) done right! The perfect platform for pushing HDTV content. The application downloads approximately 320Mb of data an hour and uploads about 105MB an hour. A broadband connection is therefor required. Joost is not pulling all of the video from a central server, instead it speeds up the download process by allowing videos to be pulled form other Joost locations that are closer to you. This makes the quality of the Joost broadcast service so impressive. I love watching it on my Mac, but it isn’t enough. I want to stream it to my TV as well. I heard something about that being possible with Apple TV, but what about the XBOX360? Appearently it is possible with the Media Center included in some of the versions of Vista. I hope it in the future also will be possible with a Mac, for instance through Connect360.
Another impressive thing is that Joost is very much based on open source technology. The application is based on Mozilla’s XULRunner engine, which basically means it’s cross-platform. Joost also has a inbuilt Instant Messenger service, and that is using the Jabber protocol (and not Skype)! The application is currently only available for Windows (also Vista) and MacOS X, but a Linux player will be made available later. If you are using Linux, and can’t wait for the client to arrive, people have been able to get Joost with Wine on Ubuntu. Their servers are running Ubuntu with Apache.
Do you want to learn more about the future of TV? Thought so, but then you need an invite. And guess what, I have some invites to give away! Please send me an e-mail.
More Information about the program.
Title : Morph Smart: Paint Job
Description : Morph plays a trick but it’s Chas who has the last laugh
Do I need Apple TV?
14 years ago
It’s time to upgrade my XBOX 360 with Microsoft’s latest patch. The new features are mainly the video codecs H.264 and MPEG4. Nullriver Software was out with updating their Connect360 for MacOS X. Version 3.0 is now released with support for the two new video codecs, including full HD (1920×1080) H.264 in both the MPEG-4 and QuickTime containers (in addition to the previous WMV). This is substantially higher than Apple TV’s support for 720p video, making the Xbox 360 the best full HD video extender available. It is of course also possible to share iTunes Podcasts to the Xbox 360. Great, I now just need a new TV!
None of the devices are perfect, just as the XBOX360 is known for being disappointingly loud, the AppleTV is getting extremely hot! Apple TV’s advantages are firstly that the XBOX360 cannot decrypt iTunes DRM and that the XBOX360 has cluttered menus when using anything else then a Windows version with Media Center as the UPnP server.
Hm, I have been playing a bit with the solution. And it is not working satisfyingly! Most podcasts crashes and some times they even freeze the XBOX. I ripped 10 short movies from a DVD with Handbrake and streamed them. That worked far better, but also then I experienced a crash.
I will be trying this also from my Vista Ultimate installation to see if the problem is the codecs or Connect360. But so far, I am clueless on what the problem can be…