An interesting trend in geek gadgetry is the increase in devices made to hook directly to a bare drive (and leave it bare).  As people upgrade computer storage, they’re starting to have perfectly good drives lying around, though usually without a good connection solution.  Two hundred GB drives are seemingly the new floppy disk. Bare drive dock solutions have been around for a while, and are great for access from a computer, but what if you want to just plug a drive full of video content straight into your television?  Brando, purveyor of all things USB, has a solution.

The HM-181 is a media player dock that will accept a SATA drive (2.5″ or 3.5″), SD cards, or a USB drive (if it’s Brando, there had to be USB somewhere!)  It can output directly to a a television, in up to 1080i through a HDMI cable.  The adapter has built-in video playback controls, and also comes with a remote for operation from the couch.  Most major video and audio formats are supported, and if you do want to attach it to your computer for use as an external drive, there’s a USB connection for that.

The HM-181 is available at Brando for $69.

I downloaded the application and gave it a whirl today, and came away quite impressed.  There’s a two-step install on the Mac, first the standard drag and drop to the Applications folder then a drag and drop of the Hulu web plug-in file to the Internet Plug-Ins folder.  All very easy.  Once up and running, the interface is very polished and intuitive, with features that will be familiar to users of Hulu on the web.  Just like on the web site, you can browse Hulu’s library of TV shows and movies, and if you link the desktop applications to your account you can access things like your subscriptions and viewing history.  But no account is required; if you choose, you can still view shows and movies without registering with Hulu.

The software is in beta, and updates will be issued regularly, though it appears to be pretty good right now.

The Nest Box with IR Camera is £139.00, available from Pro-Idee.

Via Red Ferret Journal

So, that begs the question, which one?  It seems like the PlayStation 3 is the one to beat.  Even though I’m not a huge gamer, I’ve heard very good things about the PS 3’s Blu-ray playing capabilities. And if I had the PS 3’s game playing power, I’d probably use it, at least a bit. Any thoughts from current Blu-ray and or PS 3 owners?  I’d appreciate the feedback.

Most people watch videos either as they are being live streamed, or some time later, as the site keeps the videos archived.  But what if you’d like to pull the videos down to your computer and keep them on your own hard drive, or even on your iPod or iPhone?  All this is possible, as well.

If you have iTunes, and just want to keep the videos on your computer for your convenience, the path is pretty simple.  Go to the profile page of the Qik user whose work you want to download, click the link “Add to iTunes”.  With your permission, the site will launch iTunes and add the specified user’s Qiks as a podcast that will update automatically as new videos are added to the site.  These will play fine in iTunes, but not in an associated device like an iPod or iPhone, as their .3gp file format is not compatible with those devices.  Fortunately, iTunes can help with that.

Find the video in the podcast section of iTunes, then right click (secondary click in the Mac world) and select  “Convert Selection for iPod/iPhone”.  The conversion takes a few minutes, and when you’re done you will have an iPod-friendly .m4v file.  One more step is required before you can add it to your portable device.

You need to select “Add to Library…” under the “File” menu, then navigate to where you have the actual video files stored.  If you brought them down as a podcast, it should be something like “iTunes  >  Podcasts > name of podcast. Within the last folder you’ll find your files. Select the file you want to convert, and iTunes takes care of the rest.  The resulting file will be categorized as a movie (and moved to the “Movies” folder) and you can transfer it to you iPod or iPhone, where it should play without problem.

This may be a bit more effort than you want to spend on every video you watch on Qik, but for a few special ones, it’s nice to have the option to take them with you anywhere.

It used to be that the hottest high-end home computers were designed and built exclusively for well-financed gamers (for those who don’t know but might care, a serious gaming machine can easily run two to three times as much as even a mid-range web/email/productivity desktop system).  But the rise of video on the web seems to be bringing us a new breed of souped-up towers, ones intended to edit video as efficiently as possible.  Years ago, I became aware that there were two general categories of applications that could reduce my standard-issue computer to a sobbing heap of silicon: 3D modeling, and video editing.  In 2000, I bought my first computer configured specifically not to fold when dealing with big video files, a high-end Dell with a whopping 1 GB of RAM.  No, really, in 2000 that was a lot.

A story on Electronista today points to three new machines by iBuyPower, targeting the home video editing audience.  Ranging from $1299 to $4299, these systems have quad-core processing, 64-bit Vista, and memory from 4 to 8 GB.  Two of the boxes come with Blu-ray re-write drives in addition to their DVD drives. All have 1 – 2 TB of storage and respectable video cards from NVIDIA and ATI.  Their case designs (clear side panels and blue interior lighting) betray their gaming heritage.   If you’re in the market for a new machine and do at least some video editing, these new systems are worth a look.

I initially attached the mini to the older of my two HDTVs, a Toshiba with a glass tube, which is more like an old SD TV than newer flat panels.  That didn’t work out so well.  The output from the Mac was hard to read and scrolling scan lines were visible rolling up the screen.  This TV, although it works fine for most signals from cable and the DVD player, does not make an acceptable computer display.

For the second try, I attached the Mac to my Vizio VX20L, which is an LCD display well-suited for computer applications.  I needed a couple of extra cables to run picture and sound from the computer to the screen. The mini has only one port to output video (a DVI, although a DVI-VGA adapter comes with the computer), and one for audio (a 1/8″ headphone jack).  For my video, I needed a simple DVI-HDMI cable — easy enough. For audio I used an adapter to convert the headphone output to standard RCA audio cables (red and white).  The Vizio does an excellent job of displaying output from the Mac.  It could be used as a computer display full-time.

One important change I made was to turn off overscan on the Mac’s video setup menu.  This is an option when outputting to a TV that makes the output signal slightly larger than the screen size.  It’s good in that the entire screen is used for image.  It’s not so good in that it puts the Mac menu bar off the screen.  You can move your mouse up above the upper limit of the screen and cause menus to drop down, but you’re stabbing in the dark, which is not so good when you aren’t familiar with the menus.  Turning off overscan fixes this, although it causes a small black frame around the screen image.  Neither option is ideal, but being able to see the menu bar is worth losing a little screen real estate.

I’m using an Apple Wireless Keyboard (which I think is maybe the most purely beautiful piece of industrial design in technology that I’ve ever seen) and an Apple Wireless Mighty Mouse.  The mouse is only slightly awkward in that I need to find a flat surface to use it on; that’s not always immediately available in a TV-watching environment.

Storage space is always going to be an issue when dealing with files as large as DVD images.  Although disc formats vary, I’m considering each disc side to be around 7 – 8 GB.  That would fill up the Mac’s 80 GB drive very quickly, so I’ve ordered a Drobo and 1 TB of storage (two 1 TB drives), which should be good for about 125 disc sides.

The DVD image runs using external DVD software such as that which comes with OS X.  Picture quality of the video image is excellent, the same as if you were running it from the original disc, and all menu and special feature content is available as it would be on the disc.

Anyone interested in duplicating this system, or running Drive-in on an existing Mac would be well-advised to go download and register a copy of the beta immediately.  On August 15, the beta period ends and Drive-in goes on sale for $59.  Registered beta users get a substantial price break — their cost will be $19.

Note: For anyone considering a Drobo for this or any other storage needs, entering my friend Cali Lewis’ promo code “CALI” at checkout will save you $25.  I don’t know how long this will last, but as of today (September  20, 2008), it’s still good.

Ones and 0s by Geoff Smith from Cali Lewis on Vimeo.

Drive-in is software for Macs that makes a full image of a DVD, complete with bonus features and menus.  When you play back the image, it’s just like watching the disc.  It even preserves the disc copy protection, sidestepping potential legal issues.  The images will play on any computer associated with the one where the image was made, but you can’t give it to someone else.  One more advantage is the speed at which the image is created.  Although this varies by system speed, a Drive-in image can generally be made in 15 to 30 minutes as compared to a high quality DVD rip which can take several hours.  This makes it much more feasible to load a large number of movies into the system.

I’ve ordered a Mac Mini (80 GB, 1.83 GHz processor) to use as a dedicated video server based around Drive-in.  I plan to store the video on a Drobo.  The Mac Mini comes very bare bones; no keyboard, mouse, or monitor.  The display will be the HDTV, and I’ve already got an Apple wireless keyboard and have ordered a wireless mouse.  As a complement to Drive-in, I’ll be running iTunes, for podcasts and any other miscellaneous content I want to get from the iTunes store.

I like the idea of being able to load in all my DVDs for ease of access, and still have all the features built into the disc.  It seems like the best of both worlds.  I’ll check back in here with a progress report once I have a sense of how this project is turning out.

Note: For anyone considering a Drobo for this or any other storage needs, entering my friend Cali Lewis’ promo code “CALI” at checkout will save you $25.  I don’t know how long this will last, but as of today (September  20, 2008), it’s still good.

In that post, I briefly discussed Hulu.com, a web venture from NBC Universal and News Corp, for online distribution of their television content. At the time, I had checked it out in its private beta. This was shortly after NBC broke with Apple, pulling all NBC-owned content from the iTunes Music Store. I found Hulu a poor substitute for purchased downloads from iTunes for a couple of reasons: There were commercials, and I was tied to a Flash-enabled computer to view the shows. Those are both still true of the service, but last night I gave it another try for an episode of Battlestar Galactica. And I was favorably impressed.

As I said, the two strikes against are still there, but I think they’re manageable. Commercials are very brief, a total of about 75 seconds divided between about five breaks, rather than the 15 minutes that commercials would occupy in the same show on conventional television. Commercials are still an intrusion, but not an unmanageable one. And while the viewer is tied to a computer, this does offer a few advantages over something like Apple TV. While the diagonal inches of viewing area is likely smaller, the resolution is better. The viewing window can be made to appear in a resizable pop-up, allowing the potentially distracting framing of the web site to be minimized. There’s also a “Lights Down” option that darkens the non-viewing areas of the page, emphasizing the part that interests you. Streaming is very good; in a 43-minute program (coming to my laptop over G-class Wi-Fi) I only once encountered buffering stutter, and it was a split-second thing, hardly noticeable.

I wouldn’t call Hulu an optimal viewing experience for new (not yet on DVD) television, but I’m not sure there is an optimal choice at the moment. Everything has its own trade-offs and compromises, but all things considered, Hulu’s a much stronger option for non-scheduled television viewing than I would have originally thought.