Advice on network video players
 

Set-top boxes, that is. Something that will take a video file stored on the hard drive of a Windows PC, via ethernet, and play it out onto my TV.

I've been using the Xbox360 for the past few years, and it's decent. Occasionally has a/v sync problems on some files, but has worked well for the most part. Unfortunately, it doesn't work at all with the newer h.264 / MKV files which have become the scene standard, and WMP11 can be a real pain to work with even on good days, so it's time to upgrade.

Whatever I buy must have component output and a remote that does not suck. A lot of these boxes seem to be HDMI only, and a lot of them appear to have really horrid remotes. I don't really care one way or another whether it has an internal hard drive, wi-fi, or anything fancy. Also not interested in how well it works with online streaming services (Netflix, Hulu, Vudu, etc.)

I've been reading a lot of Amazon reviews, and pretty much every device out there seems to have mixed reviews. Some say they're awesome, some say they're garbage. Was hoping maybe someone here had some first-hand experience.

At present, I'm kind of leaning towards one of these two:

Western Digital TV Live Hub

Netgear NTV550

LG DP1W hands down, no questions asked.

I have Gigabit ethernet all over my house (Cat6 wiring, jacks and sockets) and I use two of them for the bedroom and living room. I stream everything from a Linux file server (music and movies).

It plays 1080p over Ethernet like it is on a local disk. Outputs HDMI flawlessly, and has SPDIF out (I use fiber to send the signal to a Sony surround processor then to my 5.1 speaker setup).

It also has WiFi, DLNA and 2-3 USB ports for flash drives etc.

It has played every single file I've thrown at it flawlessly, mpgs, AVIs, MP4s, Matroska, FLAC, every format you can think of. Absolutely no problems at all, hasn't given me ANY kind of grief or second doubt. I'm considering getting one for the kitchen as well.

I just can't recommend this player enough.

Nice looking box, though from what I can tell it does not appear to have ever been available in the US.

Oops, I had no idea. If you can't find one better or at least as good, let me know and I can mail you one.

Why not build something custom? MythTV is a nice frontend and you can mount SMB share over the network. Look at AMD E350 based mini-ITX boards. Something like that can be built for pretty cheap (under $300).

The LG I mentioned is ~$120.

Because I specifically need something with an analog component output in order to work with my TV.

The whole reason I started using the xBox in the first place was that it has a good-quality component out. Prior to this, I'd been using a standard PC as the player- the only problem was that no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't find a video card or converter box which produced a reasonable-quality component out, so I was stuck using the SVHS output of an old ATi card. It works, but on a 55" screen the quality leaves something to be desired.

It's not the software that's a problem. Windows Media Player would work just fine if I could make the physical hookup.



Thanks, but I doubt it would work with my TV. Wrong scanrate. (Unlike HDMI, component video still relies upon the old NTSC / PAL timing standards.)

Yeah, component output from computers is never quiet good. You don't have any other inputs on your TV besides component?

I bought a Logitech Revue off Craigslist about 3 months ago and have mixed feelings on it. Has to be the single most awesome remote control I've ever owned, though I feel it's lacking a few features to control items on my HT receiver such as source selection for example.

Being an audio nazi I'm not satisfied with anything unless it's encoded in as many channels humanly possible. Using a mid level Sony 7.1DTS receiver I experience a problem with my cable tv settopbox (SA8300HDC OCAP box) on some HD programming, but more specifically the commercial. A little background on my setup; Watching a show in HD/DTS on DiscoveryHD for example a good comfortable volume level of the receiver is 50. In two channel audio however, volume level of 50.. Let's just say:

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1335806308

Yeah, it'd blow the damn windows out on every house for miles. Back to that show on Discovery we're watching in DTS audio at volume level of 50- Drop to commercial break and let that DTS audio go 2 channel. What happens?

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1335806308

Very unsatisfactory. Like, Chernobyl unsatisfactory.

Now introduce the GoogleTV Logitech Revue into the mix. This device goes between your settop box and TV via HDMI cable, then has an optical audio output to the HT Receiver. In the menu settings for the box I discovered a setting to adjust the audio output, PCM or DTS. When DTS is selected it'll up convert everything from two channel into multi DTS which is AWESOME! That completely solves the problem of blasting my neighbors windows out at 3am when I'm bored and watching something recorded on DVR.

There has to be a trade off here. For all that good, something can't work right? Correct. There is a software bug in the Revue's Android build which causes the DTS audio feed to completely drop and you lose all audio input to the receiver. This can happen once a day, or every five minutes. Again, very unsatisfactory. Second issue is watching netflix the box appears to not have the hardware or software processing power (ability?) to up convert the audio AND decode the video, which renders netflix useless.

Logitech has identified these as software problems since their last update and it doesn't appear they have any plans to rectify the issue. My solution for this was to move the optical output back to my television and if I'm watching something off the DVR just to switch inputs on the HT receiver so audio comes from the DVR, otherwise just use 2 channel from the tele.

Good points:
USB ports, will accept usb accessories
Will mount USB 3TB external NTFS drive
Will play media from said 3TB external drive
Has built in DLNA for network media
Great interface
Web surf while watching TV
Controls your DVR
Allows you to find programming easier with an onscreen guide
Very cool remote control
itard/android WIFI remote app for phone/tablets
User friendly
IR Blaster with very long cord
Wired or wireless Ethernet available
Google Chrome
Many android apps work
Keyboard remote is very easy to use, even to type on
Remote takes 2 AA batteries
Remote is RF based, NOT IR
VERY good remote range
Unit power supply is "laptop style" instead of a "wall wart"
HDMI
Optical audio
Netflix interface is very user friendly, much improved from my LG Bluray or TV



Bad points:
Audio
Audio
Audio
Sometimes netflix won't reconnect
Runs 100% of the time
No VLC for Android (not Revue's fault, though.)
Sometimes Codec's are a major PITFA with media files
Unlimited skip commercial free Pandora app doesn't work
NO HULU


http://blog.logitech.com/wp-content/...evue_InUse.jpg


Overall I believe this device was worth $85.00 on the used. This unit does leave a lot to be desired, but I've found myself not using the cable companies set top remote any longer because of how convenient the keyboard remote is. It will play a few media files that my TV won't recognize audio on which is a plus.

Joe's TV is an ancient rear projection unit that he's had for years. He has posted about it before.

Joe, treat yourself to a new plasma.

Yes. I have analog composite and S-video.

I do not have HDMI, DVI, VGA, or any other "computer-style" input. If I did, I'd have the PC hooked up to that and I'd never have bothered with an external media player in the first place.



This device is HDMI only.

Thus, it fails.



I honestly just don't like the image quality of the LCD or plasma displays as compared to my CRT unit. They're improving, but I've still never seen one that exhibited no motion artifacts at all when confronted with source material that is less than optimal (eg, a divx recording of an old NTSC analog tv show).

You should move one more time Joe and stick to your saying of never moving the giant CRT again. This way you are forced to buy a new, slightly worse picture TV.

I've moved this damned thing seven times so far since I purchased it new in 2000. And despite my griping about it, I will probably continue lugging it around until the particleboard cabinet simply disintegrates (and even then, I'll probably be tempted to build a new cabinet for it out of plywood.)

I just don't understand why the manufacturers of LCD and Plasma sets can't comprehend one simple concept: Digitize the incoming image, and then set the pixels on the screen to match. Don't try and perform a bunch of fancy motion compensation, framerate multiplication, interpolation, etc. Just display the damn image.

My CRT set does this quite nicely. It looks at the analog values coming in through the component port, and uses them to directly drive the tubes in real-time. There is no buffering, no motion compensation, no noise reduction, no attempt to alter or manipulate the image in any way. It just paints the image onto the screen.

And yeah, I understand that things a bit more complex when taking an analog signal at one resolution and displaying it on a fixed-pitch screen at a different resolution. But computer monitors seem to be able to handle this task just fine. I've got two very cheap, five year old Hanns-G LCD screens sitting on my desk right now, both being fed an ANALOG signal (VGA), and neither one looks like crap. I can even set my video card to a non-native resolution, and apart from just a tiny bit of fuzziness on text, they still look great. No dot-crawl, no blocking, no motion artifacts, no color artifacts.

So why in bloody hell can't anybody manufacture a "TV" that works the same way? That's all I want, really. I want a large (55-60") display that behaves exactly like an LCD computer monitor. You can omit the tuner, you can omit the speakers, I don't even need a remote control, much less an integrated web browser. Just sell me a piece of glass (or plastic) that faithfully reproduces whatever image I feed into it.

How can this possibly be difficult?

My $600 50" LG plasma does this...I don't have the problem you describe.

Come on Joe, get out of the stone age!! The picture quality on my 2 year old 50" LG Plasma is great and only cost $850 2 years ago.

As an undocumented feature, my LG Plasma also does this, but frankly the user interface sucks.

If you are willing to put in a good bit of effort, it might be possible to still find one of the old original PS3 that still have Linux support. Then you should be able install mythTV on it and get have it work with most media formats. This assumes though that those codecs were ported to the PS3 architecture, which I honestly have no clue about.

I've got a newer (6 month old) LG Smart TV in 55" and 240hz (I know, you don't like frame rate multiplication)

I get so many compliments from people on the clarity of the picture, it's ridiculous - usually the compliments aren't necessarily meant as compliments, but instead are questions: "How did you get the picture to look so...real?"

I didn't do anything really, it's the TV that did it.

In addition, the newer LG Smart TVs include support for "Plex" (www.plexapp.com) - which is literally the media sharing solution you're looking for. I burn my DVD / Blu-Ray collection to my desktop computer (I've been using .MKV files) and then turn on my TV to watch them over my home network. LGs Smart TVs also include a second TV remote that works like a wii controller (It also very simple in that it only has like 8 buttons on it). Point at the TV and get a cursor, control the cursor simply by pointing the remote. This feature works so well for me that I've put the primary TV remote in a drawer, and never even consider pulling it out anymore.

I've been using a Western Digital WD TV Live to stream 720p and 1080p mkvs wirelessly and it's been working awesome.

The Western Digital TV Live Hub is pretty much the same thing minus the wifi, but plus a 1TB drive and component outputs.

The remote is nothing to scream about but works fine for navigating through my movies/tv shows and pressing play/pause. What else do you need it to do anyways?

I've read about people having issues like it not detecting the network computers properly, etc. but I have had no problems at all. It can pull dvd covers and info off the web, but I could care less about that. All I wanted it to do is play mkvs on my projector without having to use a htpc and that's what it does perfectly. I haven't turned on the htpc in months and have recently moved it off the rack and into the shed...

My new Samsung 65" plasma, has the functionality to play mkvs built-in and works just as well as the standalone WD TV box. I stream 3D 1080p movies to it. Actually, the free Samsung bluray player (BD-D5500) that came with the plasma can pretty much do the same thing as the WD TV Live and has component outputs too.

--Ferdi

andSo, what did you have to do / change / enable to cause the set to just pass video straight through? Because literally every single Plasma and LCD display I have ever seen suffered from various artifacts when displaying an image that was either low-quality at the source or contained elements such as smoke / fog / subtle color gradients.




Not really interested in a science-fair project at this point. I just want a box to sit there and work with no tinkering.



Yeah, the current crop of LCDs do look quite good when they are fed high-quality source material, such as a BluRay disc or a realtime HD stream (OTA or cable.)

Where I've always seen them fall apart is when presented with source material which is fuzzy, grainy, soft, or otherwise imperfect. Try playing a VHS tape into one. (No, I'm not literally using VHS tape, but that's representative of the sort of source material that seems to cause them the most problems.)




Thank you, that's the sort of feedback I've been looking for.

I've seen the "WD TV Live" box, and unfortunately it is HDMI-only. They used to have a "Plus" version of it that included component, but it's been gone for a while. Why they force you to upgrade to something with a built-in hard drive just to get an analog output eludes me, but such is life...


Well that's interesting.

I've never actually touched a BluRay player (the concept of physical media is obsolete) so I've not really paid attention to the featureset of such devices. I had no idea that they were capable of network playback. This is something I'll have to take a look at. I may become the first person in history to willingly purchase a Bluray player and never actually put a disc into it.

I did nothing. I guess being on the low end of the plasma TV range, it doesn't have any of these "brilliant" features.

It's going to be more difficult to find something with component outputs, after HDCP caught on, Component outputs pretty much went the way of the Sony Beta.

Yeah, I'm finding that out as I look through the selection of available units.

All of them still seem to offer composite (?!?) but none with component. What the heck is up with that?

The WD box is looking like the answer.

composite is analog, component is digital. HDMI carries the same video signal as component, but HDMI can be secured with HDCP. Component cannot be secured. The media industry has decided that it doesn't want to make it possible for you to play their hi-definition content over unsecured connections, and as such, the labels decided that they weren't going to support hi-definition playback through unsecured methods. As a result, labels began adopting the HDCP standard for their blu-ray disks. An HDCP blu-ray will only work in an HDCP Compliant blu-ray player, and an HDCP Blu-ray player will only output video to an HDCP compliant TV. (Here's a trick, connect an old computer monitor to your computer video card, then load up a blu-ray video into your computer and try to play it on the old monitor - guess what: not only will the video not work, but chances are, your monitor will display something along the lines of "display does not support secure content".

Not only are blu-ray movies affected; PS3 content, PC games, your cable box, and even your satellite TV reciever are HDCP compliant if they output to HDMI. Chances are: if they also output to component, you're only getting a 720 signal through the component connection...at best.

How does HDCP work?
Companies that want to produce HDCP compatible displays get the little security box and are given a code from the HDCP standards people for their little box. The display output (the blu-ray player/cable box/video card/etc.) pings the display for its model-unique code on connection. If the display returns a valid code, the player then begins streaming video signal to the display. If at any time the connection is broken, the output will wait until it again receives a valid HDCP code from another display.

To get valid HDCP codes, a manufacturer has to follow certain rules, such as: all HDCP capable devices must frustrate attempts to hack the encrypted signal. In addition, the HDCP Standards people have the ability to issue revocations on their HDCP security codes if they find that a manufacturer isn't following the guidelines. Basically all new blu-ray disks have a "disable code" sector, and if you're a rogue manufacturer your device's codes will get applied to the disable code sector. Once a device reads the disable code, it will add that code to it's "do not play" list, and all displays with that HDCP code will no longer work with the player. (I also believe that the player will send a sort of "self-destruct" signal to the display, permanently rendering it useless for HDCP playback, but don't quote me on that)

This makes media labels happy, because you can't copy their hi-definition content and share it across the internet (or so they want you to think - fukcing retards).

Side note: Devices which can record content cannot receive HDCP signals. Secondary note: your home DVR does not actually recieve an HDCP signal - it recieves a signal which is scrambled by your provider, and then stored (under a different type of encryption) to an internal hard drive. The HDCP encryption only ever happens when your receiver *outputs* the video. The same can be said for the Playstation 3 - though people who have worked a lot with PS3 components know that the PS3 used to have an unencrypted hard drive, which was then encrypted specific to the PS3s serial number through a system update - again this was done for copy protection.

So: no recording your favorite TV series onto computer hard drive/BD-R disks for future playback - you can record them to your DVR, and then when your DVR is full, you can delete them - that's all the recording capacity you get.

How do you get around these problems?
As you can tell, I've reasearched the issue at least a little bit, and I've only found one solution to the problem, though I haven't found that I needed to buy one. I won't go into details, but you can read more here:

Buy an HDFury III
www.hdfury.com

In further news, sometime in 2010/2011, someone cracked the algorythm for HDCP codes; basically, this means that they could come up with HDCP codes and create HDCP compliant recorders/strippers to the masses. The HDCP revocation method provides a "feel-good" to the media, but there are two easy workarounds to HDCP Revocation: 1: if you can come up with your own HDCP codes, then you can assign a unique HDCP code to every single serial number, which would make it completely impossible for the HDCP people to do anything about it. (Manufacturers are generally granted only one HDCP code for an entire model line, or multiple models within the same family, which means that one or few HDCP revocations would normally be all that is needed to eliminate rogue devices)

The second option, of course, is to ID the HDCP code found in a popular manufacturer's displays. If, for instance, I grabbed an LG-owned HDCP code and provided recording devices with LGs code, the HDCP people would have 2 options:
1. Do nothing. To the masses, "doing nothing" won't make a difference.
2. Revoke LGs HDCP code. LG didn't do anything wrong, so it wouldn't make sense to punish them; furthermore, it would completely undermine the legitimacy of HDCP, as tens of thousands of consumers would have expensive TVs which just stopped working, at no fault of their own or their manufacturer. Consumers would probably band together, get with lawmakers, and make HDCP (or revokation) illegal. For the HDCP people, this is the end of their careers.

No, it is not.

Component video, in the purest sense, simply means that the three primary color signals (or some mathematical derivation thereof) are carried separately, rather than being modulated together on a carrier, thus preserving their fidelity and preventing color artifacts (eg, dot-crawl) which invariably occur with phase-modulated composite color.

There are two common forms of discrete component video interface in wide use today. Most of us are familiar with the first one by a different name: VGA. This standard was predominant in computing from the early 1990s until just very recently, having been superseded by a combination of DVI-D, HDMI, DisplayPort, and other digital technologies. In the VGA system, red, green and blue are represented by analog voltages carried on three separate wires, where each voltage corresponds directly to the intensity of that particular color for whichever pixel is being scanned at any given instant. Horizontal and vertical sync are carried on two other wires.

Within the domain of "consumer video" (eg, television, home theater), the phrase Component Video usually refers to an analog standard defined by CEA-770.3, in which the three discrete wires are used, which represent Y(Luma, or total brightness), PB (B-Y, or the difference between Luma and Blue) and PR (R-Y, or the difference between Luma and Red.) Sync is achieved by out-of-bounds voltages overlaid on the Y wire during the blanking intervals, when it is not being used to carry valid video information. (This is similar to the Sync-on-Green RGB systems used by SGI and Sun.)

This system is slightly more complex than pure RGB, however it has the advantage of decreasing the total bandwidth required to carry the signal as compared to a pure RGB stream of the same resolution and fidelity, while still achieving complete color separation at the far end. It is, in essence, a form of lossless analog compression, which dates back to 1982 and the release of Sony's professional-grade Betacam videocassette standard.


Now, it is certainly possible to use a component encoding process in any digital carrier to achieve the same bandwidth economy as described above, and for the same reasons. Such schemes are typically referred to as YCBCR to distinguish them from their analog counterpart, and they represent only one of many possible encoding schemes which can be utilized within any common digital interface. More importantly, however, the term "Component Video" is almost never used within the consumer marketplace to refer to any digital interface, regardless of the content of the data which it is carrying, as unlike the analog standard known as "Component Video", in the digital domain it does not describe any specific physical interface.




No, it does not. An HDMI interface carries a stream of ones and zeroes. A component video interface carries three discrete analog signals.



Any digital video stream, including a TCP/IP stream, can be secured with HDCP.



Seriously? It's a $250 box that converts HDMI to component. And I'd still need to come up with an HDMI stream to feed into it. There are far simpler (and cheaper) solutions available.




So, that's one enthusiastic vote for a box which I can't get in the states, one enthusiastic vote for the WD box, and one extremely enthusiastic vote for a solution which is irrelevant to my needs.

Leaning in the WD direction.

I find my Roku 2 pretty good for the price of 50 bucks... HMDI, wireless, 1080p and pretty reliable.

Have you tried something like Tversity instead of WMP?

Tversity "knows" what your box supports natively and will stream it the same as WMP. It will also demux/transcode if necessary. I've used it to watch 1080P mkv files without issue on my PS3. Only drawback would be the PC running the Tversity has to be somewhat capable to transcode large files.

Might be worth a try since it's free. . .

I like my Roku too, but it's not a network video player.

So I picked up the Western Digital player over the weekend. So far, I'm pretty happy with it. It's not perfect, but it does what I need.

Pros:

• It seems to play everything. AVI, MP4, MKV... Apart from .TS files (which are essentially unplayable in general) I haven't found a single file that it can't digest. This is a massive improvement over the Xbox, and was my #1 selection criteria. So Mission Accomplished on that.

• Simplicity! No more having to dick around with Windows Media Player library sharing on the host PC. This box just drills right down into the file system of the media server PC and shows it to you as you'd expect: in a traditional file / folder view. Good bye WMP!

• It can output Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS. The Xbox couldn't do this- everything got downsampled to Dolby Surround at best, despite the fact that I was using the optical output.

• Audio / Video sync is perfect. The Xbox had a tendency to drift out of sync on certain files, mostly older, highly-compressed and poor quality Divx content. I ѕhit you not when I say that it sometimes got as far as 5-6 seconds out of sync. I haven't seen a single occurring of this yet with the new box, and I've been deliberately playing some of the older, crappier content that I have to test for this.

• 720 / 1080 is no problem whatsoever. The Xbox would routinely stutter when playing back high-bitrate HD content. I've owned this TV for 12 years, and this is the first time I've been able to reliably play non-OTA HD content on it. It finally looks every bit as good as it did in the store demo back in 2000 when I bought it. (Now it really blows LCD / Plasma displays out of the water.)

• It can reliably do FF / RW on any media. The Xbox was really flaky about this, particularly in RW- it would alternate between sticking in one spot for several seconds and then leaping backwards in massive chunks. With the WD, the video display is still quite choppy in RW, but the "scroll bar" (time counter) at the bottom of the screen operates smoothly and accurately at all speeds forwards and backwards.

• It's quiet. Even without a hard drive, the fans in the Xbox were always audible. There are no fans in the WD box, and you have to literally press your ear against it to hear the hard drive. The media server itself (which is as quiet as I could make it) is louder than the WD box.

Cons:

• The UI could be better. It's a bit sluggish to respond to keypresses, and it's harder to navigate the menus quickly as a result. In particular, scrolling through massive lists is a chore. With the Xbox, you could just hold down the "PgDn" button and it would rapidly scroll through folders containing hundreds of files, stopping the instant you released the button. With this, you have to hit the PgDn button over and over and over again, and because of the aforementioned lag, I sometimes overshoot by a page or two.

• The remote is crap. Seriously, this was the best thing about the Xbox, and it's the worst thing about the WD. The buttons on the Xbox remote were wonderfully laid out, and were all different shapes and sizes and contours and orientations, such that it was easy to operate by feel alone. And it was backlit as well, just in case you couldn't find the button you were looking for. On the WD remote, the keys are all laid out in a square grid, they're all perfectly flat, and they are all roughly the same shape and size. Difficult to operate by feel alone, and it's not backlit either. They could have at least put a raised bump on the play / pause button to distinguish it from the "Stop and immediately exit to the main menu" button that's right above to it.

• It contains a hard drive. Ok, it's a minor gripe, but seriously, why does it need to have a hard drive in it? If it were a big hard drive then maybe I could de-commission my media server PC and use it exclusively, but it's only 1 TB, so it's pretty much useless.

• Certain of the software features are a tad wacky. Like the "Sync to Network" function, which was enabled by default. As soon as I configured it on the network and pointed it to the shared volume on the media server PC, it immediately started copying the entire contents of the media server's media drive onto itself. Stopping this process, clearing the data, and disabling the feature required a bit of searching through the manual. I'd think that, by default, the "fill myself entirely to capacity with duplicate copies of data that already exists on the dedicated server that is standing six inches away form me" option should be disabled.

All in all, I'm pretty happy. Until my trusty ole' triple-CRT projector finally ѕhits the bed and forces me to downgrade to a modern TV with an HDMI / VGA input, I do believe that this box will do nicely.

now that Joe is satisfied and has his analog YPbPr solution, what would you all recommend for the same device for a TV that can use HDMI?

The WD is still interesting since it has the ability to send video out to other monitors.

See my post.

Well, if you have HDMI I'd certainly recommend the cheaper of the WD units as opposed to the one I have, presuming that you don't need the 1TB internal drive. That and the Component out seems to be the only difference, and I consider the hard drive to be a liability rather than a benefit.

Based on the sluggishness of the UI and the crappy remote, I have a hard time believing that the WD is the absolute best solution available, although I'm far from dis-satisfied with it. It simply happened to be the best one I would find which had Component out.


Huh?

oh
my bad
it streams to DNLA devices. and so does my NAS.

just learned that this thing does TUNE IN radio.

Can you check if it will play "SOMA FM Indie Pop Rocks" station, Joe? That may solidify that it is the box to go with.

Also I see there are hacked firmwares out there for it. Nerds.

TL;DR

Just picked up a WD TV Live for $99 new (non refurb) and it does everything. Plays 1080p mkv dts files was the biggest want and it does it over wireless from my slow nas with only about 3 sec of dead air before play back starts.

Gf says get a apple 2 and jail brake it.

It shows up in the list, though for some reason I'm not getting any audio on that channel. Not sure if I'm doing it right.

You really should be listening to a local radio station, though. This internet radio thing is just a part of the international communist conspiracy designed to sap and impurify your precious bodily fluids.



Yeah, all in all I'm pretty happy with mine.

AppleTV hath not component video output. This is most failing.

The station is formerly local and run by a close friend of my sister.

I remain impure.

I meant to re-check this last night, but I got hung up fiddling with the fitment of the new rear wheel to the chassis. It's rubbing the brake caliper, so I've got a bit of light fabrication to do.

While I was working on this in the living room, I was watching an old Modern Marvels show about the evolution of modern candy production. Fascinating stuff (seriously.) Still quite happy with the WD box, and I finally figured out a trick with the remote. There is one button on it (the "enter" button in the middle of the d-pad section) which has a different tactile presentation from all the others- its surface is slightly domed, and thus it can be used as a "home" button to determine the relative positions of the other common buttons. Play/pause, for instance, is two above the home key, and then RW & FF are immediately to the left and right of that.

And you're still a communist bastard.