Welcome To The Fold, Google

Work + World Of Warcraft + Sleep = no blogging.

In other news, I see that the new GoogleTV is suffering from the same case of streamus-interruptus that my Playstation 3 contracted last year. Hulu, CBS, NBC, ABC - all are detecting access from the Google/Sony set-top box, and blocking it. It's still the case that the content providers are paranoid about the screen you are using - if you view via a computer monitor, that's OK, but using a digital TV, not so good.

So, another target market that the networks could have snapped up and served ads to will instead now be served by the ad-free market that is the world of BitTorrents and their variants. Congrats, guys - heckuva job!

Well, Steve Jobs managed to break the music labels eventually - maybe he can do the same to the video morons.

Is It October Yet?

Because that's when Rock Band 3 comes out. I've just upgraded my drums with the three cymbal set, so they're now fully RB3-ready. And I'm all ready to shell out the bucks for the new keyboard instrument and the lesser of the two pro guitars. I've never played guitar before at all, so I'm really looking forward to seeing how the training mode works out.

The playlist is slowly starting to leak out. Here's what I'm seeing so far:

Songs I'm ready to play right now:
Dio – Rainbow in the Dark
Jane’s Addiction – Been Caught Stealing
Ozzy Osbourne – Crazy Train
The Doors – Break On Through
Whitesnake – Here I Go Again
Yes – Roundabout
B-52′s – Rock Lobster
Def Leppard – Foolin’
David Bowie – Space Oddity
Devo – Whip It
The Police – Don’t Stand So Close To Me
The Ramones – I Wanna Be Sedated
Steve Miller Band – Fly Like An Eagle
Primus – Jerry Was a Race Car Driver
Golden Earring – Radar Love
Elton John – Saturday Night’s Alright (For Fighting)
Deep Purple – Smoke on the Water
Dire Straits – Walk of Life

Songs that I won't mind when they show up:
Huey Lewis and the News – The Power of Love
Jimi Hendrix – Crosstown Traffic
Joan Jett – I Love Rock and Roll
Night Ranger – Sister Christian
Queen – Bohemian Rhapsody
Foreigner – Cold as Ice
Tears for Fears – Everybody Wants to Rule the World
War – Low Rider
The Beach Boys – Good Vibrations (Live)
Lynyrd Skynyrd – Free Bird
Blondie – Heart of Glass
The Who – I Can See For Miles
James Brown – I Got You (I Feel Good)
John Lennon – Imagine
INXS – Need You Tonight

Songs I'm going to assign one lighter to and hopefully will never see again:
Smash Mouth – Walkin’ on the Sun
Stone Temple Pilots – Plush
Warren Zevon – Werewolves Of London

Plus there's still a few more rumored songs, like 25 or 6 to 4, 20th Century Boy and some as yet unnamed Rush song, and a bunch of stuff I've never heard of (what are those pesky kids listening to these days? And get off my lawn!).

(Still) So Much For Hulu

I've had a few struggles in the past with trying to use my network-connected PS3 to view Hulu-hosted videos. When I first bought my PS3, I could use the built-in web browser to connect to Hulu and watch videos. But shortly thereafter, Hulu decided to explicitly block the PS3 as a web client.

Now they've announced Hulu Plus, which will (at some future point) bring the entire Hulu library (including more shows than are available in the standard Hulu) to non-PC devices, like the iPhone and the PS3.

This will only cost you....$10/month.
Oh, and on the PS3, you will apparently also need to subscribe to the Playstation Network Plus, which runs another $50/year. So, tack on about $175 a year or so.

Now...Terry White asks "Will you pay for content that once was free?"

For many tech-heads, that's the wrong question. The question is: "Will you pay for content that is still free, and at a higher-quality, and without advertisements?"

Because that's still the competition for me - these shows are in enough places on-line that this kind of deal just doesn't offer enough in convenience/quality/whatever to make it competitive. No Hulu plus for me.

More Stuff I Now Know

Some things I found out today:

1. Looks like now that I am with UVerse instead of Time Warner Cable/Earthlink, I now have access to ESPN360.com for streaming video. I'll have to see if this is accessible on my TV (presumably by streaming through my PS3, as I doubt there is direct access from the Bravia TV itself. Yet.). At any rate - cool. More stuff to watch.
2. I also get access to AT&T Wifi hotspots, which is good for my iPod touch.
3. In dealing with the Hulu-blocking-PS3-access issue, it looks like some people were having success getting around this by using a proxy server to change the User-Agent HTTP header to mimic a standard Windows browser. More recent messages seem to indicate that a new block has been put up that stops even this. My guess - they are now querying the Flash run-time for user-agent info, and Flash isn't going through the proxy server. So I won't even try to get that up and running yet. Why does Hulu hate this path so much?

UVerse First Impressions

So, I never thought I would say this, but - I'm now an all AT&T shop. My cell phone has been with AT&T since I got it (well, technically it was Cingular to start with, but still the same provider). But now I've switched over my phone, tv and internet to AT&T UVerse. It did take a while - the UVerse web-site didn't believe I was in a service area until I alerted them to the problem. But once that was resolved, the order and install went pretty smoothly. My install took about two hours, which included installing a new junction box (or whatever they call it) on the outside of my house and replacing a telephone port on one wall, but not running any new cables. We just reused the coaxial cable from my existing DirecTV installation to connect the set-top box in my living room to the main gateway box in the back office.

First impressions:

• The Total Home DVR service is nice. I can setup and view recordings on either of my two boxes, with up to four streams recording. My previous DirecTV setup only had one box capable of recording/viewing, with two streams maximum.
• The DVR itself is not quite as capable as the Tivo box from DirecTV. There is no thumbs-up/thumbs-down ranking available, no automatic recording suggestions, and while there are searches available, it doesn't look like I can setup a recording schedule based on that search. It terms of the basics, however, the UVerse DVR is certainly capable enough for most use cases.
• Basic TV viewing is fine. The channel surfing is faster than the DirecTV boxes, but I haven't found a way to only surf through my favorites. I don't really want to pass by the channels that I don't even receive - that's just a dumb interface. The Tivo box was much better in this regard.
• There are some rudimentary interactive capabilities. The Weather On Demand might get some use (I had this problem with DirecTV also - no local weather from The Weather Channel), but I tend to use the internet on my iPod touch for "instant" weather information. But at least they are there, and maybe they will get more robust over time.
• There is home media server support through Media Share on UVerse, but it is officially Windows-only. My media is on my iMac, so I'm going to poke around to see if there is any way to trick Media Share into seeing my iTunes-based library.
• On a related note, the UVerse router is blocking my existing UPnP-based media sharing (which I currently use to stream from my Mac to my PS3). I'm going to need to find out what firewall rules need to be relaxed for this to work - this is a major show stopper for me.
• Other than this UPnP issue, the router itself seems to work fine. None of my devices (computers, iPods, PS3) had any problem connecting, and the speeds and signal strength seem to be good enough for my house. According to SpeedTest, I'm getting close to the advertised 12 Mbps speed for downloads.
• The phone service also looks good. I was able to switch over my cell phone to use the same voicemail system as the UVerse land-line, so now both phones drop messages into the same box, and the messages can be retrieved on phone or over the web. Nice.
• UVerse comes with its own branded version of the Yahoo services. However, I already had my own Yahoo account (along with related accounts like Flickr). It isn't clear that I can merge the two in any way, so I have to decide if I want to migrate to the new AT&T Yahoo account, stick with the old one, or maintain both of them.

So, really, the only big sticking point for now is the UPnP blocking. It also remains to be seen how the HDTV signal looks, once I get my new TV (which may be happening this weekend). And of course, it's nice that the bundle is going to be cheaper than my existing SBC/DirecTV/Earthlink combo, while also providing me with better features. Ah, technology.

So Much For Hulu

My previous entries around accessing Hulu via my PS3 are apparently obsolete, at least for the time being.

Via Engadget HD, Hulu is now apparently specifically blocking the PS3 browser from accessing videos. And so Fox and NBC can now join ABC as networks for which I will have to use BitTorrent or similar solutions to view their back content. Congratulations - you guys lose out on whatever meager compensation you were receiving for ad views.

But it was well worth it in order to be able to....ummm, what was the reason you did this, again?

Yet More Playstation 3 and Mac Streaming

I've had a few posts in the past about attempts to get the various media on my Mac (in iTunes, primarily, but also some loose files not in a format that iTunes likes) streaming wirelessly over to my new Playstation 3. In fact, those are about the only posts anyone actually reads on this blog.

Oh well.

At any rate, one of my first posts mentioned an open-source project called, generically-enough, Ps3 Media Server. Back then, it appeared that the software worked, but didn't make the cut for me because it was a cross-platform solution (written in Java) that did not have any support for my iTunes playlists. I didn't really want to serve up my 6000 MP3 in a big jumble - I've worked a bunch on my playlists and wanted to use them over on the PS3.

Well, I've taken another look and over on the code site for PS3MS (or whatever it's abbreviated to), and they now have a Mac OS X-specific build that adds a couple of key options for sharing not only your iTunes library, but also your iPhoto library automatically. And I can report - it works well. iPhoto events and albums both show up correctly, with thumbnails. And the entire iTunes library, with playlists, artists, genres, etc. all show up as appropriate under both the music and video entries on the XMB.

There's even some support for streaming content from the web (YouTube and such), although I'm not able to get most of it to work myself. Maybe I need to twiddle around with the transcoder settings. I'm using a slightly older version (the latest builds are listed as Intel-only, and I'm still running on an old G5), so maybe there are issues that have been resolved by now. Don't know if the elusive Hulu is available through this thing or not (although I don't see how you would do any searching with this interface yet).

So, I'm giving this an extended shot. So far it's worked well....except that I do get some network issues still (with an error code of 80710736) during video playback. I haven't tried a wired connection to see if this resolves the problem or not yet, but I probably will at some point. At any rate, Mac-to-PS3 users may want to give the OS X-specific build a look.

Can My PS3 Get Lost Now?

Engadget reports that Disney is now (or will soon be) part of Hulu. While I'm not overly happy about some of the Hulu shenanigans relating to controlling who can see what when, I am hopeful that this will allow my Playstation 3 to stream ABC programs.

Well, OK - actually, just the one ABC program I happen to watch - Lost.

As I mentioned previously, ABC's own streaming seems to be unhappy with the Playstation 3 browser, insisting that I get an approved browser instead. I haven't looked into it much, but I'd be very surprised if there were any technical reason they couldn't have streamed the content to my Flash-enabled PS3 browser just as easily as any other one. But since they decided to be anal about things, I turned to the torrent-o-sphere to get my missing Lost dosage instead, and ABC lost out on whatever meager revenue that might have received from embedded ads or whatnot.

Hopefully, ABC will move content over to the more PS3-friendly Hulu, and leave it in some format that I can use.

And hopefully, Hulu won't keep screwing around with its access policy, either.

And Yet Even More Flash on the Playstation 3

Since I've actually been picking up some hits on my posts about using my Playstation 3 as a media center, I thought I'd mention another issue that has come up. It appears that the PS3 does have some issues with its Flash implementation - in an earlier post, I described how the PS3 browser locked up while pausing a Hulu playback.

Last night, I tried looking up some old Red vs Blue videos on Google Video. I got to a page of search results, but at that point, the PS3 browser again hung up on me. I'm not sure what the root cause was here, but the search result page is a fairly busy page, with lots of subframes and embedded objects (and now that I think about it, that's fairly different from the standard Google search page, which is usually pretty clean). At any rate, the browser lockup this time was more severe - the browser never responded to stop/refresh/back/etc. I was eventually able to exit the browser back to the main XMB screen, but the XMB itself was now locked up. No background animation, no scrolling menu items, no response to the controller. I had to hard boot the PS3 by (gasp) actually standing up, going over the PS3 and holding down the power button. Everything came back up as normal after the reboot. I was finally able to find (and see) what I was looking for over on YouTube.

I think the bottom line is that Flash playback is possible now on the PS3, but only under fairly "ideal" circumstances, and failure can result in a hard lockup. If an occasional reboot is the worst problem, then it falls into the "barely acceptable" category - after all, the PS3 isn't a general purpose computer (at least for most people), and so I'm not usually multitasking on it. If I'm watching a video, that's usually all I'm doing on it (well, maybe a download of some DLC in the background). But if we ever get into a Red-Ring-Of-Death-type situation, where a crash leaves the thing unbootable...

Well, suffice it to say I'll be unhappy. I haven't done very much scrounging around the Intertubes yet to see how widespread this sort of thing is.

Advantage Hulu

I've posted a couple of times about viewing Hulu videos using my Playstation 3 browser. The conclusion is - it mostly works, although I do sometimes bump up against the limit of what my wireless connection between my router and the PS3 will handle, result in occasional stuttering. I get similar results streaming from YouTube (watched old Bottom Live shows in ten-minute chunks - good stuff there).

Having missing Lost last night, I decided now would be a good time to see how things worked over on abc.com (since ABC doesn't use Hulu or YouTube to distribute its shows - I don't think I actually watch any CBS shows, so that network doesn't matter to me). So, I fire up the browser and head on over.

First strike - ABC has pop-under ad windows. The PS3 browser can handle multiple windows at once, although I think you only get full-screen mode - you have to select which window is on "top". Of course, you don't know until you switch over, and the browser first asks if you want to open a window (I think there is an option somewhere to permanently select the desired behavior). I thought we had kind of gotten beyond those annoying pop-unders, but I guess its just that I've been using more modern browsers on my PC and Mac and so never have to see them.

Second, and more severe - once I got to the Lost page and started the viewer, ABC decided my browser just wasn't good enough. Only Mac and PC need apply, and only if using IE, Firefox or Safari. So Linux is out, as is Google Chrome, I assume.

And of course, so is my PS3.

Now, there's really not any reason for it. It's just plain old Flash video, same as Hulu and YouTube, so there isn't really a technical reason why ABC can't get their content to the PS3. They just decided to put some kind of lock on it, and wanted to overly control how it gets delivered.

But the bottom line is, I now will just jump over to BitTorrent and pull the show from there. Since it's recent, it'll be easy to get. Of course, ABC won't get to embed any advertisements in the copy I get, and they won't get the hit count (and advertisement dollars) on their web site that I would have given them.

So yeah - nice work there, Disney. Good job.

Hulu And The Playstation 3, Continued

In a previous post, I mentioned issues with watching Hulu videos on my new PS3.

This was partially, of course, because I am an idiot.

As it turns out, Hulu videos have a "full screen" mode, which does correctly scale the video to the browser size. So I am able to get the video to fit to my screen without needing to zoom out more.

However, there is still another small issue, although this one has to do with the Playstation itself, I suspect. When I pause a video in Hulu, it continues to buffer content up to some amount, and displays a large play button to resume. This works on my Mac, but on the Playstation 3, I haven't been able to resume playing after buffering occurs. The mouse cursor moves, but none of the on-screen widgets react to button clicks. Even worse, the browser controls themselves don't respond, either - I can't go back or even quit the browser. I have to hard exit back to the main menu by holding the Playstation logo button on the controller (what is the name for that button, anyway?).

I don't know if things are getting backed up on the PS3 while doing the buffering or what, but this means I have to watch an entire Hulu show without stopping, which is a bit suboptimal. So, one hurdle overcome, another hurdle encountered.

And Even More On Rivet (and Hulu)

Since I'm apparently an idiot, I had forgotten that 24 was a two-hour episode this week and tuned in at my usual 8:00 Monday night. Hmmm, now I don't know what's going on. Oh well, this gave me an opportunity to check out web video viewing on my new PS3.

This evening, I fired up the browser and headed over to Hulu to watch the episodes I had missed. I soon saw I was getting the same stuttering performance I had gotten earlier when I tried to stream a ripped DVD. So, time to find out just what the issue is here.

I dug around in my closet and pulled out the longest Ethernet cable I had. After stretching my router's power cable to its limit, and sliding the PS3 over a bit in its cubby hole, I was just barely able to string my cable between them. After switching over to wired Internet connection, I relaunched the video from the Hulu site - and voila, now it works pretty well. It's still not broadcast-quality, but I think I would be getting the small pauses and such even if I was viewing it on my Mac directly hooked up to the router - it's being streamed over the Internet. So it appears something on the PS3 wireless client just isn't up to streaming that much content (because I am able to stream this video successfully to a laptop using the same wireless connection).

The other problem with viewing Hulu on the PS3 is that I'm using my 24" standard-def CRT TV. The screen is the wrong proportion for the video I'm trying to view, and the PS3 browser doesn't appear to let me zoom out to shrink the size of the video - I can only zoom in, which is the wrong direction. So I just centered the video part of the page as best I could, which was good enough for now. An HDTV would, I suspect, solve this problem.

After finishing 24, I went back to check out my ripped DVD over the wired connection. At first, it looked promising - the first couple of minutes went by with no stuttering and good video and audio quality. And then....an error message? "The content cannot be played - error code 800288D8."

Hmmm. A quick Google search seems to indicate this is some fault on the PS3 side of things. That is, there appears to be an issue in streaming MPEG-4 video that is independent of the server being used, so this doesn't seem to be a Rivet issue. I may have to play around a bit with different video formats some more until I find some combination that everyone is happy with.

The quest for multimedia Nirvana continues....

More On Rivet

Just as a quick followup on my Rivet testing...

I've been seeing how well Rivet and my wireless router do on streaming video. So far, I've had no problem streaming standard definition TV shows from iTunes - they've all worked just fine, with no stuttering issues. However, I also tried ripping one of my DVDs with Handbrake, using its PS3 settings. This resulted in a 2.1 GB file (just for the main feature). But for whatever reason, streaming this file gave me consistent stuttering, enough to make it not watchable.

So, I don't know if this is a limitation in Rivet, my wireless router, or the PS3 wireless client (I haven't tried running an Ethernet cable over from my router to the PS3 - that's a longer run than I have cable for). I'm going to play around with some other Handbrake settings - there's enough to tweak in there that I'm sure I can find a good balance between video quality and "streamability".

Streaming From Mac iTunes to a PS3

Well, my love of Guitar Hero was tempting me to go out and buy a Playstation 3, but it was learning about media streaming to the PS3 that finally pushed me over the edge. Well, that and a 20%-off sale at Dell - I don't think I remember seeing the PS3 on sale very often.

But back to streaming - one of the reasons I purchased my 80GB iPod Classic was the thought that I might eventually use it as a kind of small media server to my TV and stereo. I don't yet have a lot of video, but I do have about 40GB of music. So I wanted a good way to get it onto my main receiver in the living room, and I've been using my iPod through a standard dock to do that. I hadn't yet bought the video cables needed to output video ($50? Come on, Apple - it doesn't need to be that much, does it? Yep, I'm cheap).

But then I learn that it's possible to stream from both PCs and Macs straight to a PS3 via its Wi-Fi connection. Ah, wonderful! Now I can stream my content to my living room, plus add a game system and a better DVD/Blu-Ray player, and it gives me an excuse to sell my iPod classic and pick up an iPod touch instead! But there's a strict requirement - it must support my (non-DRM) iTunes content and playlists. So what software to use?

So far, I've taken a look at a few alternatives:

MediaLink seems to be the current marketshare leader. It installs as a Preference Pane, and exports iTunes songs, videos and playlists, and iPhoto albums. You can also expose arbitrary folders, for those of you who don't use iLife to manage your files. It was easy to install and set up, and has a 30 minute trial available. Everything showed up pretty well in the PS3 menus, with one exception - for some reason, my groups of TV Shows all appeared scrambled up in one large list called Unsorted. This may be due to the way I had them tagged or something (I don't think iTunes handles TV shows very well right now anyway), but it was an annoyance. MediaLink is $20 to unlock.

I then poked around at some open-source packages. There's a Java-based server called (appropriately) PS3 Media Server. It's a cross-platform Java application and makes no attempt to use any settings to appear as a native Mac application (yes, it can be done to a degree). I didn't play around with it much, but all it appeared to do was expose selected directories out to the PS3. It didn't tie into iTunes or iPhoto at all, and so didn't know anything about its playlists, etc. It probably could have been made to do so given some scripting work on my part, but I wasn't really looking for a programming task just now.

[Update: It appears that newer versions do now have support for exposing iTunes libraries automatically, although I'm still having some issues with it correctly detecting updates to the library. More on that in this later post.]

Another free package that got several mentions in my Googling was the ominously-named MediaTomb. Since I already had MacPorts installed, and since MediaTomb was available as a MacPorts package, I tried to install using that. Well, MacPorts decided it needed to build and install Perl, Python, OpenSSL, and a whole raft of other things that probably were already on my system. So after a few hours, I have a MediaTomb installation on my machine - along with a bunch of other redundant stuff. And like many open-source packages (don't get me wrong - I'm heavily dependent on open source in my technical life and have contributed a bit here and there), it looks like it is going to take a bunch of tweaking to get up and running. It also doesn't look like it's going to do anything with my iTunes playlists either. I'll poke around with it a bit, but it doesn't look like it's going to make the cut.

Finally, I saw a mention of a relatively new release - Rivet 2.0 from Cynical Peak. Apparently, this was previously an XBox-only streamer, but now has added PS3 support. In my brief exposure, it has three advantages over MediaLink: it's slightly cheaper ($18.95 instead of $20), it sorted my TV shows correctly out-of-the-box, and it has a security setting to restrict connecting machines (if that is a concern). Otherwise, it seems to work just like MediaLink - songs, playlists, videos, podcasts, photos all just show up in the right place on the PS3. Rather than a Preference Panel, it is presented as a menu-bar icon on the Mac. It also has a different trial period - you get one video and ten songs of your choice until it is unlocked. As I mentioned, about $19 to unlock.

I haven't gotten any stuttering with either MediaLink or Rivet, but there have been some reports of that with MediaLink (which admittedly has been around longer, so it has had more time to be pounded on by the general public). I think I'm going to kick the tires on Rivet a little more, and if everything looks good, I'll probably go with that one.

Edit: I've since found a small advantage for MediaLink over Rivet - MediaLink does support cover art display on the PS3 (at least for Mac OS X 10.5). Rivet doesn't currently, although their support forums indicate it is a planned feature. It's of somewhat limited use, since album art only shows up (as far as I know) as a small icon in both the XBR browser and in the bottom corner of the music visualizer screen - it isn't used nearly as prominently as in iTunes and on the iPod. But if it matters to you, MediaLink has the edge there, at least for now.