Things must be looking up for the people at Slingbox, with their announcement at CES of the Slingcatcher, allowing content to be transmited on a Slingbox-connected TV to another TV set, either to one in the same house via a home network or to one in a remote location via the Internet.

According to Forbes, SlingCatcher will be available in mid-2007 for less than $200.

Users with a home Internet network will be able to highlight an online video on their computer screen and “sling” it to a TV outfitted with a SlingCatcher. The device will format Internet video feed so that it looks sharper than the poor resolution that would usually result from connecting a TV to a computer.

SlingCatcher will also be able to deliver other multimedia content to a TV, including digital photos, slide shows and music.

Tags: Slingbox, Slingcatcher, CES

901am reports on Netgear’s launch at CES of a new media player, the “Digital Entertainer HD”. Admittedly it does sound like a nice product, but do they have to tell lies in selling it:

“The Digital Entertainer HD is the first device that makes Youtube videos available on a television, claimed Netgear’s vice president of product marketing Vivek Pathela.”

Bullsh*t. Windows XP MCE edition plays YouTube videos on a TV via a very simple plugin. It plays Google Video videos as well as videos from Grouper and DivX Stage 6. I’m running an earlier version of the plugin (that only featured YouTube and Google video), but I’ve been running it for the better part of a year. Simply, Netgear has lied. I’m betting that some of the alternative software packages to MCE out there have YouTube capability as well. But before you say I’m talking software not a “device”, isn’t a MCE box a device? You can buy them online, both from mainstream retailers and specialists as well. Netgears box is after all nothing really more than cobbled together computer parts, and somewhere inside of it will be software to run it all.

Tags: NetGear, YouTube, MCE

Zatz Not Funny has all the details on the three new sling boxes. Looks like a whole pile of improvements. Given I’ve personally got my house wired to the max with multiple PC’s at all major entertainment points it’s not something I’ll be buying, but worth a look.

Media Release from Sage:

SageTV Media Center today becomes the first full-featured personal video recorder/media center software product to offer placeshifting capabilities enabling users to access their live or recorded TV, music and photos on any PC when they are away from home. The integration of PVR and placeshifting functionality in a single system yields better video quality and faster navigation than a separate placeshifting box connected to a PVR while also costing significantly less than purchasing two separate solutions.

The new placeshifting functionality is available immediately as a $30 add- on to both the Windows and Linux OEM editions of just-released SageTV Media Center Version 5.0.

Read the rest of this entry »

what more can I say. No warning on download. It even gets to right near the end before you get this:

Yahoo couldn’t give a rats arse about ppl outside of the US at all. Meedio worked outside the US, obviously Yahoo isn’t interested in us though.

Just when we thought Yahoo Go TV might end up delivering a PVR product….Yahoo goes out and buys PVR software maker Meedio.

Says Meedio:

Today is a big day for the team here at Meedio; we have sold most of our technology to Yahoo!

David Brott, Jeff (beergeek), Kenny (fasttech), Pedro (flea0) and I are joining Yahoo!’s Digital Home team. We’ve had the opportunity to spend a lot of time with Yahoo! in the past few months and we love the way they are developing the best, most user-friendly services for the Digital Home.

As I said before, behind Meedio LLC the company, is Meedio the idea and all of us want to see it succeed. The sad truth is that we had recently hit a brick wall and did not have the resources to make it flourish. But, Yahoo! has a great team that is just as dedicated and passionate as we are in this space and, of course, they carry the content and might of an early Internet pioneer. Together, the combination can be nothing but a winner. We are thrilled at the opportunity to put the Meedio idea together with the Yahoo! experience and bring it to millions of people all around the world!

To be perfectly honest with you, before I wrote the first line of Meedio code, I envisioned a day when it could be used as the “new browser”; to bring all the content goodness that Yahoo! can provide to the 10 foot world. It is really exciting seeing it actually happen.

Showshifter has closed down and is on the market. Sad really, I used the trial version a year or two ago and it wasn’t a bad program…indeed it was one of the few peices of PVR software that worked straight away with no problem at all, but because of their propriatry format there was little to no user based writing plugins for it, so the numbers never really took off.

(via PVR Wire)

CNet reviews the HP Pavilion Media Center TV:

“If you want to turn your den, home office, or dorm room into a home theater without making the move to an A/V-style form factor, the HP Pavilion Media Center TV m7360n offers the same media-friendly features we saw in the previous model, the HP Media Center m7260n Photosmart PC; however, it adds a shiny Intel Viiv sticker on the front. Even though we like many of the proprietary features on the $1,150 (after $50 mail-in rebate) m7360n, including a LightScribe DVD burner and a slot for HP’s Personal Media Drive, the value of the Viiv branding is dubious.”

Full review here.

I’m not sure if this is good or bad news, but the list of versions for the new Windows Vista has been leaked, and there is no MCE in it! The old MCE functionality will be rolled into Windows Vista Home Premium and Ultimate editions. All the details are at Paul Thurott’s Superistefor Windows here.

A new release from the folks a GBPVR, v 0.96.8.

From the announcement:
2006-2-21 v0.96.8
- Added a checkbox to disable plugins. This can be useful for tracing the source of faults.
- Fixed a bug that would cause the task description to not show when using a horizontal menu skin.
- Now supports video in a window (not for XCard/PVR350).
- Added option to use alternative MVP dongle. This is still very new, and a bit buggy. It does allow the video inset window which was not possible with the original Hauppauge dongle. Its not until you try to write these things yourself that you realise how well someone else has done…
- Added a setting in config.xml to set the processor affinity (ForceSingleProcessorAffinity), which can be invaluable for users with multiple CPUs or multi-core CPUs. With out this, directshow can stutter on many setups.
- Auto PID tracking for BDA users.
- Fixed a bug that would cause an error playing music with visualisations for user with USB-UIRT as an input device.
- VMR7 now also remembering the ‘last aspect ratio’.
- Added menu options to the system tray to start GB-PVR or Config. Also added about box showing the version number.
- Added a couple of extra database indexes that should speed up a few activies for people with huge numbers of show listings
- Fixed a bug that could cause manual reoccurring to not automatic schedule new recordings under a specific set of circumstances.
- Fixed a bug with season recording duplicate detection.
- Playing DVR-MS files will now use the video decoder you have selected in the config app, rather than the system default.
- Fixed a bug that would cause the music visualisations to not kick in with the screensaver
- Added option to use new VMR9 Custom Renderer. This allows the OSD to be updated when video is not being played, which is essential for displaying some status messages about the DVB signal. Also means you can skip while the video is paused.
- Fixed a bug that could cause an error message when deleting a file from the video library
- Fixed a bug that could cause playback to stop when switching net radio stations
- Some speed improvements in the recordings screen.
- Fixed a bug that could cause a 30 second stutter in timeshift mode.
- Added some logic to give recordings a second chance. 30 seconds after the recording was started, the file size is checked. If it is not growing normally, then the recording is stopped and restarted.
- Added some logic to cope with US broadcasts networks that create one or two minute show overlaps to confuse PVRs. It’ll default to allowing up to a three minute overlap, but this can be changed using the setting in config.xml. The overlap period will be missing from the beginning of the second show. This logic is only applied if no other tuner is available at the time.
- A couple buttons that previously didnt work on the MCE remotes now work.
- Several improvements to the usage of zap2it data…multiple capture source share the single EPG request if possible, incremental updates to cover gap betwen current guide data and requested days plus today and tomorrow.
- FM Radio screen is now uses composite images for the station list so that it is more skinable than previous releases.
- Partial aspect ratio control (F7) support for Overlay renderer. Those aspect ratios that specify a number outside of the range 0…1 (ie, off the side of the screen) will not work.
- Added a new ‘System’ screen which allows you to shutdown/hibernate/restart etc. It also shows a bit of summary system information. I also intended to have a ’settings’ button in here to change plugin settings etc, but I ran out of time so this feature is hidden for now. It’ll make an appearance in the next release.
- Added checkbox and logic to the device configuration pages to ‘only show detected devices’. This should help with initial card setup difficulties that some users have.
- Added some logic to try to automatically compact the database after the EPG update. It can only do this if no other process is trying to actively use the database at the time.
- Fixed a couple of timeshift related bugs
- Fixed some other bugs which I forget.
- Added several languages to the default install, and the ability to switch between them in the config app.
- A right mouse button click now defaults to the same behaviour as pressing the ‘escape’ key.