A new Apple TV in the works?

Engadget are reporting on a tip they've received about a huge change in direction with the Apple TV strategy. Up until now, I've seen no advantage to the Apple TV over a Mac mini solution... well ok, ease of setup for the non-techie maybe, but I'm pretty sure the market for non-techies who want more than a TV and tuner (and possibly a PVR for the brave few) is pretty much non-existent. All that could be about to change though, if the Engadget rumour mongering is to be believed.

In a nutshell, a new version of the Apple TV is in the wings with a completely redesigned hardware and software layer. The hardware will be a thin client with 16GB solid state storage and the bare minimum of connections. It'll be running the iPhone 4.0 OS and focus on streaming content rather than syncing. This is a breath of fresh air coming from Apple; it's about time they realized that syncing is not the only way to get bits and bytes from A to B. Interestingly, it will reportedly be able to connect to a Time Capsule for offline content. Now if this is true, and if the codec support extends beyond the staple H.264 diet of most of Apples product lines, then this could be a very interesting prospect. You know what, even if it is H.264 bound, then you can always rely on Air Video to pick up the slack and transcode any content you like into the right format for this new Apple TV to serve up in full 1080p glory on your TV screen.

Now admittedly this thing would never replace my trusty Mac mini as the centrepiece of my home entertainment system, but I can definitely see a place for a few of these scattered about the house streaming content. It could even replace my Acer Revo in the kitchen cupboard - more on that later of course ;)

The best bit about the new Apple TV? The price: $99. Let's hope the rumours are true eh? :)

Air Video Server

I'm a big iPhone fan, I've had one since the day they came out in the UK. Well, not exactly true, I don't have one right now after losing it on a beery stag weekend in Malaga... but that's beside the point :) They are an amazing design with a beautiful screen, so any self-respecting HTPC needs to be able to serve up content to it right?

Enter Air Video by InMethod. It's a beautifully simple piece of software, but they've done a really good job with it.

The first thing you'll want to do is go install the server software on your HTPC. It's a very lightweight program that lives in the menu bar and generally stays out the way. You'll need to tell it what directories to share which is a simple, painless process carried out in the Preferences panel of the app.

Notice I'm sharing my EyeTV archive? I mentioned this in an earlier post on EyeTV; while EyeTV itself will automatically convert recordings to iPhone format and stream them to an iPhone app, it can't come close to the performance and ease-of-use of the Air Video solution. While the EyeTV conversion process is a slow, CPU-intensive affair, InMethod somehow manage to convert pretty much any video format to iPhone format on-the-fly and stream it straight to the iPhone app, no waiting, no messing. It'll even stream over 3G. Of course, it will also let you schedule videos for conversion in advance, either from the server or from the iPhone client itself.

Speaking of the Air Video iPhone client, there's a bit of bad news. It's not free. It'll set you back a whopping £1.79. Trust me, it's easily worth 50 times that so stump up the cash :)

Plex 9 Alexandria on its way...

A sneak-peek video has been released to demonstrate some of the new functionality coming in the new Plex 9 release:


Plex/Nine First Peek from Elan Feingold on Vimeo.

The full announcement can be found over on plexapp.com:
http://elan.plexapp.com/2010/05/19/a-sneak-peek-at-alexandria/

It's looking really cool, can't wait to get my hands on it. One thing that isn't clear to me yet is how tightly coupled the Plex 9 media server component is to the Plex 9 client, or if it is a generic uPnP AV server with some Plex-specific bells on... I want a beta to try out :)

Remotes: Harmony vs Apple

Like just about every other household in the UK, my living room was starting to disappear underneath an avalanche of cheap & nasty remote controls, many of which were actually the same cheap & nasty remote model with different key maps applied. Finding the one you want was an absolute nightmare, so I invested in a Harmony remote and I'm very glad I did. I bought a Logitech Harmony 555 Universal Remote Control as it had all the features I needed and was a reasonable price. The Harmony range of remotes goes on a long way past the 555, but for me they aren't worth the extra money. This little beauty does everything I wanted.

The Harmony remote isn't for the faint-hearted though. It takes a lot of effort to get the thing set up just as you want it. The software from Logitech is a bit cumbersome, but you can tell they've put a lot of effort into making the process as straight forward as it can be.

You need a Logitech ID to begin using the software, which at the time I bought the remote I didn't really see the need for. However after a couple of years when I changed a few pieces of kit and needed to update my configuration I had a cold sweat moment when I realized I'd got rid of the computer I'd originally used to set the thing up. Facing the bleak prospect of starting again from scratch, I grabbed the Mac version of the software, installed and logged in. Hey presto! All my config popped up safe & sound. Sometimes, not very often but sometimes, a well written piece of software can really put a smile on your face :)

I'm not going to go into great length about the setup process as it's going to be different for everyone, but basically you can organize your remote control around activities. Right now, my Harmony remote is pretty simple with only three activities: "Use Mac", "Play Xbox 360", and "Play Wii". All I have to do is his the Activities button at the top, then choose any one of these three options. The Harmony remote does the rest; it switches on all the necessary devices on, switches TVs and amps to the correct inputs, and remaps the buttons to something appropriate to the activity.

Sounds wonderful, I hear you cry, so what's the need for an Apple remote? Well, the Harmony remote suffers from the same problem as most remotes; they are big, clunky, terrifying things that require a manual. Compare this to the Apple remote: a simple slab of white plastic with a few simple buttons. It is much less intimidating and feels more comfortable and natural in the hand. In short, it passes the GF test: she happily picks up an Apple remote and clicks away, but stares bemusedly at the Harmony remote before handing it straight over to me (which admittedly is not necessarily a bad thing, especially if Embarrassing Bodies or Coleen's Real Women is on at the time and I can quickly nip across to Dave).

But I do have another reason for loving the Apple remote. I'm the kind of person who could misplace a straight jacket in a padded cell. This general dopiness applies to remotes just as much as it applies to my car keys, wallet, house keys, mobile, and anything else that isn't screwed down. I lose them. A lot. All the time, in ridiculously unlikely places. It's very annoying. But, I've found a solution! A Harmony 555 will set you back around about £60, but an Apple remote can be picked up for a few quid on eBay. So my solution is simple:

Even I can't lose them all at the same time :) And I have done a scientific study to show that 3 is the perfect number: at any one time, one is on my first sofa, the other is on the second, and the third is lost somewhere down the side of either. Remote control nirvana, trust me!

Remote Buddy: HTPC Glue!

Up to this point, I've blogged about a couple of different software packages I use: EyeTV for live & time-shifted video, and XBMC for DVDs, video files and streaming video. Both these programs integrate seamlessly with the Apple remote making controlling them from the comfort of your armchair an absolute doddle. But there's a snag... what do you do if you want to context switch, say you've just finished a DVD and want to catch the news before bed? It feels wrong to have to drop the remote, reach for a keyboard or mouse to shut down XBMC and fire up EyeTV, then switch back to the remote again. Enter ioSpirit to save the day!

ioSpirit are the makers of Remote Buddy, and for me it is the glue that holds together the whole HTPC concept on my Mac mini. Without it, it feels like I've got a computer connected to my TV. With it, I can sit back the arm chair and control the whole thing with a simple white remote.

Let's get the bad news out of the way first: it isn't freeware. A license will cost you $19.99 and can be bought on their website at http://www.iospirit.com/products/remotebuddy. Trust me on this, it is well worth the money. And if you don't want to trust me, then fear not as there is a 30 day free trial.

Once installed and up and running, it'll give you an icon in the menu bar.

It is the "Preferences..." option on this menu that you'll spend a little bit of time getting things set up just right. By default, Remote Buddy will set itself up to display its overlay menu when you press and hole the menu button on the Apple remote. It does a great job of fitting the contents of the default menu to what you've actually got on your system, but for me it is a bit exhaustive and messy. Just because a program on my system can be controlled by remote, doesn't mean it has any part to play in my HTPC system. And simplicity is the key here; if my GF brings up a list of 30 different pieces of sotware to choose between, that remote is going straight back down the side of the sofa where she found it. So I recommend creating your own menu profile (by hitting the plus icon in the screenshot below) and then ripping it to pieces. Delete everything you don't htink you'll need; it's easy to add it back in later if you were a bit overzealous with your pruning. I ended up with a very simple list of 4 applications, like so:

Clean, simple, and elegant! From here you can pick and choose your applications, fire up new ones, close down ones you aren't using any more, and so on and so forth. It's nice and simple to navigate, and the only thing you need to be aware of is that the clumsily-named "Activate behaviour" option is the first option you'll want to choose each time you switch between apps. It will fire up the app if it isn't running, and it'll bring the window to the front and then re-map all the buttons on the remote to perform application-specific tasks. The only button that isn't remapped is the menu-button-held-down action; this will always pop you right back out to Remote Buddy's own menu overlay. All the application-specific controls can be customized to your hearts content by visiting the Mapping tab in the Preferences panel:

Mostly, the defaults are spot on and so unless you really want to tweak it to your own specific requirements (all I did was change the fast forward and rewind actions around a bit on the EyeTV mapping set) you'll get along just fine without having to wrap your head around the details on this tab.

So there you have it: Remote Buddy is one useful piece of software for any HTPC. I have friends trying to set up their own HTPCs on a Windows platform and despite a fair amount of fiddling, ebaying, and googling, they've so far been unable to get close to the level of slickness offered by Remote Buddy. I give it a big thumbs up, well worth the investment!

Mac mini: the brains & the brawn

Every home theatre setup needs a brain... For me, that brain has to be a Mac mini. Don't get me wrong, although I have a lot of Apple kit I wouldn't consider myself a Mac zealot; I run XP, Ubuntu & Windows 7 for a variety of purposes (some of which I'll get round to writing up on the blog, stay tuned ;) ). But I've yet to find a more aesthetically pleasing, powerful, and easily integrated solution to a home theatre epicentre than the Mac mini. Not cheap, by any means, but damn good :)

My HTPC experiments started about three years ago when I decided to replace my noisy, clunky, home-built PC with a sexy little Mac mini. It was a September 2006 model with a gigabyte of RAM and a 1.83GHz Core Duo (T2400). I promptly stuck it on my computer desk in the spare bedroom (aka the study or computer room), and left it there for well over a year. What a ridiculous waste of a great piece of kit! I subsequently hit on the idea of getting my audio and video content from the Mac mini on to my living room TV somehow, and spent many hours investigating streaming solutions, old XBoxes, Apple TVs, slingboxes and squeezeboxes, before having a eureka moment... all I had to do was pick my mac mini up and stick it to the side of my TV! What a revelation! My spare bedroom became a spare bedroom again, and I got my wish of video and audio content from my computer right there on my living room screen!

Since then, I haven't looked back, and I haven't had a separate, traditional computer in my house. My trusty Mac mini has stood proudly by my TV set right up until it took early retirement last night, when I replaced it with a younger, faster model.

So why a Mac mini and not an Apple TV or similar? Well, the issue with buying into the Apple brand is the risk of... how to put it nicely... having your user experience controlled by Cupertino. I'm a tinkerer, I like to get a piece of kit in and see what I can do with it. An Apple TV is just too... appliancey. It's too pared down, too locked down, and too limiting. I wasn't sure exactly how slick the software solutions would prove to be, I wasn't even completely sure what I wanted to do with it, so instead of going the appliance-trying-to-be-a-PC route with the likes of the Xbox, Apple TV, and their ilk, I rather went for a PC-pretending-to-be-an-appliance: all the power of a full operating system in a aesthetically pleasing and above all quiet package.

Elgato EyeTV: a must have for any Mac HTPC

Any HTPC worth its salt needs to be able to handle broadcast TV, and I've got no big surprises here... anyone even remotely interested in Mac-based HTPCs will have heard of Elgato and their range of EyeTV devices. They offer a number of different USB sticks to enable live TV to be displayed, recorded and time-shifted on Macs. I bought an EyeTV Diversity which I'd highly recommend over the other devices in the range; it provides two aerial inputs and dual tuners to allow recording one channel while watching another. Pretty much a minimum requirement for any PVR if you ask me! You don't need two separate aerials or even an aerial splitter to set this up; everything you need to hook up a single aerial comes in the box.



Live TV is displayed in a window which can be expanded to full screen, and the chunky interface is fully compatible with the Apple remote. Elgato make their own remote, but I much prefer the simplicity of the Apple remote (as long as another piece of software is thrown into the mix - more on Remote Buddy in a later post).

The Elgato software is very slick, as long as you're using a Mac. If you're on Windows, you can still use the kit with a third party application shipped on the same CD, but I tried it out on a Windows 7 box (more on that box later :) ) and to be honest it was awful. On Mac however you're using Elgato's own in-house software which is as slick and polished as it comes. It has a nice big UI, and you can do everything you want straight through the on screen menu system using a remote control. You can also whip out a mouse and use a more typical interface too, should the remote control operation get a bit tiring.

TV listings require an account on a listings website, and a 12 month subscription is included in the box. After a bit of research, I found it is possible to substitute in a free listings service when the subscription expires.

Recording programs out to hard disk is fairly space-intensive, running around about 2GB for an hour. They are stored as MPG files which can be played back either through Elgato's software or through any other MPG playback system, such as XBMC and Air Video. The latter of these is covered in another post, but it's worth bringing up here as Elgato's software allows you to export recordings to an iPhone friendly streaming format. Now, running this on my old Mac mini was not a lot of fun; the transcoding is pretty heavyweight and brought my system to its knees. Elgato sell a hardware accelerator USB stick snappily named the Turbo 264 HD 1080p Video Encoder/Accelerator to offload the majority of the work from the processor, but it costs a pretty penny. The best tip I can give you is to download Air Video Server by InMethod. They sell an accompanying iPhone client called Air Video (for a measly £1.79 last time I checked) and the two pieces of software together allow you to stream any video out to the iPhone via Wifi or 3G, whether you've transcoded it in advance or doing it on the fly. The performance hit is nowhere near that of Elgato's transcoding, so this is absolutely the way to go in my opinion. More on Air Video in another post, but suffice to say, leave that "Prepare all new recordings for iPhone access" option unchecked for now ;)

The general iPhone access however is well worth enabling, and go and install the Elgato EyeTV iPhone app. It will let you review your recordings, schedules and guides on the go. Never get caught out missing a program again!

Anyway, there's probably a ton more I could say on EyeTV, but I've written enough for now and Family Guy is on in a window next to this which is incredibly distracting but infinitely more entertaining :)

XBMC or Plex?

The first thing I'd recommend for anyone interested in their own HTPC is a top-notch media player front end. Even before forking out for the right kind of hardware to run this on, I'd suggest heading over to xbmc.org or plexapp.com and try the software on for size on any kit you have handy. Plex and XBMC are two very slick, polished media players who share a lot of DNA. Plex is Mac-specific, whereas you can get a build of XBMC for pretty much any piece of hardware you might have lying around already.

Welcome to XBMC:

and Plex:


The first thing to say when comparing these two is that Plex is an offshoot from the XBMC code stream and has been diverging ever since. The Plex team have done a fantastic job of polishing up third party application support, installing plugins for streaming services such as YouTube & iPlayer (to pick the two most obvious examples). It's possible to install similar plugins in to XBMC of course (and I think perhaps the plugin library for XBMC is larger), but XBMC hasn't put so much time and effort into making it a slick process. While Plex hides any technical detail behind a simple, searchable interface not unlike Apple's own App store (in fact the Plex team also use the name App Store for their interface), XBMC happily shows its SVN backend to the user and leaves them to navigate a deeply nested file hierarchy to find the plugins of interest.

The clunky XBMC plugin system:

And the smooth as silk Plex approach:


On the downside, in my experience XBMC is by far the more responsive UI to use, which is such an important factor of any living room equipment. When I click a button, I want the system to respond immediately. XBMC does... Plex not so much. I often found an irritating one or two second delay when interacting with the Plex UI. Now admittedly this was on my old generation kit (more on the hardware in a later post) and perhaps the UI is perfectly responsive on my brand spanking new Mac mini, but for now XBMC is doing a nice job for me.

So I'm in the XBMC camp right now, but I'm very much looking forward to the upcoming release of Plex 9 which is set to bring a whole new decentralized media server implementation to the party. That might just be enough to make me switch back :)

A new toy and a new blog!

So I've just upgraded the heart of my home entertainment centre with a shiny new Mac mini. I've had a Mac mini hooked up to my living room TV as an HTPC for a couple of years now, but the hardware has struggled a bit to cope with the load. Not any more :) My main media server is now purring along very nicely indeed, serving out music and video from a whole range of sources out around the house and beyond, courtesy of a few handy iPhone apps.

I've explained to a few people what software & hardware I run on my HTPC and in other places around the house, but I figured I'd get it written up in a blog over the next few weeks (or maybe months!). I plan to write up my experiences so far after a couple of years experimenting with different bits of kit, what has worked, what really hasn't, and hopefully figure out what to do next... well, I do now have an old Mac mini lying around doing nothing after all :)

My goal is always to put together a system so slick, so simple and user-friendly, that partners, family members and visitors can use it without a 30 minute presentation and a lot of hand-holding. My litmus test for any new piece of function I build in is the reaction I get from my GF: boredom and confusion are a miss, and while excitement is perhaps a bit of a stretch, mild interest and actually using the system herself are the seals of approval I go for. I'd love to hear about other peoples experiences with this stuff as I'm always on the lookout for adding new toys.