Mashed Articles

It’s high time you moved your PC into the 21st Century by making it television-capable.

Let’s face it: most of us are missing a trick. Who here ignores traditional broadcast schedules, opting instead to catch up on TV shows via BBC iPlayer, ITV Player or 4oD? How many of us have downloaded a digital boxset from iTunes or spent hours slumped in front of the computer monitor browsing funny videos and clips on YouTube?

The way that we watch TV has changed – so why shouldn’t the way we access TV change along with it? Why watch web-delivered content on your widescreen laptop? You could be enjoying it on that lovely big TV in your sitting room.

If the thought of reclining in your chair and flicking with ease between live Freeview channels, a film on your hard drive and that program you’ve been meaning to catch up on with iPlayer doesn’t entice you, maybe the thought of your wallet will. When you buy a TV, you want to get a good few years use out of it before upgrading again. But entertainment technology is advancing quickly, and that large flatscreen you purchased a couple of years ago is already looking a bit old-
fashioned because it’s not HD. If you want an HDTV, you’ll need to buy a whole new television. What happens when 3D models go mainstream? You’ll have to upgrade again. And let’s not forget the digital switchover, which is happening at the moment. If your set is incapable of receiving digital signals, you’ll have to upgrade, or at the very least buy a set-top box or two. Either way, your wallet suffers. But if you make a PC the centre of your home entertainment system, you can embrace new standards through software simply by upgrading a single component – which is far less expensive than replacing your whole set every time a new technology comes along.

You’re probably wondering where the catch is. If TV PCs are so wonderful, why doesn’t everyone have one? The answer is that PCs and the living room have had an awkward relationship over the years because of one thing: noise. But no more: new advancements in technology have produced quiet machines that still have the grunt needed to handle HD video streaming and more. If you’re not sure which components your ideal machine needs – or if you’re eager to build one to your own exacting standards – then you’re in luck. We’ve compiled a list of the best software that will bring it your PC to life. Trust us: you’re not going to look back.

Media Center

Windows 7 Media Center is one of the most polished 10-foot interfaces around, but in general the software has been slow to evolve. Ignoring the addition of native H.264 support in Windows 7, other improvements to the system have been mostly cosmetic: turbo scroll, faded menu overlays, a new album art display and a handy desktop gadget. Media Center could easily feel old-fashioned and behind the times, then, if it weren’t for the army of bedroom coders constantly beavering away to produce plug-
ins that enhance the core features. Thanks to them, Media Center even has its own unofficial app store.

Another reason that many people still don’t take advantage of Media Center – despite the fact that it’s pre-installed on most XP, Vista and Windows 7 PCs – is that the software is at its best when you have a TV tuner and you’re using it as a fully fledged DVR. The app is hardly anyone’s first choice for general video playback (that’s usually Windows Media Player) or streaming video (most people prefer direct web browser access), so it gets forgotten about. Media Center has always done a great job of cataloguing the photos, music and video on your hard drive, and this could be handy for TV PC users – but its internet TV integration has been lightweight at best. Where Vista’s version had a poorly populated Online Media section, Windows 7’s Media Center just adds an Internet TV option supporting WMV, Silverlight and Flash video. US users have access to a range of internet TV streams from the likes of CBS, Zune, MSNBC and MSN; but UK users aren’t so well served on this front.

Touch makes Media Center more compelling, but don’t expect it on your TV PC

It’s not all bad news, though: you can watch iPlayer and even iTunes content in Media Center. Sky Player is also available as a plug-in, offering access to various Sky channels for subscribers, including Sky Movies and Sky Sports.

The suitability question

To do away with the hassle of having to navigate around your PC desktop before watching TV , you can get your system to boot directly into Media Center on startup. In Windows 7, select ‘Startup and Windows Behaviour’ on Media Center’s Settings menu. Simply check the box next to the ‘Start Windows Media Center when Windows starts’ option. Easy.

Of course, you could argue that Media Center is a little bloated for a system like this one – and the cost of a Windows 7 licence will add an extra £150. That’s a lot to pay, especially when you won’t even be using the bulk of the OS on a day-to-day basis. It’s worth considering lighter-weight alternatives such as Boxee or XBMC; these might be better suited to an Ion-based system.

Media Center Alternatives

Microsoft’s Media Center faces stiff competition these days thanks to freebie software like MythTV, Mediaportal, Boxee and XBMC. MythTV has been knocking around since 2002, and the software provides some good DVR support if you’re building a PC for heavy-duty TV recording. Numerous add-on modules can add photo browsing, RSS feeds, Netflix integration and Slingbox-style placeshifting. Mediaportal is unashamedly Media Center-esque, but it has a limited appeal for TV PCs since it only runs on Windows.

XBMC is otherwise known as Xbox Media Center. What started out as a clever hack for Microsoft’s games console has now evolved into an “open-source (GPL) software media player and entertainment hub for digital media”. There are versions for Linux, OS X and Windows. Using www.xbmc.org’s own guide, you can easily specify a minimal Ubuntu install before you add the software. XBMC can handle a huge array of video files, and playback can be accelerated using the Ion hardware. Usefully, XBMC can either launch a compatible player or function with a VDPAU (Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix) modification to the software. It’s all there in the XBMC wiki.

Out of the Boxee

Another Media Center alternative is Boxee. This freeware media centre solution was born out of the XBMC code base, and it brings a social-networking edge to things. Boxee does everything you expect – it catalogues photos, music and video on your PC’s hard disk and makes them accessible via a sofa-
friendly UI. If you’ve titled DVD rips correctly, Boxee will pull in the background blurb from IMDB.

Boxee apps take things a step further, plugging you directly into third-party video-streaming services including Netflix, YouTube, BBC iPlayer, Last.fm, Flickr, Digg and CNN. Log into your account on the Boxee websiteand you can seek out people you know that are also using the software. Adding a friend to your list will show you what they’ve been watching or what they recommend.

Boxee offers plug-ins for all of the best video, music and photo-streaming services

Boxee is an ideal choice for an Ion-based TV PC, especially as the integrated media player supports hardware-assisted video decoding. Need a cutting-edge remote control to go with it? Type Boxee into the iTunes Store and you’ll find a Boxee Remote app that lets you control your Boxee-powered TV PC with an iPhone or iPod Touch. And if you don’t want a PC at all? At this year’s CES, D-Link announced the first Boxee Box, a dedicated hardware solution that runs the software silently.

Stream Your Video Elsewhere

Having a TV PC connected to your beautiful plasma TV is one thing; being able to watch it every time you want to is another. So what can you do when your partner wants to watch Glee or the kids are pestering you to switch over to Dora The Explorer? No, not go ahead and watch what you want anyway: instead, simply stream your videos to a more portable device. Yes, we know the whole point of a TV PC is to take away the pain of slumping in a hard chair – but it’s handy to be able to stream to a laptop should somebody else fancy watching something too. After all, not everything you watch needs to be viewed on a massive Full HD TV – and you can always take your laptop to bed for some comfort.

So consider the return of the portable TV. Not in the form of the 14in mini-telly of old, but in the shape of laptops, netbooks and Wi-Fi Internet tablets that you can cuddle up with on the sofa. For example, grab yourself an iPhone, iPod Touch or Apple iPad (when available) and, using the Air Video software from the App Store, you can stream videos stored on your TV PC to it. Family harmony maintained; entertainment still on tap.

Out of all the many things I detest, the worst is paying for items and still not owning them. With the world the way it is, I have no option but to disobey the laws of economics and open my wallet for gadgets that curb my freedom to use them to their full potential, and then pay for a dressed-up upgrade every six months. Which is why it gives me immense pleasure to report that the last bastion of exclusive hardware ownership has been breached. Open-source hardware has reached its tipping point.

If the time wasn’t ripe for this revolution, news of an open-source camera from a university wouldn’t have made it past the campus science journal. But Stanford’s Frankencamera project is popping up all over the radar. The idea is simple – take the principles of open-source software and apply them to a low-cost assimilation of off-the-shelf camera parts tied together with a Linux-based OS that’s available to everyone for modification. Forget proprietary APIs and SDKs, this is the holy grail for people that spent their school breaks soldering radios.

When (not if) this union of open hardware and software specifications trickles down to consumer-grade cameras, you’ll be able to super-size your point-and-shoot to take RAW shots, or use more pre-configured modes for shooting at night, or make use of the ability to adjust the auto-timer settings and more. Just like with open-source software, you don’t need to meddle with the innards of the camera: pick it off the shelf, connect to the internet, and fetch the wisdom of the community in a firmware upgrade. Or just order a supercharged modded version that’ll shoot under water and has a hot shoe for attaching a custom flash.

Frankencamera isn’t a lone example. The Arduino computer project started as an inexpensive prototyping system and is now accessible to electronic students worldwide thanks to dozens of clones that spawned because of Arduino’s open specs. Then there’s the RepRap self-replicating open spec 3D printer that’s 50 times cheaper than commercial alternatives. Hardware maker VIA has released a reference design for a netbook, MIT plans to do the same with its solar-powered car and there’s even an open-source graphics card under development.

So open-source hardware definitely makes sense to the garage mechanic and the independent researcher. Using non-proprietary standard hardware helps them keep their costs down. But why would traditional hardware companies want to spend money developing a new piece of hardware and then just release the specs? It’s a complete reversal of their current modus operandi.

They’d do it because open-source hardware actually presents a business opportunity for the hardware vendors. Take the example of Cisco. When a licence violation forced the company to release the specs for one of its routers, sales picked up. A dozen or so third-party firmware projects mushroomed around the router and made it do things way beyond Cisco’s wildest imagination.

In a similar vein, backup company BackBlaze has just taken open source hardware to another level. The company sells unlimited online storage for about £3. Since existing commercial storage solutions wouldn’t allow it to keep its expenses in check, it decided to assemble its own 67TB 4U storage pods. Its hard work cost it $117,000 for one petabyte (that’s 1,048,576GB) storage rack. Dell retails the same amount of storage for $826,000, Sun for $1million, and EMC for over $2.8million. You do the maths.

These are the kind of savings you need to beat the charts in the current cost-conscious market. So what does the company that has seemingly cracked the code do? Just like you’d expect, they show off with fancy cost comparison charts and stacks of storage units on their blog. Then they take a leap into the future and explain in great detail how you can copy their design! They have it all – videos, specs and wiring diagrams. They even tell you how to dampen the vibration from all the disks.

From a traditional business model point of view, BackBlaze has just committed commercial suicide. But the pointy-haired nay-sayers fail to see that by letting people work from its design, BackBlaze is offloading the R&D burden on to more people than it could ever pay for on its own. That’s something you can take to the management, and not have it thrown back in your face.

For these reasons, open-source hardware is finally on the verge of breaking through into a store near you. Depending on how they play it, far-sighted hardware vendors will receive either a pat on their back, or a slap in their face. What is certain, however, is that they can’t afford the opportunities any longer.

Microsoft rarely manages to elicit a positive reaction from me, and I don’t know why. Is this a learned behaviour? Do I cringe at the sight of every expensive new Redmond operating system simply because I sit in the company of Linux devotees and computing idealists all day? Do I express such bile for the utterly contemptuous form of the Zune merely because Microsoft doesn’t deem the UK as a worthy market for its release? Are these actually great inventions that I have simply been conditioned to reject by my environment? I’m beginning to think otherwise.

This is not because I suddenly think Microsoft is great. No. Take the frankly lazy recent release of Windows Phone; it’s an example of something brown and sticky that the  juggernaut has simply coughed out of its right lung and deemed good enough for user consumption, despite the public moving on to better things many moons ago.

No, the odd thing is that I find myself actually coveting a forthcoming Microsoft product. I must be ill.

It’s called the Courier. It’s a dual-screened tablet, with a nifty interface combining capacitive multitouch and pin-point stylus input. It has one button, no keyboard and a super-clean design to match. Its cute little notepad OS seems both fashionable and highly suitable for pen-based interaction and casual web browsing. And this is from Microsoft? Wait a minute.

At this point the Courier is at a very early stage. Perhaps it doesn’t actually exist beyond one promo video and a whole lot of hype. There’s definitely something fishy about it, namely that it is almost exactly what I would imagine an Apple tablet to be. In functionality, in appearance, in philosophy: Apple.

Now, I’m no Apple zealot, I promise you. I own an iPod Touch, which I barely use thanks to its infuriating insistence on communicating only with iTunes. Instead, I use a more sensible MP3 player which appears to my PC as a hard drive. I refused to buy an iPhone in favour of the cheapest, most basic mobile handset I could muster. I have an iMac at home, but half of the time it’s booted into Windows 7 doing decidedly non-Apple things. Similarly I have no great affinity towards tablet PCs; I’ve owned several, and grown tired of their gimmicky tablet interfaces within hours.

But this is something else. The Courier is the tablet PC that the public has been begging Apple to make. It is truly a genre definer.

One short video – the preview I’m so enamoured with weighs in at under a minute and a half – is all it has taken for Microsoft to insert its future hardware firmly into the Universal Lifestyle Computing bracket pioneered by Apple’s handheld devices. I don’t care if Universal Lifestyle Computing isn’t a recognised bracket. It is now. I recognise it. And I recognise that companies like Nokia and Sony are desperately trying to weasel their way into that bracket with shamelessly Apple-aping products.

Essentially this boils down, once again, to me making myself progressively more angry with myself. I can’t stand the prospect of becoming a computing hipster. I have so far managed to resist the ULC onslaught, but if I start buying balsamic vinegar and in-season olive oil, wearing drainpipe jeans and aviators and strutting around Bath with all the latest gadgets shining out from within my brown leather satchel, it’ll be Microsoft’s fault. Luckily the grumpy part of me is positive the Courier won’t be nearly as cool as it looks.