April 2006 Archives

I have temporarily taken down the meedio setup. Unfortunately it doubled my monthly bandwidth usage in one week, I hit about 80% for the month, and am not currently willing to pay for more bandwidth, as keeping my blog online is more important.

I don't have a problem keeping it online, but will have to search for some other solutions. I may mirror it at a couple of different places, and then re-link to it.

I went ahead and installed it on my bedroom pc and started in. I was able to get the meedio configure application to recognize yahoo as the default app thanks to some directions posted on the meedio forums. I pulled one of my three tv tuners out of the living room and installed it. No go. Yahoo's TV Tuner wizard says that it is an unsupported tuner, even though the WinTV PVR-USB 2 is in the list of only five tuners that it supports. Damn.

For the time being I am using BeyondTV again. Natively supports my tuner, AND the remote. Unfortunately, BTV and Meedio (or Yahoo GO) won't use the IR Remote at the same time, Meedio uses a plugin and needs the IR program closed, and BTV uses the Hauppauge IR program.

I may swap out remotes later in the week. I have other shit that I need to do though, so it may be a few days before I get around to that.

I can think of easier ways to get laid, but what the hell. Looks like he is currently at 1,653,269 hits. Not too much longer to go. Hehe, his girlfriend is going to be pissed.

Help Win This Bet

Thanks to Acidman for the link

UPDATE

Three hours, 12 minutes later, and the guy is up to 2,276,462.

Have fun dude.

Yahoo! Go for TV was released in the last 24 hours, so I went ahead and downloaded it to check it out. It is definately Meedio in disguise, with a bunch of missing stuff.

I am fairly biased towards my review, as I paid for Meedio, and then paid for the "pro" version later, with the hopes that the TV portion would eventually be improved to where I could replace BTV with it. No such luck. BeyondTV always kicked Meedio's ass as far as PVR capabilities, and supported hardware. Yahoo! Go is free, so that is a bonus, but as a paying user of Meedio, it ticks me off. Not that I regret it. I got what I paid for, a fully functional front-end that my family could use with a single remote. It is great for watching movies, viewing pictures, and listening to music.

Anyway, on to Yahoo! Go.

It was a fairly small download compared to some others I have checked out at 9mb. Quick and easy install, then runs the setup wizard. You enter your yahoo username if you have one. I don't know what happens if you don't, so can't say much there, as I do. It prompts you the locations of your pictures, music, and videos. Since I don't have any TV tuners in my test system (my desktop), there was nothing for me to set up there.

Once the install was finished, I eagerly started the app. It comes up with a nice clean theme, purple in color. Nice, my favorite. There are seven menu options. I will go through each in turn.

First there is movies. Once you have selected a menu option, the right hand side brings up several more. Under movies, there are Top Box Office, Today's Features, My Theaters, Local Theaters, and DVD Player. Top Box Office is a detailed listing of what is currently out in the theaters with synopsis, trailers, and cast listings. This is kind of a nice feature. Today's features looks to be a listing of upcoming theater releases, with the same kind of stuff as Top Box Office. My theaters probably gives you a list of your favorite theaters IF you have set them up on your yahoo account. Since I use Fandango anyway, this was pretty much useless to me. Local theaters predictably gives a listing of...Local Theaters!!. Damn. It also gives you a list of movies that are currently playing there, and you can get to the same Deatailed listing that is in Top Box Office. DVD player takes you into what I guess is the stock Meedio internal DVD player. Since I use an external program for this (Theatertek), this option was pretty useless. All in all, the entire movies menu section was pretty useless to me. No way to set up my DVD software, no way to add in my own movies (I have about 250 ripped to my hard drive, or recorded from BeyondTV).

The next option is Music. Ok, here are the guts to my HTPC system. If it weren't for music (I have about 9000 mp3's) I would just run BeyondTV and be done with it. In the music menu, we have several options. First is LAUNCHkast. This is an extremely well done module. I have used shoutcast with Meedio, and set up internet radio through it, but this kicks ass. Next is Music Videos. Just the crap that is online at Yahoo though. No way to set it up for local music videos that I may have downloaded from itunes, or from bands websites. If I want to see crappy music videos, I can tune to MTV or VH1. Next is "On your PC". This gives an explorer-like view of your music directory. I have all of my music arranged in \Artist\Album directories, so it makes it easy to traverse. Once you select "On your PC", it brings up the artist listing, and there is a menu option to "play all". It does not work. You actually have to drill down into the Album directory so that the actual music files show up on the screen in order to select tracks, at which point you are thrown into the Now Playing screen (also a default Meedio behavior). The music player is ok, but there are no options to play protected itunes music, I was not able to find any way to add multiple albums or artists to my playlist, and I hate the way that you have to traverse it. If I want to fool around with explorer, I will open explorer and increase the fucking font size. The next two options are CD player (pretty obvious what this does) and Now Playing. No options in now playing to launch any kind of eye candy, or to look at lyrics.

Next is Photos. There are four options in this menu. First is My Yahoo! Photos. Fine if you have your stuff uploaded to Yahoo Photos. I don't. I use flickr, or my own web site. Next is Shared Yahoo Photos. It prompts you to enter the Yahoo ID of a friend, then you get to see the photos. Next is pretty cool. Flickr. The last things I want to look at is 500,000 flickr photos. No way to search for a particular flickr account, or even set up my own (which oh, by the way, yahoo DOES own, and my yahoo account is LINKED to). Good idea, shitty result. Last option is "On my PC". Decent photo viewer to show off your My Pictures stuff to company. From past experience, just make sure that you only keep your final edited pics here. Keep the crap somewhere else, otherwise you end up showing off your upside-down sideways, shitty pictures of body parts that you don't want your mom to see. Oh, wait, that was a different day.

Next is the TV option. Since I don't have a TV tuner in my box, this shouldn't even show up in the fucking menu. Since it does, I checked it out. Each screen under this menu just tells you that TV is not currently configured. No shit. If I wanted to see this, I would have configured it.

Next is Videos (as opposed to movies?). Why not just keep this under the movies menu, or combine the two of them. First option is Featured videos. Short trailers and clips of TV shows. Watch the damn commercial instead. Next is Top Web Searches (The Most Sought after Videos). Need I say that this is crap. Actually it's not all that bad. User uploaded videos to yahoo. Next is Search. Search for videos on Yahoo. Ok, pretty self-explanatory. Last is On My PC. During setup, you are given the option to specify the default video directory. Since I have over a TB in about eight different drives and directories across my network, this just pissed me off. It played the wmv's fine, but since half of my stuff is ripped DVDs that have been compressed, it wouldn't do anything at all with these. Damn, that sucked.

Next option is settings. No way to change ANY of the settings in Yahoo! Go TV.

Bottom of the list is Exit, which I did, right after going through everything.

Pretty much what I expected from a beta version. It's nicely put together, with most of the work leaning heavily towards the online experience, which I expected considering that it is yahoo. It shows a lot of promise. Enough that I will keep it on here, and upgrade to the next beta. Since I have a running version of Meedio on here too, I was able to hack it somewhat, and try out the yahoo modules in it. No go with that. There is also no weather module, which sucks. The stuff that is good really rocks, but for the most part, I found it pretty much useless. On one hand, it is free, which is nice, AND it may prompt snapstream to fix the problems that it has with the crappy Beyond Media so that it doesn't lose any customers. Yahoo has enough pull, and money, to make this a pretty decent software if it wants to.

If you are not into HA and HTPC's and have actually made it this far and still don't know what the fuck I am talking about, don't worry about it. Mainly I am just blowing off steam, and getting a post in :)

The guys at Meedio have made out pretty well. Yahoo has bought the technology, if not the actual Meedio product. Kind of cool for Pablo and the gang. Since the deal with Yahoo, Meedio is no longer available for download, althought he message forums are still up. I have made the most recent setup available here at least for awhile. I plan on sticking with it as my media front-end, at least until something better comes along.

UPDATE

I have taken the file offline because it was sucking up all of my bandwidth due to other sites leeching instead of putting it on their servers. Thanks.