Film

• Doug Liman to direct film about Attica uprising
• Al Pacino to replace Robert De Niro on Son of No One
• BBC making a movie about Seb Coe and Steve Ovett
• Jeffrey Wright joins Duncan Jones' Source Code
• Gwyneth Paltrow joins Contagion

• Joanna Lumley, David Hyde Pierece and Mark Rylance to star in La Bête

British TV

• BBC to launch mobile phone apps
• Merlin gets an iPhone app…
• …as does Freeview
• One-stop video on demand service SeeSaw launches with BBC, C4 and Five content

• Pilot casting, including Scrubs' Donald Faison on The Odds
• Steven Spielberg's Nine Lives moves from SyFy to NBC after four years in limbo
• History Channel to make its own version of Top Gear?
• Better Off Ted's Jay Harrington joins Nathan vs Nurture
• Courtney Thorne-Smith to recur on Two and a Half Men
• The CW goes action with Nomads from Numb3rs producer Ken Sanzel
• NBC picks up Friends… with Benefits
• More pilot casting, including Primeval's James Murray on Chaos
• Eugene Levy joins Hitched
• Poppy Montgomery and Marc Blucas join True Blood
• Taryn Manning joins Hawaii Five-O
• Vampire Diaries, Gossip Girl and Supernatural get renewed
• Lost ratings down to 9.8m
• 24 hits series low
• Paul Blackthorne to recur on CSI: Miami
• Elisabetta Canalis to recur on Leverage

And if you don't watch downloads, why not?

FYI, I use both my Nintendo Wii and my iPhone to access the iPlayer and I use my Apple TV, iTunes and iPhone to purchase TV content, preferably in high def. But how about you?

As always, leave a comment with your answer or a link to your answer on your own blog.

So I have this thing called an Elgato Turbo.264 that plugs into my Mac. It's designed to speed up video conversion, which it does more or less: anything I've recorded on my EyeTV gets exported to my iPhone or AppleTV a whole lot quicker than without it, other things not so less. Still, it integrates nicely with Video Drive, which has been giving me problems of late with regular old QuickTime, so it's hard to do without.

Trouble is, it's having problems with other videos now, particularly AVIs.

For a big chunk of this week, I've been fighting to the death with an Elgato EyeTV Sat box. This is a nifty little gadget that lets you get Freesat on your Mac, including BBC HD in full high def quality, provided you

1. Live in the UK
2. Have a satellite dish and a spare lead from it somewhere
3. Have £180 or so

The full review is going to be in MacFormat issue 212, so you'll have to wait until then for my full review of it. However, one of the issues I had was actually tuning it to receive all the Freesat channels, since the auto-tune failed to pick up big chunks of them (including Channel 4, More4, E4, Film4, BBC3, BBC4, ITV2, ITV3 and ITV4 as well as their time-shifted siblings). Elgato swear this shouldn't be a problem, but it was.

Fortunately, after a bit of liaising with Elgato over the settings, I was able to get all the channels. Since Elgato doesn't seem to want to publish them on its web site according to my exchanges with them – and since MacFormat simply won't have the space to print all this – after the jump, all the settings an EyeTV Sat owner might need to get his or her box working properly.

I suspect I might get as many as 10 or even 20 hits on this page, but I figured it might be useful to some people. The rest of you? As you were.

Film

• Jason Lee and Michelle Trachtenberg join A Couple of Dicks
• Trailer for Soderbergh's The Informant, starring Matt Damon and Scott Bakula
• Bill Nighy to appear in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
• Trailer for Inglourious Basterds

Web TV

• Joost to quit serving content

British TV

• Alexander Armstrong and Martin Freeman to star in BBC4's Spectrum v BBC Micro drama Syntax Era
• QFS: Michael Grade supports top-slicing

US TV

• Chris Kattan joins ABC's forthcoming The Middle
• Tim Minear developing remake of Alien Nation for the Sci Fi Channel
• SoapNet picks up second series of Being Erica
• Hung most watched series premiere on HBO for two years
• ABC picks up Defying Gravity
• Castle's Castle to publish a book
• Liza Minnelli and Delta Burke to star in Lifetime's Dueling Divas
• Final Middleman episode to be performed at Comic-Con

I've only had a Wii for five months* and the option's been there for a year, apparently, but it's news to me that you can watch the BBC's iPlayer on the Wii, so I thought I'd belatedly pass the word.

I haven't tested it yet, and it's not as good quality as you can get on a PC, since the Wii has an old version of Flash, but all the same, much better to be able to watch it on your TV than huddled round a computer.

* Bought at my wife's insistence, I would point out, since games consoles and working from home don't mix unless you're a games journalist/professional games player

Channel 4 would like to apologise to you then, and point out it's made 4oD available to us as well now.

No really.

It's even made an advert about it.

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.

Fortunately, someone had already had a cable running round the place once, and had left all the tacks behind, so with just a couple of cable ties, I've managed to make said trailing cable almost entirely invisible.

And look, I have my line-up back:

And with decent signal: this means I get picture-in-picture, too: record one channel and watch another at the same time. Incidentally, note how, even though they're been fed by the same aerial, the two tuners have substantially different signal qualities.

Woo hoo. So now I have a decent, non breaking-up version of this week's Being Human, too. One thing to note: if you buy a signal splitter so that you can have two aerials coming out of one TV socket, check to see if you're getting male or female connections or else you'll find your cables won't work. Doh.

PS If by chance you also happen to buy a Heroes mousemat off eBay, be prepared: it might smell a bit.

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?

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.

• New Torchwood "twice as intense". So that would make it…

Film

• David Cronenberg to direct Tom Cruise and Denzel Washington in The Matarese Circle
• Christopher Nolan to direct Inception
• Sam Mendes to produce Hollywood version of ITV's Lost in Austen
• Steven Seagal wants to build a filmmaking industry in Costa Rica
• Samuel Bayer to direct Nightmare on Elm Street remake
• Chuck's Zachary Levi joins Chipmunks sequel
• John Malkovich joins Jonah Hex

Comic

• Batwoman to make a comeback

Theatre

• Omid Djalili to succeed Rowan Atkinson in Oliver!

Technology

• Apple readying iTunes streaming video service

British TV

• John Nettles leaving Midsomer Murders
• Moving Wallpaper launch date brought forward to end of month
• Hustle to return for sixth series
• Beautiful People gets a second series

Canadian TV

• Broadcasters' profits plummet  

US TV

• Dick Wolf wants to do a Muslim Law and Order
• Lots and lots of pilots
• Summer Glau to guest as herself on Big Bang Theory
• Alex O'Loughlin to guest on Criminal Minds
• Heroes and Fringe ratings slip a tad
• Trailer for season three of The Tudors [US only]

• Matt Smith to co-star with Eva Green in Womb

Awards

• Winners of the Elle awards

Film

• Meryl Streep, Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin to star in a comedy directed by Nancy Meyers
• Universal acquires rights to Spencer Quinn's Dog On It
• James Mangold to direct a legal thriller about an oil rig disaster
• Mickey Rourke to star in Walter Hill-directed hitman movie St Vincent
• New Watchmen TV spots
• Moneypenny and Q back for next Bond movie?
• McG trying to get Arnie into Terminator: Salvation

• The Shield's Michael Chiklis to launch comic book about Greek gods returning to the present-day Earth

Theatre

• Gipsy Kings' Zorro to close

British TV

• Beeb adding HD programmes to iTunes

US TV

• FX developing superhero series based on Powers
• Anne Heche to co-star in Hung
• Kelsey Grammer to direct Cybill Shepherd in Alligator Point pilot
• Two new characters for Gossip Girl
• Fox orders Outnumbered pilot
• Spike greenlights comedy Players
• NBC orders pilot of 100 Questions for Charlotte Payne
• Three pilots get directors
• Very special casting on Supernatural [spoilers]

• David Tennant to host Comic Relief
• Pics of the busted bus

Film

• Kung Fu Panda director to direct Masters of the Universe
• Brotherhood of the Rose to get adapted again
• Jeffrey Dean Morgan joins Hilary Swank in The Resident
• Emily Blunt out of Iron Man 2, into Gulliver's Travels?
• Get Smart sequel due by Spring 2010
• Puss in Boots spin-off from Shrek gets a writer
• Poster for State of Play

Art

• Turner landscape sold for £9.1m

• Sheila Hancock to star in Sister Act

British TV

• BBC to lead the push for universal broadband
• Five's VoD service now available to Mac and Linux users
• Morph gets a photoshoot for his 30th anniversary
• Martin Freeman and Joanna Page reunited for Q Pootle 5 animated pilot

US TV

• Lauren Graham pilot gets a green light
• CBS greenlights three new drama pilots
• Promo for Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles promises fresh start
• Life on Mars' ratings not good

123WebTV, the search engine for watching TV and movies, has released a number of free online gadgets which will make searching for and watching the best TV shows, sports highlights, movies and user-generated videos online a whole lot easier.

Users can visit www.123webtv.com/applications where they can install the applications including a Facebook app, iGoogle gadget, Mac Dashboard widget and Vista gadget.

The widgets allows users access to a wide range of TV shows, videos and channels available to UK audience. Channels include BBC, ITV and Channel 4, with the ability to browse by genre (e.g. sports, entertainment, music and news) and themes or search for specific content. Much of the content is free whilst other content is available by subscription or pay per download.

All applications can be found at: www.123webtv.com/applications

1. Facebook Application With the 123WebTV Facebook App
You can search and find TV shows, sports highlights, Film, and User Generated video direct from your Facebook profile or Facebook Page. You can also share the application with your friends. You need to be on Facebook to use this application.

2. iGoogle Gadget
Use the iGoogle Gadget to search and find TV shows, sports highlights, Film, and User Generated video direct from your Google home.

3. Mac Dashboard Widget
With the Mac Dashboard widget you can search and find TV shows, sports highlights, Film, and User Generated video direct from your Dashboard.

4. Windows Vista sidebar gadget
With the Windows Vista sidebar gadget you can search and find TV shows, sports highlights, Film, and User Generated video direct from your Sidebar.

5. Widget for your website or blog
Include the 123WebTV search widget on your website or blog for your users to easily search TV shows, sports highlights, Film, and User Generated video direct from your site.

I've not found the searching that good, but your mileage may vary.