Who cares?

iTunes Match

2012-01-12T17:42:00.000+01:00

So, in late 1999 I started to rip my CDs onto my computer, because I just hated to always search an album, put the case somewhere, find it back later etc. I just hated handling the hardware.
Having just migrated that time to GNU/Linux, I payed attention to the different licence issues and patents, and decided to use the Ogg/Vorbis format for my music instead of MP3.

In the following years, it was no issue at all to find a player that could handle that format on PCs, regardless of the operating system. However, for portables it was much more hard to find. Especially as I did not want an extra gear but wanted to use my mobile phone as a player.
I tried several software on Windows CE and Symbian and to some degree I got it working, but often the players being capable of supporting Ogg/Vorbis were not so good in regards of ergonomics.

Later, I purchased a Cowon D2 dedicated player, along with fine Sure (and later Klipsch) in-ear phones. It was great quality and a very well player, the audio quality was just superb.

But then came streaming...

I got interested in that UPnP/DLNA stuff and then the mess really began. On the server-side (PC/NAS), it went fine for the most part, except that some UPnP servers just filtered Ogg/Vorbis as it is just not part of the specs... so my music was just not offered for streaming in my network.
Even worse it was on the player front. On a laptop no issues with that, everything that was accessible just played - but other mobile clients just failed to know the codecs - video and audio was just bad and it was not really a matter which platform it was - neither iOS (on the iPhone 3GS that time) nor Android really supported it very fine (depends on the device and Android flavour - with Cyanogenmod 7.1 I got it though later on).

I tried with server-side transcoding, but it turned out that it really took too long and most of the UPnP/D
LNA servers that provided transcoding on the fly to the format the client supported failed in other disciplines or were just too complicated to set up.

By the way, the most annoying thing is that many UPnP servers just do not offer to specify separate locations for music, video and fotos, they just scan the HDD or a base folder and categorised it. Problem is with that, that all my albums also contain the cover art as a picture file (e.g. cover.jpeg) - which polluted my fotos folder then when viewed per UPnP... As it turned out, I now use XBMC for being UPnP server and renderer. The reason is: XBMC is one of the greatest media centers with great music/video database support (including artworks, bio, critics etc.) and knows many formats through the usage of libraries such as ffmpeg.
Additionally, it is one of the rare solutions offering to be UPnP/DLNA renderer and source at the same time. Bt the biggest advantage is that, once you configured your media to use the database mode, it is offered in the same great way via streaming. So, when accessing the XBMC via UPnP on, say, via my mobile, I have the same good separation and navigation as on XBMC locally - just great!

However, transcoding is still hard and also not really suitable on my Atom-powered HTPC. So, for my music, I decided to convert all my stuff from Ogg/Vorbis to MP3 with quite high quality settings.

To my regret, it turned out later on, that now streaming went just well with all my clients, but for some music the audio quality just dropped clearly - having undergone a double encoding (first, from CD to Ogg, then from Ogg to MP3).

Problem!

What to do now? Leave streaming and revert to my Ogg/Vorbis collection? Rip all my CDs again? Spent the money and buy everything again from Amazon or whatever MP3 store?

No, too expensive, too time consuming.

Using a Music streaming service? Possible, but the problem is that I often have no internet access (e.g. at work where I use music most) and thus cannot use streaming.
Okay, some of the services offer also conditional downloading similar to podcasting, but... I want to hear music that I already "own" and do not want to pay a monthly fee of about EUR 10 and handle the downloads between devices. Which is really inexpensive if you use it like most of the people do... ;) But for me, as said, paying that much money per month was just too expensive for just listening to my existing and old collection.
Especially, as in Europe we really are in stone-age with those services - no big competition like in the USA (not to mention video and TV offers... no Hulu, no Netflix, no Amazon whatever).

So, then there was iTunes Match! Great! A service offering to replace existing music on my HDD with the DRM-free and high quality AAC version!
It works that way, that you pay Apple (and GEMA) almost 25 bucks a year (that is much less per year than I would pay for the others). In turn, iTunes tries to match my local music with the iTunes Store music and replaces it as if I would have bought it via iTunes. For all music that cannot be found, it just uploads these files to the iCloud as if it was there as well.
If I now loose my music due to a HDD crash and loss of backups, I still have my music downloadable from the cloud.
I just tried it today, but so far most from my 24 GB music was found on iTunes and was replaced. I can also now "sync" my music with my iPhone 4S and other boxes - much simler than with the previous wired and wireless iTunes sync options - which were (from my point of view) horrible.

On the Mac/PC, I can now decide whether to stream or download parts of the collection or everything. That way, XBMC still can access my music even without an iTunes plugin.

Let us see how it works in the long term, I will report if there is something notable!

Euroflugtag (4-7. August 2011) in Niederkassel-Rheidt bei Bonn

2011-08-05T23:16:00.000+02:00

Jetzt am Wochenende ist in Rheidt der Euroflugtag 2011. Weitere Infos gibt es auf der Euroflugtag-Website des Aero Club Rheidt.

Star Wars op kölsch 9 - Et ärm Dier

2011-07-09T00:48:00.000+02:00

Wach auf, Megalon!

2010-10-26T21:39:00.000+02:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Drt0FU988Q&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Broken Comedy Offiziell - Pussycat Prolls feat. $cheiß-T - Köln Porz (Ha...

2010-08-05T22:21:00.000+02:00

Arcade racing game... a bit, uhm, different

2010-08-05T12:30:00.000+02:00

http://www.geek.com/articles/games/wipeout-recreated-with-an-rc-car-and-lots-of-cardboard-2010084/

Moon

2010-07-17T02:54:00.000+02:00

http://www.gamona.de/kino-dvd/moon,filmkritik-pc:article,1724435.html

Ui, mal wieder ein "Raumschiff-Film" ;-)

Last mission for Atlantis. Good luck!

2010-05-14T22:23:00.001+02:00

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/videogallery/index.html?media_id=13894434

TomTom Darth Vader Viral Campaign Video

2010-05-06T23:26:00.001+02:00

The Empire Strikes Back:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_K-iNnuHXk&feature=youtube_gdata

Well, have a Navigon though...

yaVDR

2010-03-24T21:58:00.001+01:00

Whooho!?!! Finally a dream team for a HTPC - VDR and XBMC combined in
a single GNU/Linux (Ubuntu in this case) distri: http://yavdr.org -
still have to test it though, but looks promising!!!

Greetings,
Timo

(via mobile phone)

A must see

2010-02-10T22:02:00.000+01:00

STS-130 Launch: http://www.youtube.com/v/W-aDSv494v4?f=user_uploads&app=youtube_gdata

Only three Shuttle Launches left... :(

Keyboard and mouse emulation with iPhone or iPod

2010-01-31T19:29:00.001+01:00

Ja, that is a cool thingy! I have quite some trouble with my Bluetooth wireless keyboard that I use for my HTPC - regardless of using Windows or Ubuntu GNU/Linux, each system start I have to setup that keyoard again and have to use another keyboard in order to do so first... That sucks. As both OS' are affected, I guess it has more to do with the very keyboard instead of a system setting that I missed. Who knows, tips are welcome.

But, there is hope already! Having an iPhone and browsing the App Store recently, I discovered Logitech's Touch Mouse application. This is an application suite that allows you to use the iPhone's touch screen as a remote mouse and keyboard. This is done through WLAN, the Touch Mouse app on the iPhone connects through the local net to an according server application installed on the PC.

And this works surpisingly well with quite low latency - mouse and keyboard events are instantly there. Of course this is not an option for power users, but for quickly doing something this is absolutely fine.

This works on a computer running Mac OS X or Windows (XP upwards) and is for free. Find the app in the appstore, while the server application can be downloaded on the Logitech website.

The app provides up to three mouse buttons and a simplified keyboard (e.g. there are no cursor keys present), but it provides also landscape mode and when having the keyboard enabled, the mouse can still be used on the same screen in parallel but with a smaller canvas. Here is a short Youtube video showing the application

HD works now...

2009-11-30T19:55:00.000+01:00

Strike! Got HD now working. Have a HD ready TV, so I have 720p. I searched the web for a while but always missed a certain post which now spotted me to the right direction. The trick was to follow a link to the beta driver located on Techno Trends's FTP site.
Please, Techno Trend, list also your beta drivers. Other companies also do that, such as nVidia. Why hiding it and not making any link or hint on your website pointing to that beta driver that allows to use HD on Windows 7 MCE? Just make a big fat note that beta srivers might cause trouble, but hiding it at all leaves a bad impression and customers not able to find that (even I had troubles finding it for some weeks!) might not buy again and tell their friends something different.

Okay - however it works not perfectly! I have got real HDTV with MPEG4 codec running very smootlhy. The only real station that I can watch is arte HD (Germany) - the rest is promo from Astra, Das Erste and ZDF. But soon, Das Erste and ZDF will yet again send HD programme until in February, regular HD will start.

... with no additional fees - as the "HD+" stuff from Astra will be charged for after one year. As HD+ is no real standard, it will be hard to impossible to receive this on a regular PC such as an HTPC that I have. And if so, I gues only Windows will be the platform of choice - leaving GNU/Linux users and those of other open platforms out. Not so nice.

I still have to find out how to use Ogg/Vorbis and other codecs in Windows 7 MCE. I installed some codec packs, but only Windows Media Player understands them... I think it has to do with the way the codec supports playback. Most codecs work with the DirectShow or whatever filter while for MCE you need the newer Windows Media Foundation (did I got that right?).

Without a working coded in Win7 MCE, I cannot play almost anything such as my music (Ogg/Vorbis) but also many of the videos on my disk that sometimes are Quicktime etc.

Time will tell.
Am also happy with the rest, such as remote control. I could not get back working my IRTrans thingy that is built-in my PC, so I got the remote control working that came along my TT DVB-s2 adapter. I just had to install EventGhost and move a DLL to it - bing! It also works by now!
Next things to come and test are codecs, recording, cutting, cover support, burning recordings etc.

If you need more details on the things named above (or even a HOWTO), just give me a wink!

see ya!

New DVB-S2 adapter and Windows 7

2009-10-25T20:23:00.001+01:00

So, for more than a week now I have Windows 7 Home Premium (System
Builder) running and am quite content with it. I replaced my two
Hauppauge/Technotrend FF and budget PCI cards in favour of this USB
2.0 DVB-S2 device.

Got everything running so far except any HD channel - regardles of
whether it is MPEG2 or H.264 in Windows Media Center. The TT one will
not install through missing Intervideo filters which I cannot find
anylonger on the net. Let is see on how I can get further. A more
detailled text with photos will follow soon.

New site

2009-10-07T23:59:00.000+02:00

I started to create a new site again. Unless I add a domain for it, you can reach it using the original URL http://sites.google.com/site/neveprise. There is also a related foto album via http://picasaweb.google.com/bjblazko.

About scene graphs

2009-10-05T21:14:00.001+02:00

Today, I continued development on our Java based game engine. Ja, re-
inventing the wheel but this the only way to learn :)
Current problem is how to design the interface for the scene graph -
not in the sense of graphical representation (we default to OpenGL)
but in a logical sense. Problem is: do I need to make the graph a tree
or a plain list? A tree involves much more algorythms and memory
consumption is a major issue, as using dynamic arrays per node (for
referencing child nodes) will become a problem in the heap as there
will much add/remove operations on each list.

So, having a 3D space sim in mind as show case, I think I will use a
linear graph with a list of fixed size. I have to read more on this if
the engine should become a more general one...

Let us see - and you are welcome to post your ideas here!

New DVB-S2 tuner

2009-10-02T00:52:00.000+02:00

In my VDR, I used two cards:

A TechnoTrend full featured (means: onboard MPEG-2 decoder) DVB-S PCI card with memory mod (upgrade to 4 MB for more colours in OSD themes)
An old Hauppauge budget DVB-S card as second tuner

Having those two cards allowed me to watch and record on alltransponders at the same time. Nice feature that! The limit is the I/O of the hard drive when recording parallel broadcasts.

Okay, I gave Windows 7 RC1 a try last week on my decent hardware. Then, I was shocked: those two DVB cards are perfectly supported in GNU/Linux systems - but Windows after XP - hardly a chance due lack of BDA drivers - especially as I installed the 64 bit OS version...

Okay, so no quick testing with Windows Media Center and TV.

For a longer time now, I was planning to settle to HDTV with DVB-S2 hardware. It seems that different devices are quite well supported in GNU/Linux as well, so I decided short hand to order a new DVB adapter.

As I always struggle with missing free PCI slots on my Abit AN8-SLI board (having PCIe), I ordered a USB2 device, model TechnoTrend S2-3600. It got good reviews all over the net and seems to run well both in Windows and GNU/Linux.

I will receive the new hardware and tell you how it works for me.

Watching television

2009-10-01T00:11:00.001+02:00

Since 2004 now I am using the Video Disk Recorder (VDR) on GNU/Linux.
Since I bought an AMD 64 Bit CPU back in 2005 or 2006, I was building
the VDR from sources because packages were hardly available or brought
too few plugins. And using a dedicated distribution for this was also
not an option because this limited me in other things - my system was
connected to a flat TV. So, just using it for TV was a waste; desktop
usage was also a demand.

But building VDR from scratch and getting integration (e.g. remote
control) done took ages.

Now, a colleague tried Windows 7 Media Center. He was using MythTV
before. Well, he was quite impressed and recommended to give it a try.

Well, I will do so and report here.

Just my first post

2009-09-01T22:58:00.001+02:00

Ja, me now having a web log. Let us see if I will use it - and for what.
Stay tuned?