The Richter Scale^®

When Amazon first announced they were going to be offering music without digital rights management (DRM) last year, I cheered, but didn’t do much else about it. However, while on an eight-week stint in a hotel in San Diego (which ended about two weeks ago) I decided to expand my music library, and checked out the Amazon MP3 download service. And I think it’s excellent. And Amazon’s DRMed Unbox video service isn’t too bad either.

The library of music content at Amazon is very extensive, with even brand new content available upon release by the record labels. And the prices aren’t too bad either - generally cheaper than the same music at iTunes, especially when you buy music by the album. I found album prices running from $7.99 to $9.99 typically.

To download a purchased album in MP3 format you need to install a small program from Amazon which actually performs the download, and, as I understand it, tags the MP3 files as being sold to you as the purchaser (presumably so that if you share them they can tag you for it). The Amazon MP3 downloader also lets you specify where to store the downloaded music, and you can also tell it to automatically add the newly download music to your iTunes or Windows Media Player libraries (but not both).

All the MP3s are encoded at 256Kbps, and sound great. Definitely a painless way to download music with no restrictions on your personal use of the files, unlike original iTunes songs. And, you can run the MP3s on any music player, whereas even the DRM-free iTunes downloads need to be converted into MP3 from Apple’s proprietary AAC format first.

As for video downloads, Amazon offers their Amazon Unbox service. This, sadly is DRMed, which makes it a pain to use, as you cannot convert the downloaded video into an MP4 file that you can play on an iPod, among other restrictions. Also, Unbox content is limited to either the machine you download the video on (for rentals) or you can designate two machines for “purchased” (not rented) content. Unbox works only on Windows-based PCs or on TiVo devices with current firmware.

Prices are the Amazon Unbox service are on par with iTunes - TV shows for $1.99 typically, and movies for around $9.99-14.99 (purchase) and less if rented. And, of course, some content not available at iTunes is available for legal downloadable viewing via Amazon Unbox and vice-versa. For example, we found Battlestar Galactica Season 4 on Amazon Unbox after not finding it on iTunes.

As with the MP3 downloads, the Amazon Unbox service requires the installation of a program on your PC. That program acts both as the video player and downloader, and does a pretty decent job. Visual artifacts in BSG4’s first episode were negligible on our 61” DLP display, and sound quality was excellent (and appeared to offer surround sound queues to our receiver unlike our experience with iTunes content on the Apple TV). Also, with at least the BSG4 shows we downloaded, we were able to start watching before the entire show had downloaded, so less planning required. We haven’t tested it with movies yet, and there doesn’t appear to be a separate category for HD content either.

The Amazon Unbox service, in addition to having less content (at least for what we’re interested in at this point), also has very strict requirements with respect to country of download. While iTunes lets a user with a U.S. billing address download content no matter where they happen to be in the world at the time of download, Amazon Unbox is very specific about the fact that downloads are only possible while physically in the U.S. This is similar to the restrictions imposed by the various TV networks on viewing past TV shows.

As I’ve stated before, I’m not thrilled with DRM because it makes you dependent on the vagaries and policies of the DRM provider, and you could well find yourself cut off from your content one day because of that. However, where it relates to content I am likely to only use once, like TV shows and movie rentals, I have less of an issue with it. I listen to my music library daily, so that needs to be DRM-free, but video does not - and if I want to watch a particular movie in the future, I can either buy it on physical media or rent it again.

I give the Amazon MP3 download service a 9.0 out 10.0 and the Amazon Unbox service a 7.0 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale. The only way I can see to improve the Amazon MP3 service is to have a more complete library of all music and audio content available (some of the music I was looking for was not available in MP3 form, but they do have an excellent collection). The Amazon Unbox service needs more content, including HD content, and less restrictive use of content - I’d like to be able to play it on my iPod and not have to have a “Plays For Sure” compatible device (which Unbox does support for purchased content).

I recently purchased the new Apple TV with the 160GB internal storage drive as a way to get movies and other iTunes video content into my bedroom. My living room has an HP Digital Entertainment System PC, on which I can play iTunes videos, as well as video from other on-line sources, incidentally, which is why I didn’t need the Apple TV there.

The Apple TV was a breeze to install, as I opted for the direct-wired Ethernet connection instead of connecting to my slower WiFi network. The iTunes software installation on my notebook immediately recognized the Apple TV and started moving content over to it as well.

One glitch I ran into was that the iTunes synchronization did not copy my entire music library over to the Apple TV unit - only the last week’s worth of new music (courtesy of Amazon’s MP3 download service, which I like better than that of iTunes). Turns out the only way to force the copy of all my music over to the Apple TV was to highlight my entire library and “mark” each item (via the right-mouse-button context menu). Once I did that and resynchronized, everything moved over properly.

Video playback on the Apple TV is pretty good for regular TV shows - I have it connected to a 32” LCD panel via HDMI, and the visual compression artifacts were negligible on episodes of New Amsterdam, Reaper, and Supernatural. We also took advantage last night of the ability to rent and watch high definition (HD) movies, selecting Jodie Foster’s The Brave One as our test subject.

The movie took about 5 hours to download over our 2MBps connection. We had purchased it on Saturday evening in order to view it Sunday night, so the download time wasn’t a problem. It should be noted that some TV programming can be watched a minute or two into the download, instead of having to wait for the entire show to download, by the way.

The HD quality of the rented movie was very good - I could not discern any artifacts. The only disappointment other than the weak ending of the movie itself was that there was no embedded surround sound in the film. I don’t know if this is a normal situation or limited to just the movie we selected.

All the ordering and downloading can be done directly via the Apple TV, or also on the associated PC running iTunes. And you do need to have a Mac or PC to get the Apple TV running, incidentally. To order via the Apple TV, just enter your iTunes account information and password via the cool little remote control.

The cost for the HD rental was $4.99 ($3.99 for the non-HD version), which allows the movie to stay on your Apple TV (the only platform it will play on) for up to 30 days, and once you start watching the movie, you have 24 hours to finish it. Not unreasonable considering you don’t have to drive to the rental store to get the movie, but more expensive than a service like NetFlix if you’re an avid movie watcher.

From our perspective, it’s a lot cheaper than buying the movie on Blu-ray Disc, especially considering it wasn’t that great a movie (although Jodie Foster’s performance was pretty good).

The Apple TV, in addition to being a music and video jukebox, also offers photo storage and a related slideshow mode, and also has a YouTube viewing option where you can look at the most recent, most viewed, most popular, and searched for YouTube videos. Nice distraction, although it also serves as a reminder of how inane 99% of YouTube content can really be.

The current price of the Apple TV 160GB model is $329, and you must have a usable Internet connection, a local area network, and iTunes-capable personal computer to make it work.

My only technical annoyance with the Apple TV hardware is that is on all the time, and it runs hot. You can shut down (i.e. put in stand-by) the video output section (which is a major heat generator) of the Apple TV by pointing the remote control at the Apple TV, and then holding down the “play” button for six seconds, but this was not documented anywhere obvious. I stumbled across this tip during a Google search about the subject.

In terms of content, iTunes has a great selection of movies and TV shows, but frustratingly iTunes does not have everything I want to watch - shows like Battlestar Galactica Season 4, Private Practice, Torchwood, Pushing Daisies, Dexter Season 2, and Dr. Who were all not available, for example, requiring me to resort to Amazon Unbox or BitTorrent feeds.

I give the Apple TV a 7.0 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale. It would rate higher if it were more eco-friendly in its power consumption and if it had greater content selection.

Having caught the start of the Planet Earth series on Discovery Channel a couple of months ago thanks to the recommendation of a British friend, I was amazed at the incredible footage, even in crappy cable TV delivered standard definition mode. So I place a pre-order on Amazon.com for one of the HD versions of the series. I flipped a coin and picked the Blu-ray version (instead of the HD-DVD version).

I finally got the package in recently and the family and I settled down for a viewing, and found, yes, that the footage was incredible, but equally incredible was the horrific amount of shimmer and static noise that appeared in many scenes. I was appalled that what was being called the HD experience to beat all HD experiences could look so absolutely horrible on screen.

I was playing the disc on my Sony PS3, connected to a 61” Samsung DLP 1080p display, on which most everything else has looked pretty darn good.

And the noise was not limited to just the first episode, but each of the episodes I watched. The noise really ruined the viewing experience for me. I did some digging on-line, and found lots of discussion of the subject on various web sites - I was not alone in my static noise! But I then stumbled across a suggestion that it could be the display system used, and not the discs. I was skeptical, as I saw reports from many folks who had all sorts of different 1080p HD displays - not just Samsung, but it encouraged me to try an experiment.

Samsung offers something called DNIe (Digital Natural Image engine) on many of their displays, including the high end DLP displays I have been using from them for several years. DNIe pumps up color saturation and detail, and typically works very well to produce an even nicer picture. But, as it turns out, DNIe was definitely my noise culprit. Take a look at the images below:

Using the DNIe Demo Mode for Comparison

Close Up View of DNIe Comparison

As you can see from the above images, DNIe (on the left side of each image) darkens the shadows of these mountains in Venezuela (episode 3 - “Fresh Water") and then sharpens the noise to create an amazing amount of speckling. Any user of Photoshop will also recognize the effect here - it’s like using the Sharpen filter too many times on an image. The right side of each of the above images shows DNIe turned off. This DNIe comparison mode is a feature of the Samsung TV to try and convince people to use DNIe for viewing their programming.

Well, in the case of Planet Earth HD, DNIe is not recommended. It ruins the picture. I now wonder if some of the speckling I have seen in other HD programming is caused by DNIe or as part of the native imagery from the source HD-DVD or Blu-ray Disc. I know that film grain is certainly more apparent in HD, thanks to a demonstration Sony gave me back in January of Black Hawk Down on Blu-ray Disc - they showed me the original production tape and the BD version side by side, and the grain was identical. But DNIe could exacerbate the grain noise. And now I know to try watching with DNIe turned off to see if it makes a difference.

I suspect that other brands of HD televisions also have a feature similar to DNIe, and I would advise those having visual noise problems with Planet Earth or other HD content to try turning off that feature and see if it helps.

With my newfound knowledge in hand, I can finally watch my Planet Earth Blu-Ray Disc edition with pleasure and enjoyment. But also a little sadness as the HD versions of Planet Earth do not include the bonus features from the standard definition DVD release, including extensive footage of how some of the scenes were shot - something I particularly wanted to see in the case of the Great White Sharks jumping out of the water when feasting on seals off South Africa.

I give Planet Earth on Blu-Ray Disc an 8.0 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale (it could have been higher had the extra footage not been omitted).

UPDATE - June 11, 2007: I discovered that DNIe kept being reenabled on my TV, 30 minutes after I would turn it off. Turns out my Samsung TV was in “Shop Mode” - a mode for when a TV is on display at a shop, where it resets various settings, like aspect ratio, DNIe, etc. to defaults to overcome the effects of a consumer having twiddled with the settings and leaving them in an indeterminate (and maybe ugly) state. To turn off “Shop Mode”, power on your Samsung TV, and then hold the Menu button for about 5 seconds until the screen flashes. Note also for the Samsung TVs on which DNIe cannot be turned off, you might be able to get the same result by changing the video picture mode to “Movie” from “Dynamic”. 

Back in my younger years, which I peg at over 25 years ago, I worked part-time at a computer store located right next to an arcade (Fun N’ Games in Framingham, Massachusetts), and as the manager was the father of a friend, I used to get advanced access to new arcade games as they came out. The job ended but I still enjoyed occasional gaming privileges during my college years when I came back to the area to visit my folks. One of the most frustrating games I remember from that day and age was something called Dragon’s Lair.

Dragon’s Lair was effectively an interactive cartoon, where at particular (and frequent) points you needed to use a joy stick and indicate which direction the protagonist - Dirk the Daring - should go in order to avoid impending doom. You typically could choose one of four (or less directions) for Dirk to “move” at these decision points.

Dirk about to die

Doom is pretty much what always befell my attempts to play through the game. I lost a lot of money (gaming privileges meant early access, not free play, alas) on Dragon’s Lair. I have always blamed my poor performance on the lag in response of the joystick - not an unreasonable excuse considering that Dragon’s Lair was based on a laser disc and the joystick controlled a decision tree, and it would take finite amount of time for the disc head to get to wherever the next scene needed to come from, be it a death scene like the one above, or a rare (in my case) continuation of the game. Mind you, it’s quite possible the lag was human lag, i.e. mine, but I’d never admit that in public.

I never finished Dragon’s Lair, but did always consider it a standout at a time when arcade graphics were blocky, and even the PC games at the time that I developed were not particularly attractive (although there was less game play lag). Dragon’s Lair featured cel-based animation by famed animator Don Bluth, digitized to laser disc. Big visual difference to pixel-based gaming. At the time, and for years to come, Dragon’s Lair was the closest thing to wide spread “3D” gaming arcade game players experienced, even though the subject was actually flat (it was a cartoon, after all) and all motions and paths were fully predetermined - you could only choose which of those predetermined paths to follow.

Some years back, Dirk was repurposed for a couple of different and more dynamically interactive Dragon’s Lair games for various consoles - game play was moderately fun, although my then eight year old son enjoyed the games more than I did.

But Dragon’s Lair has returned to its optical video medium roots. A couple of months ago, I received a pre-release of Dragon’s Lair on Blu-ray Disc. The kids and I played with it extensively - they greatly enjoyed the Dad-induced death scenes, while for me it brought back the humiliation of defeat. And this time, perhaps, it was human lag (at least to some extent) that was the cause of death as we played the game on our Sony PS3 on our 61” DLP 1080p screen. The game would have been well-nigh impossible to play with the PS3 controller, but using the optional Sony PS3 Blu-ray Remote control it worked out moderately well - except for my accidentally hitting “Stop” and having to start the game all over again, multiple times. Dragon’s Lair on Blu-ray Disc will play on any Blu-ray Disc player which supports BD-J (which should be all of them).

It was entertaining while it lasted, but I found the non-linear play of Dragon’s Lair frustrating. Let me explain that. If you are really good at Dragon’s Lair and never fail, there will be some sense of linearity from one scene to another (or at least it will appear that way), but if you cause Dirk to die, as I am wont to do, then Dirk resurrects in some random location, making it seem like you’re jumping all over the place all the time. I’m told by the folks at Digital Leisure that the original arcade version worked like this too, which is perhaps something I blocked as a painful childhood memory.

The manual I received with the Blu-ray Disc version also made reference to a visual cue appearing on-screen at a time when a decision needed to be made, but that never happened during our game play, and I was later told this is for the HD-DVD version of the game (even though the manual was Blu-ray Disc specific). However it was a pre-release, so that may have now been corrected.

For anyone who was a big Dragon’s Lair fan, or just wants to play a video game on their non-game console Blu-ray Disc player, Dragon’s Lair on Blu-ray Disc will definitely provide entertainment and nostalgia. I did go through a bit of nostalgia myself, but mostly about how easy it was for me to get Dirk the Daring killed during my gameplay (see image above for reference).

I personally found myself yearning for some fragging on Halo 2 or playing some current next-gen gaming titles with a more explorable world after a period of playing Dragon’s Lair. Perhaps I’ve become spoiled, but to me Dragon’s Lair seemed antiquated compared to modern console gaming. But perhaps new gamers will appreciate the novelty of this approach more than I.

I give Dragon’s Lair on Blu-ray Disc a 5.5 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale.

Dragon’s Lair on Blu-ray Disc is available for $49.95.

Dragon’s Lair on Blu-ray Disc

The Blu-ray Disc camp has been crowing in recent weeks about how it has already won the next generation movie disc format battle, touting the fact that in early January, there were twice as many Blu-ray movies sold as HD-DVD. The Blu-ray folks are right, based on numbers I’ve seen, that they are outselling HD-DVD movies, but the differences are slim, and the numbers are very low.

Sony, in particular, has been posturing about the “large” numbers of PS3 systems sold since that platform was released in mid-November 2006. Every PS3 system incorporates a Blu-ray player. By my estimates, according to data from Sony and NPD Group, as of the end of January, there were 1.25 million PS3 sold (one million through end of 2006 per Sony, 244,000 sold in January per NPD). Combine that with the standalone players sold, and you add maybe another few hundred thousand.

That compares with just a few hundred thousand HD-DVD players in the same time frame - about 262,000 in 2006 (170,000 standalone units per the HD-DVD group, and 92,000 HD-DVD add-on Xbox 360 drives), and some relatively equally smaller number in January 2007. For argument’s sake, let’s say that by the end of January 2007, there were 1.5 million Blu-ray capable players vs. 300,000 HD-DVD capable players in consumer’s hands. The actual exact numbers don’t really matter, but what is striking is that this means there are roughly five (that’ 5!) times as many Blu-ray players out there as HD-DVD players.

But most of those Blu-ray players are PS3 game consoles. Sony’s posturing about Blu-ray player sales in the form of PS3 game consoles is just that - posturing. That’s because only a fraction of the PS3 users out there are buying Blu-ray movies. Look at these numbers from an article in Next Generation less than a month ago, where Sony Computer Entertainment America is quoted as quoting NPD Group as saying that cumulative Blu-ray movie sales at the time stood at 439,000 units vs. a cumulative 438,000 HD-DVD movies. In my book, that’s a dead even race. But more importantly, it shows clearly that people are not buying Sony PS3s to watch Blu-ray movies. If they were, the Blu-ray movie numbers would be three times what NPD Group says (according to Sony).

Those numbers imply a tie ratio - the ratio at which movies are tied to players - as approximately 0.33 for Blu-ray players, and about 1.4 for HD-DVD players. However, in the short run (i.e., the present), all these numbers don’t really matter because they are still pretty small in the grand scheme of things - high-definition movie playback is for all practical purposes still a niche market, and anyone claiming to be king of that market is making a mountain out of a mole hill. It’s not until the installed base of players numbers in the several tens of millions that this market will be a real mass-market.

So what’s Sony to do get people to start using their PS3s to watch movies instead of just playing games on them? I have a short list of suggestions:

1) Include a real DVD remote with each PS3. You can now buy a $25 Sony-branded Bluetooth Blu-ray DVD remote control for the PS3, but it really should be included free with every PS3 if Sony is serious about the PS3 being a real Blu-ray player.

2) Add an infrared (IR) port to the PS3 so that folks can use their universal home theater remote controls to control DVD and Blu-ray DVD playback on a PS3. For older units this can be a USB add-on, and for newer units it should be built it. Blu-ray is supposedly a home theater delight, so why shouldn’t consumers be able to use their home theater remotes to control it? Bluetooth is “cool”, but IR is the standard for remotes.

3) Provide decent DVD upscaling so that older DVDs still look decent when played back on the PS3 on that nice new HD-TV. This would provide people with greater purchase justification for the PS3, as they could then sell their old upscaling DVD player on eBay (not that it would bring in much money, but it’s still a great rationalization point).

4) Offer a breadth of family-friendly games so that moms and non-game playing spouses would feel better about having it in the family (or communal) living room. Nintendo has done this so very right with the Wii, but meanwhile among the sparse assortment of PS3 games, you pretty much have only Mature and Teen ESRB rated titles.

5) Include a way to write to PS2 game cartridges as well as the current optional dongle to read them, so that the living room PS2 can truly be replaced by a PS3, as opposed to only kind of, somewhat, almost replacing the PS2 (and that’s in the U.S. - European PS3 will have far greater PS2 compatibility issues when they ship).

6) Rebrand the PS3 as a Blu-ray disc player which also plays games, instead of a game console which also plays Blu-ray discs.

Without better addressing PS3 owner apathy in using the PS3 for playing Blu-ray movies, the tie ratio for Blu-ray titles to Blu-ray players will continue to embarrass the Blu-ray camp as it becomes more and more obvious that the majority of PS3 owners aren’t watching movies. 

I have just posted a handful of my articles and commentaries from Jon Peddie’s TechWatch, an industry newsletter I write for regularly over on my Richter Scale Articles site.

Those articles/commentaries are as follows:

From the December 11, 2006 issue of TechWatch:

- What Was Significant in 2006
- Forecasts for 2007

From the January 8, 2007 issue of TechWatch:
- Bill Gates’ Digital Lifestyle Vision - Putting the Pieces Together
- LG’s New BH100 Super Multi Blue Player for HD-DVD and Blu-ray
- One size fits all, says Warner Bros. - New THD disc is both HD-DVD and Blu-ray Disc
- To HD, Or Not To HD, That Is The Question

Hope you enjoy them even if they are a little dated (I only repost articles after the issue the articles are in has been superceded by a newer issue).

Sunday was a pretty miserable day for me. The Terabyte RAID disk array in my Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4-based file server I use here at home suffered a major drive problem that was not resolvable using the RAID system. In plain English, I had a system crash and data loss. I discovered this around noon, and had to cancel my plans to attend a Superbowl party hosted by a Colts fans here on Bonaire, as well as another social engagement later that evening. Instead I spent the day downloading new Red Hat install CDs, backing up my backup (I only lost about a day’s worth of data), setting up a temporary replacement file server, and building the RAID-based server from scratch. I ultimately had to rebuild it yet a second time, as the drive that was causing the crash was not the one I originally thought. By the time I was mildly operational it was 5am on Monday.

At which point I realized I had completely missed the Superbowl and, more importantly to me, the Superbowl commercials, one of my annual guilty pleasures.

Well, I spent yesterday in additional recovery mode, and am now catching up on my e-mail and work, again, but thanks to iFilm, I have been able to watch all the 2007 Superbowl commercials without the long gaps of football in between. My favorite is the Blockbuster Mouse Ad. The Snickers Kiss and Bud Light Auctioneer ones are pretty good too.

Last night I tried an experiment to see if I could get relatively inexpensive (sub-$300) HD-DVD playback going on my PC. The components of this experiment, other than the PC, involved an Xbox 360 HD-DVD Player and Cyberlink’s PowerDVD Ultra software.

I’m pleased to say the experiment worked. The $199.99 Xbox 360 HD-DVD Player (which I raved about here) is a USB 2.0 device. I merely plugged in the HD-DVD drive, waited for Windows XP to recognize it (I allowed Windows to go to the Windows web site to look for drivers too), and after around a minute or two, the drive was fully installed and usable as a DVD drive.

The next step was to install the $99.95 Cyberlink PowerDVD Ultra software. The current version of the software (pictured above) installs for either HD-DVD or Blu-ray Disc support - you have to choose, although company officials tell me that as soon as next month, a free upgrade will be made available to all purchasers of the current version which will support both versions for folks fortunate enough to have both HD-DVD and Blu-ray Disc drives in their PC.

The PowerDVD Ultra software comes with a tool called HD Advisor, which scans your system for compatible drives and to ensure your system is powerful enough to do a real-time decode of the high definition formats. The minimum requirements are actually not insubstantial, as processing high definition content requires a lot of CPU and graphics horsepower. However, if you do have a suitable system, it works very well. The only minor annoyance I found was the inability to turn off subtitles, but I suspect that is user error (or at least a lack of reading relevant documentation).

The other nice thing about this combo is that you get a free copy of the remake of King Kong in HD-DVD (at least as of last week), and a spare Xbox 360 remote control (not much use on your PC, but maybe you can sell it on eBay or use it with your Xbox 360 if you have one).

So, for $299.94 (not including any possible shipping costs or sales tax), you can watch HD-DVD movies on your PC. Not a bad deal at all (assuming your PC is powerful enough, of course).

I know over the years I have subjected many of my readers to the “woes” of living on Bonaire, a small Caribbean island with, among other things, lousy TV service, and obviously no U.S. ZIP code. You might ask why TV is even important when living in paradise, and would answer that mindless entertainment is needed even here.

The reason the ZIP code (or more specifically, not having one) is important is because it means we cannot get Electronic Program Guides - EPGs - see my post on “TV Time Shifting in Paradise” from over a year ago about this.

I have managed to cobble together a partial EPG on my new HP z565 Digital Home Entertainment Center (a Windows XP Media Center Edition PC that’s designed to sit in your living room) by using a Miami-area ZIP code, and then renumbering and deleting channels as best I can. It at least works for three major U.S. networks, Cartoon Channel, HBO, Showtime, and Disney, and has already been useful. As an added bonus, I can stream recorded shows to the Xbox 360 in my bedroom should I choose to.

However, an acquaintance recently reminded me that I am paying for an expensive business connection for DirecTV in my office in Marshall, Texas, where I only spent a few weeks last year, with the TV there being unwatched the rest of the time (and I only watch it for background noise in the evenings when I am there). The Samsung DirecTV decoder also has an 80GB driver and TiVo service. But, still it’s rather expensive per-hour viewing cost.

Around the same time as I was reminded of this, a couple of other friends mentioned that they had installed Slingbox devices so they could watch their home TV signals remotely while traveling. Ding ding ding - bells went off in my addled brain.

So, during my most recent visit to Marshall a few weeks ago, I installed a Slingbox Pro box (ordered from Amazon.com - about $218), and I couldn’t be much happier. The Slingbox Pro device takes video signal input in the form of either a cable TV signal, composite video or S-Video plus audio, or HDMI (with an optional cable) digital input for HD signals. I plugged in my DirecTV TiVo box, hooked up the infrared transmitters that come with the Slingbox Pro so they could control the DirecTV box, and I was off.

The Slingbox software, which maker Slingmedia calls “SlingPlayer”, was easy to set up - both to control the Slingbox itself, as well as provide the necessary controls on my notebook to view my TV signal. I also had Linda try it back on Bonaire after I set it up, and she was able to get it going there too. The really neat thing about SlingPlayer is that it knows all about the particular DirecTV decoder I have, and even has a virtual remote control (looks identical to the physical remote) that I can manipulate with my mouse. That in turns means I can access all the TiVo functionality of the box remotely too. And it all works over an Internet connection. The more upstream capability you have to send out a signal, the better. In my case the DSL connection at my office in Texas offers 768Kbps upstream, sufficient for a pretty reasonable 640x480 video stream from the Slingbox.

After I got back from Texas and CES I went and set up Slingplayer software on the HP z565 in my living room, and can now watch live TV from Texas in my living room. Full screen on my 61” TV is too grainy and jumpy, but I can get a decent image at about 24” diagonal, which is just fine to catch up on missed shows and programming I would otherwise not get. It also means I can stop paying $1.99 for missed episodes of Grey’s Anatomy, Desperate Housewives, and Lost. And, I can also watch it from any PC with the SlingPlayer software. And for certain handheld devices, there’s even Slingplayer Mobile version for mobile phones and PDAs running the Windows Mobile operating system.

I’m also considering installing another Slingbox at my in-laws in New Hampshire so I can watch their TV signal here on Bonaire, kind of as a back-up of sorts (no TiVo there yet, though, but I can fix that too).

My biggest regret with the Slingbox is that I didn’t think of getting one sooner.

My next issue to solve is how to get a video signal from the output of my big screen TV in my living room to the small TV in my kitchen without running cables (my wife hates cables across the floor or ceiling). We have concrete walls, so there’s no good way to run them inside the walls. The concrete walls also effectively destroy my use of a wireless AV transmitter - those really need to be line of sight, or at least through a wood/drywall panel, not eight inches of concrete in order to have an interference free image.

However, if I wait long enough, Sling Media will be selling the SlingCatcher - a box which will let me use my network connection (wired or wireless) to receive TV input from a Slingbox either in the same building or anywhere else there’s a Slingbox I have access to.

I give the Sling Media Slingbox Pro a 9.5 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale.

Well, in addition to now being closely associated with discussions on the future of HD-DVD and Blu-ray standards, in particular with respect to the adult entertainment industry, a recent interview of mine has made it to the web (not YouTube yet, though).

Take a look at this clip, shot during a media luncheon at Pat Meier-Johnson’s Lunch@Piero’s event. It’s a five minute interview dealing with commentary on multimedia convergence and the future of tangible media (e.g. CDs, DVDs).