The hardware may have changed, but Bastard, my PVR, continues to be a bastard.

And it all looked so different a couple of weeks, when I discovered he could now record two things at once. Cracking! No more worrying about scheduling conflicts, no more worrying that the end of episode one is going to get recorded on the beginning of episode two if there's an over-run.

Marvellous.

Except I updated him to version 3.1.1 of his EyeTV software, which worked fine in most regards, except with exports. Suddenly, little Bastard didn't like to export programs with their soundtracks intact. I didn't realise this until about a week later, by which time I'd deleted the originals.

Curses.

So I downgraded back to 3.1, using Elgato's preferred method. Except I didn't restart my computer since they didn't ask me to. Now Bastard won't start recording unless EyeTV is already running. The problem went away after a restart, but not before it had failed to record one programme: American Outlaws, starring Ali Larter.

Bastard.

Well, finally, after all that fun with the Sky+ competition last year, I have Sky+HD. As you may recall, I was this close to getting it when at the last moment, I found out you need two feeds from the satellite dish to be able to record a programme while watching another, so we never got it. Fortunately, at our new flat, there are two wall feeds from the communal satellite dish (even if one, for some strange reason that even the Sky engineers couldn't fathom, is on the other side of the room from the other feed).

As it happens, I made a slight cost saving from delaying, since the cost installation and the box has gone down from £75 (reduced from £150) to £49. Bargain.

So, after a few days, what am I reckoning, apart from it's all worth it just to see Ali Larter in high def on Heroes?

Continue reading "Review: Sky+HD"

Read other posts about: Caerdydd

As you may know, I have a PVR for my Mac called Bastard. It was originally called Bastard because of its occasional refusal to record programmes for no adequately explored reason. After a few software updates, it got better and started to behave, even if it still warranted the name Bastard for refusing to export anything over an hour long to my AppleTV without giving an error (allegedly the fault lies with my Turbo H.264, made by the same company. They're the ones doing the alleging. Twats).

Anyway, I've moved flat and my Mac is no longer sitting comfortably near a TV socket. So I had two options: either stick a great big trailing cable around the room to where there is a TV socket or invest in an EyeTV Diversity, which employs two mini antennae and some fancy signal processing skills to supposedly produce great pictures and reception even indoors.

I bought the Diversity. Suffice it to say, the trailing cable's now arriving this week some time.

Continue reading "Review: Elgato EyeTV Diversity"

Ooh look. The UK iTunes store has just got round to releasing movies that you can either buy or rent then play on your computer, iPod, iPhone or Apple TV. Pricing is £3.49 to rent a new release, £2.49 for an old release; to buy a new release costs £10.99, while an old release costs £6.99. All prices include VAT.

File size for a 2h20 movie is about 1.6GB so best not to try this if you have capped broadband. Not sure if you can watch something while it's still being downloaded in iTunes, but if you have an Apple TV – which is starting to become even more attractive by the minute, particularly since at least some of the movies (eg Into The Wild) will be in high def on it if you pay £1 extra – you should be able to start watching within a couple of minutes of purchase. 

As far as I can work out, you've 48 hours to watch a rented movie once you've started playing it – and 30 days to start playing it in – and you can watch it as many times as you like in that 48 hours. But if you don't make it through to the end of the movie in that time, you'll still have the option of carrying on to the end of the movie – or deleting it.

That concludes the commercial break.

Not sure how keen I am on the pricing - cheaper to buy the DVD almost. And there's not a lot of great stuff in there yet, unless you count the older movies like Batman Begins and The Matrix. But indie stuff like The Darjeeling Limited is due any moment now, and as we learnt from the Music Store, what's in there when it opens is always a lot, lot less than a few months down the line.

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There's a saying that “technology begets technology”.

I know this because I made it up a minute ago.

I used to have a 21“ 4:3 TV that I bought ex-rental from Rumbelows for £50. Then, six months later, I bought a DVD player from Woolworths for the princely sum of £150 (oh the extravagance). Being a purist, I insisted on watching movies on it in letterbox format rather than 4:3.

It looked rubbish. So I had to go out and buy myself a 28” widescreen set from Matsui (aka Dixons own brand). As I said, technology begets technology.

This lasted me all of nine years before keeling over and dying in January. So I bought myself a replacement - an HD-capable Sony Bravia 26“ LCD tele. This has a really nice picture when dealing with digital sources connected using an HDMI cable (eg my Apple TV, particularly now I've set it to 1080i 50Hz rather than 720); it has a reasonably fuzzy/crap picture with analogue sources (ie anything that uses a SCART cable such as a standard DVD player or a Sky box).

My DVD player keeled over and died on Friday: Davina McCall and the T1000 are to blame. I managed to fix it once, through the manly use of screwdrivers and ”shaking it a bit“, but that little Alba DVD player wasn't coming back from the dead for a second time. Bang goes £17.99 worth of electronics from Sainsbury's straight into the pink ”small household electrical appliances“ recycling bin at Makro on the Greenwich Peninsula.

We therefore had a few choices

1. Go without a DVD player.
2. Buy an equally cheap DVD player from Sainsbury's or Argos.
3. Buy a colossally expensive Blu-ray player
4. Buy a colossally expensive HD-DVD player
5. Buy a £50 DVD player with HD-upres capabilities

Which would you have picked?

1. What are you? Amish?
2. A reasonable conclusion that would condemn you to another year of slightly fuzzy DVD playback
3. Interesting call, rich early adopter. They'll be £100 cheaper in a year and the disks are still nearly £30 each. I can wait
4. Ha ha ha! I've got a Betamax I can sell you if you want
5. Correct. Technology begets technology and if you have an HD set, you need a DVD player that can upgrade the DVD picture to HD quality.

So we headed off to Argos and bought ourselves a Philips DVP 5960 and HDMI cable for £7 (see what I meant about Curry's overpricing?). Here's our experience so far

Continue reading "Review: Philips DVP 5960"

So downloads are all the rage now. Big Finish, which makes those Doctor Who audio plays, has set up a downloads service (they still haven't got back to me about those missing extras, BTW, so I'm going to assume you don't get the CD extras with the downloads, making them even less attractive).

The BBC, after doing ever so nicely with its iPlayer, has leapt onto the Apple bandwagon as well by putting various shows onto iTunes, including Ashes to Ashes, Life on Mars, Torchwood and more. I've had little interest in the iTunes TV service until now - cos it's mostly been shows that are rubbish or aimed at kids. But with Stu_N suggesting I was wearing rose-tinted glasses in my recall of Life on Mars, I decided to give iTunes a try and download the first series.

Continue reading "Review: iTunes - the Life on Mars download experience"

Read other posts about: Ashes to Ashes, Big Finish, Life on Mars

Fingers crossed, I'll be giving both Bride of Peladon and Catalyst a listen this week, which might mean I review them as soon as... next week.

However, I thought I'd draw your attention to a couple of things first. Number one is that Big Finish now has a podcast. It's a little bit cringeworthy, but it's worth listening to since you do get advance information and behind-the-scenes explanation. Most notable in that is the first podcast, in which Nick Briggs explains the rationale behind the pricing structure of the downloads service. Did you realise, for example, that the US pricing of downloads is about $7.99? If you can follow Nick's reasoning for that in comparison to the £12.99 charge for the UK (which appears to amount to “they've been paying over the odds for ages now, so now it's the UK's turn”), you're a smarter person than I.

It's also got a blog (of sorts. Guys, have you heard of comments? Permalinks?) which occasionally turfs up a bit of news, too.

I’m also producing the next run of Doctor Who Companion Chronicles, which has been a fantastic experience. I’ve chosen the companions and the writers and come up with eight (yes eight - you heard it here first) stories that I hope will please others as much as they please me. Oooh, I wish I could reveal more. I wish I could tell you who is flying into the country in May to return as a character that was such a pivotal part of my childhood but, sadly, for now you have to guess. Likewise I can’t reveal which one star from the last series is coming back this year.

Let the guessing on that one begin.

Over the weekend, I decided to give the downloads service a try, just to let you all know what it's like. Here were my experiences...

Continue reading "Review: Big Finish downloads service"

Read other posts about: Big Finish

The New Year brings with it many things, and technology updates - once the Christmas bills have been paid off - is one of them. As it happens, I've updated two things: my TV and Bastard, my PVR. I haven't updated to Sky+ because while I'm just about okay with paying £99 for a new box, I draw the line at paying £60 to have some bloke turn up with it and plug it into an aerial socket.

Anyway, I, in common with a sizeable percentage of SE London, judging by

1. the number of nice people down at the recycling centre bringing in old TVs and giant cardboard boxes marked “Sony Bravia”
2. the number of not-so-nice people who have left old TVs and giant cardboard boxes marked “Sony Bravia” lining most of the pavements in the neighbourhood

have bought a Sony Bravia. The reasons for this are threefold. Firstly, my clapped out 28“ Matsui CRT widescreen TV that I bought in 1999 was starting to do an odd thing to the picture. Mathematicians call it an affine transformation, Mac users call it the ”Dock Genie“ effect - everyone else, particularly in SE London, just calls it ”f*cked“.

Secondly, Sainsbury's have been selling 26” Sony Bravias for £349. They don't deliver, so that saves them from WEEE - the gits - but it does make it all a bit cheaper. Everyone else appears to have been going for 40“, but we wanted something smaller than before and less power hungry, so 26” works out well.

Thirdly, the adverts have claymation bunnies in them.

Continue reading "Review: Sony Bravia 26" and EyeTV 3.0"

The PR woman has been belting on at me for ages to give this a mention, and seeing as today, it's now available to the public rather than just we brave beta testers, I thought I'd finally relent and talk about Locate TV.

It's supposed to be like Google for tele, movies and actors. You type in the name of a film, TV show or actor, and it tells you what the actor's been in, when the next showing of the programme or movie is online or on television (you can tell it where you live and what TV services you have access to) or whether it's available on DVD. You can then embed a little widget in your blog that gives other people access to the equivalent information for their region, etc.

At the moment, it has two problems, apart from a not inconsiderable slowness, IMHO:

1. The widgets are fugly. Ugh.
2. It doesn't do a good job of aggregating data into an easily consumable format - true of Google as well, I suppose, but not helpful when you have to keep going back and forth between search results to make sure you've covered all eventualities.

If you do a search for Doctor Who, for example, it gives you 30 results. The first three are

Doctor Who (2005) - TV Series
NEXT ON: Saturday 6th October 12:00pm - UKTV Gold
Time-travelling adventures, following the exploits of the Doctor, aided by his trusty sidekick
Doctor Who - TV Series
Sci-fi adventures with the eccentric Time Lord
Doctor Who - TV Series
A mysterious traveler can visit any point in space and time.

Could have done with them stuck together, I reckon, although the spelling of traveler in the third one suggests an American source, even though it just lists DVDs.

So still a bit wobbly, but could be useful with a bit more smartness in the aggregation logic and a better web designer.

UPDATE: Stu tells me that a similar - and possibly better - service is available from Bleb. Thanks Stu!

It might seem at first, humble reader, from this delightful blog that I am a “thought leader” and “opinion former” of the highest order. In actual fact, I am very easily led.

Case in point: the Elgato turbo.264. I read reviews of it in MacFormat and Macworld and thought to myself “I need one of those!”

The reason for this is simple: Bastard, my PVR, takes forever to export stuff into a format that my iPod or Apple TV can cope with. I record The F-Word, it lasts an hour, and Bastard takes two or three hours to export it at a reasonable video quality. I don't especially want to be leaving my Mac on all night - not very environmentally friendly is it? - so anything that speeds the process up and reduces electricity consumption has to be good.

The Turbo.264 is what I need, apparently. At least, that's what I've been told.

Continue reading "Review: Turbo.264"