Category: Video

Affordable PCs

I don’t know if you’re like me, but I have a bunch of old PC’s around the house, I just can’t seem to get around to the recycling them, thinking at a minimum that I have data on that hard disk that I need to recover or at least validate that I don’t need it anymore.

A little while ago, I ran across this show, revision3, and I thought – I have a few (actually 3) cases with various really old technology inside. I’m talking IDE disk drives here. I can use this idea from revision3, and taking a step in that direction, put modern technology inside an old skin. After all, I don’t really care what the outside looks like, what’s important is that the stupid thing runs; and runs faster than the last PC I bought (for a bit more money, by the way).

Then my son’s PC died and rather than go out and buy something new, I encouraged him to go along with me on this adventure…

Here is what I bought (right from Amazon) shipped right to my door.

  • Intel Pentium Processor G3220 3.0 GHz LGA 1150
    BX80646G3220 $58.99
  • ECS Elitegroup Micro ATX DDR3 1600 LGA 1150 Motherboard
    H81H3-M4 (1.0A) used $34.99
  • Seagate Barracuda 1 TB HDD SATA 6 Gb/s
    NCQ 64MB Cache 3.5-Inch Internal Bare Drive ST1000DM003 $53.99
  • Kingston Value RAM 4GB 1600MHz PC3-12800 DDR3
    Non-ECC CL11 DIMM SR x8 Desktop Memory (KVR16N11S8/4) $39.74
  • EVGA 430W 80PLUS Certified ATX12V/EPS12V Power Supply
    100-W1-0430-KR $34.99
  • Total: $222.70

Yes, like the guys building the gaming PC, I could spend a bit more money and put in a high end graphics card for rendering a PC game fast enough, but I myself don’t need any more than this. There is VGA and HDMI on the motherboard. I think my son will finally opt for the graphics card, because he does do games and stuff. (a PNY 750TI is $140 extra)

But for the basics, including for example, the idea of a video recorder (a PVR or DVR) – this is enough. And, what I have also discovered with my son is that this thing is really quiet! Yes, there is a fan on top of the CPU to pull heat away, but outside the case, it is very quiet.

If you have a bunch of cards to put into the PC, maybe this isn’t for you. There is one slot for the graphic’s card, two slots for memory (the 4gb memory I bought is on one stick). There is power for just about any SATA you would reasonably put inside, 2 hi/2 low SATA connections, 6 different USB connections (inclusive of 2 USB3). All in all, pretty sweet for this price.

You will need a DVD drive to install Windows (which he already had from the old computer) or a bootable ISO copy of the DVD on an external drive and I already had a Windows 7 license to use, otherwise you might have to spring for the Windows software (+ $100). If you’re doing Linux, then you won’t need that.

Hope this is something useful for you.

Interesting uses for the Wiimote

I ran across some of the work of Johnny Lee while listening to Phil Windley’s Technometria the other day. You can read (and listen to) more at the Conversations Network, a great resource of ideas and material, or you can click the link above to Johnny’s website at Carnegie Mellon University.

Because the Wiimote has bluetooth built in and an infrared camera, you can interact with it via your computer, reverse it’s normal gaming orientation to the TV and expose a whole new range of potentials.

Here are some direct links to some of the YouTube video’s he’s posted regarding potential apps for the Wiimote, yes beyond just gaming…

Low-Cost Multi-touch Whiteboard using the Wiimote (my personal favorite)

also, see more…
Tracking fingers with the Wii Remote

Foldable Displays (tracked with the Wiimote)

Head Tracking for Desktop VR

Analog TV Death Delayed

as reported by SOSF,

This decision will require both network and cable broadcasters to continue providing an analog feed to their customers even though all of them have spent literally multi-millions of dollars gearing up and getting ready for the new digital age of television viewing.

I have analog coming into my home right now, mostly because it’s cheaper than digital plus the cable company wanted to charge me a lot of money for “home-runs” to the TV’s. At the time I had no digital TV’s either.

Today, I don’t really have digital TV yet (it’s been an expense thing) — I have a lot of component video and I do IP streaming from the video server near my router to the living room.

Until you get a larger and more recent TV in place, it’s hard to justify the extra expense, both to install and recurring.

Once the incoming signal is digital, you will need these digital-to-analog converters for each analog TV you have. At the store, if you have to buy them, it’s going to cost you about $20-30. Not counting whatever equipment your cable company wants to charge you (probably built into a set-top-box)

Note that some of the problems with DRM have been reported, and also all of that DRM code in Windows Vista has had various folks up in arms.

DRM strikes yet again

Wil Wheaton (yes that Wil Wheaton) posted problems with his DirectTV-HDMI connectivity. All due to software which “protects the content” from people who have legally paid for the content.

DRM is totally a mess right now, and it’s not going to get better until customers speak up and force the content management and delivery mechansims to change.

Wil: How many DirecTV customers are currently hosed by this DRM-related nightmare? I’m not sure, but I can tell you what the number would be if the damn studios and networks weren’t so dead set on treating their customers like criminals: zero.

7 years later, still a good example of what was to come

I was looking for some other piece of information, but stumbled, instead, upon this gem of a film from 7 years ago.

This film, produced in 2000, was 3 minutes long, took 4 months to make, before the kinds of film making tools that are available today. Still, this work, rivaled what the major motion picture studios could produce.

Link here or here

Vista and DRM – *updated*

Recently, Steve Gibson, Leo Laporte, and Peter Gutmann talked extensively about what Microsoft put in the base of the Vista OS.

  • For an introduction on the issue, click here or listen to a podcast by clicking here.
  • The next week, they get into the Vista details here or listenhere.
  • In the 3rd week, they wrap it up here or listen here.
  • ** Microsoft later responded in a blog post, read about it hereor listen here

I’ve just reviewed all of these sessions, and I agree with the speakers:

Two questions do come to mind after digesting all of this.

  1. Why did Microsoft do this? I mean, I wouldn’t think they would be “beholding” to Hollywood for anything, heck the other way around, Hollywood would be interested in getting to 95% of the personal computing screens.
  2. Considering all of the issues around SPAM, and related issues of identify theft, zombie PCs, etc., one would think that the same amount of effort in these latter issues would improve the situation for a very large number of users.

This work appears to do nothing except make users very unhappy, at least once they find out about it and are faced with real issues like the inability to “RIP” legally procured content that you have “fair use rights” to. Or perhaps your display manufacturer went on the “cheap” and didn’t include the licensing keys for the crypto involved. Vista supposedly will not play the HD content on a display that doesn’t “abide” by these rules. The policy that sets this thing is not in the display card or even Vista, it’s in the content itself. People are reporting in forums this simple fact: I’m putting in an HD-DVD and it’s not playing. It’s still beta, so anything might happen between now and February.

As I say, we are left with the basic issue of Why?

** Update 1/21/2007
found via boingboing, click here

“…misses the larger issue: the stark demarcation that will arise between legal vs. pirated movies. On Windows Vista, the only way to get true HD movie and TV content from your $2000 home-theater PC will be to download illegal pirated content!

I cannot believe Microsoft/Hollywood haven’t seen this coming … Blu-Ray and HD-DVD protection schemes are likely to be completely broken in a matter of months, and once that happens, the various crippled features in Vista will only affect one type of user – the law-abiding ones who would never pirate a movie. Those users will suffer, while the pirates will party on. What’s the point, Microsoft?”

What the future will bring

I was having lunch with some of my previous work associates yesterday. We got to talking about mobile phones, the “bricks” of yesterday and the “razor” thin ones of today, and also about VoIP services (since half of us had it). This reminded me, since I’d read it sometime ago, but no longer remember who exactly coined it, that in the past, there were 3 ways to get information into your home:

  1. the phone line (which was bi-directional),
  2. over-the-air broadcast (one way) radio and
  3. broadcast TV
  4. well, maybe 4 if you count the newspaper or a magazine

Today, we still may have

  1. a phone line,
  2. the radio
  3. plus possibly also satellite radio
  4. broadcast TV may be completely replaced
  5. via cable (or satellite)
  6. but also there is a high-speed digital line that may be DSL (with the phone) or might come over the cable (with the cable TV)
  7. plus, in some areas optical fiber for the TV.
  8. Now we also have mobile cellular telephone service that’s more or less been for voice,
  9. but is also increasing being used for data as the bandwidth increases (this is where I’m working in the industry now)
  10. A few years ago there where smatterings, then rivers, now floods of WiFi and now WiMAX, or metro broadband wireless (there used to be a company just down the street that was heavily involved in just this thing in South America, because it’s cheaper to “wire” households up this way than with copper).
  11. There are plenty more fixed and mobile communications options than I can think of right now. My sisters, in rural Minnesota, get a slower speed version of broadband that’s built off antennas on top of granary elevators and mini-pizzabox sized antenna’s on their houses or in their yards. The distribution antenna works for distances up to 15-20 miles. That and power are the reasons why it’s slower speed. This was put in place because the local telco switch was running out of ports for dial-up and basic voice, back 10-15 years ago, and an enterprising young man saw an opportunity and worked it, when the REA type telco couldn’t possibly move fast enough.
  12. And there’s a chance you’re still getting a newspaper delivered, too.

The point is, the source of bandwidth pretty much does not matter any more. You’ll get your telephone service from somewhere in a network cloud, or maybe from some other network cloud if you move around. If you’re like me, you have application services that tie the endpoints together so that people calling you in one cloud don’t know that you’re answering in the other cloud.

This is largely going to be the same for your TV service. Our soldiers in Iraq, I’m told, have versions of IPTV that are more modern versions of the “triple play” that interworking of the broadband/phone/TV service, which is of course, carried on a military backbone or perhaps a leased facility back to their families here in the states. I don’t begrudge them a bit for a service such as this, but it sure heralds the future for us, doesn’t it?

Content is changing, too, newspapers are still around, but increasingly they have to pay attention to the online world. Oh, the basics of reporting and fact gathering is still largely the same, the tools are different and faster to use. Just lots more amateurs out there…

Radio, and now TV, are putting broadcasts (with and without commercials) out there for distribution via RSS or maybe forcing the website experience. Some media outlets are not getting “it” trying to force users to watch live (Nielson still has clout) in order to keep the same old revenue sources. Others ARE getting it, and that’s why there are DVD’s of whole season of TV shows, or in some forward looking markets, downloads or even feeds of shows. So, distribution models change and with it, the revenue dynamics. I freely admit I don’t have time to listen to that radio or TV show anymore in “real-time”. I want my “time-shifting” rights! So, podcasts and TiVo/MythTV – I think these are good things. Once bitten, “don’t take my TiVo away!”

In the future, it really won’t matter if the pipe is

  • FIOS (Fiber to the curb ala Verizon landline or my Dad’s cable company in rural MN),
  • EVDO Rev. A (VerizonWireless and Sprint),
  • HFC (CATV company), or
  • copper wires (traditional telco).

Telco infrastructure is getting to the point where we don’t care what it is, as long as it’s there when we want it and it’s economical enough to fit into our lives without making us think about it. Content and basic service models are increasingly looking for alternative revenue sources, rather than the basic Alfred Hitchcock “word from our sponsor” model which really just shifts costs from minutes of use (MOU) into a bundled cost of an advertised product. MOU will still be there for a while, thanks to the telcos and more importantly, the mobile phone era. But something better than the current draconian measures envisioned with DRM and lawsuits is needed.

We’ve come a long way since when I would travel and my mother used to ask me to call collect and ask for Uncle Arvin, who was never there; it was just a pre-arranged signal that I had arrived at my destination. Let’s hope the coming years see as much of a change for the better as the last few years.

Happy Holidays.

IPTV

IPTV, or Internet Protocol delivering TeleVision (and not Iowa Public Television) is supposed to be a big market. These last few years, lots of companies have been investigating and some have been actually doing something. The subscriber levels for this year, 2006, is supposed to be 8.3 million, worldwide. But, only 500,000 of these subscribers are in the U.S. That is 6.02%… A lot of these subscribers are in western Europe, with Gartner indicating 3.3 million are there, this year. Other deployments are starting in Shanghai, Guangdong, and other Chinese cities.

The market is supposed to explode. Gartner is indicating a 5 fold increase in 4 years in western Europe and others indicating a roughly 4 fold increase worldwide, over the same timeframe, to 34 million total subscribers. At the high end of the speculation, 63 million subscribers have been quoted in the press.

If the U.S. has 500,000 subscribers now, who has them? Parts of Rural America, in that there are hundreds of Independent Operating Companies (IOCs) who are running IPTV today. Places like Ramondville, Texas and Lenora, Kansas. Nearer to me; Fallon, Nevada.

Outside the U.S., IPTV is rolling along, in places like Belgium and Brazil, Sweden and Slovenia, Ireland and Italy. With price sensitive Germans, the expectation of interactivity is expected to help generate money for the carriers. In France, it’s sold in consumer electronic stores, similar to our Best Buy or CompUSA. Gartner, again, predicts that by the end of this year, roughly half of IPTV subscribers will be in France. As the other western European country’s growth catches up, France will still keep a third of these subscribers.

Why haven’t we heard about this much here?

  1. Elsewhere, the combination of low entry prices from competitors and incumbents (like France Telecom) and the idea that content from firms like the Pay per View players are willing to embrace new distribution channels. According to Gartner, however, a lot of the subscribers captured via this aggressive pricing have yet to be completely “hooked” on the IPTV service itself, it’s simply packaged as part of their “triple play” bundle. The factors that follow contribute to situations unique to those of us here in the U.S.
  2. The phone companies, here, usually have copper, “twisted pair” for the “last mile” to your house. Running voice at 64kbps is what this last mile distribution was designed for. A pair of wires, and thus 2 possible phone lines for each house, who could want for more? A couple of decades ago, this was satisfactory thinking. DSL internet services, rolled out for the demand for broadband internet, uses this same twisted pair copper wire to get to a “DSL modem” in your house. The investment they’ve made in DSLAMs in the central office may not yet have paid off enough, for them to start to look at upgrades to this infrastructure. The newer services, such as streaming HD TV, or even a basic DVD movie compressed in MPEG2 (a popular video compression technique) is 5-7 Mbps of bandwidth that will obviously put a strain on this kind of infrastructure. So, either they must add hardware in the “last mile” part of the network, to enhance and strengthen signals to go farther or stay stronger or they must go to something the industry calls Fiber to the Curb (FTTC). Verizon calls this FiOS, or Fiber Optic Services, and they are pretty much ready to push the button. Very expensive stuff, but the market is seeing some action here from these smaller operators, the IOCs, rolling out fiber. In Sanborn, MN, where I grew up, Cable TV (which is also the phone company in Sanborn) service was so troublesome with an aging HFC network, that about 5-6 years ago, the Cable company dug up all of the streets and laid fiber to everyone’s house. My dad has fiber at his back door. Sanborn, MN – population 434. No IPTV yet, but he certainly has a pipe large enough if and when they finally offer such a service. A bigger population area, different fiscal issues, but as operators such as Verizon are demonstrating, not necessarily impossible to solve.
  3. The U.S. legacy cable operators, the MSOs, have been delivering your standard TV over coax cable and this is called Hybrid/Fiber Coax or HFC (From the head-end to your neighborhood, it’s fiber, to a device on a telephone pole or in a vault, appropriately called, the “fiber node” and then it’s coaxial cable to your house). All of the channels are “broadcast” in separate frequency channels along this infrastructure simultaneously. Telephone service and regular internet service to your “cable modem” is delivered similarly, in a channels right alongside the video. Digital TV is delivered right down these same channels, encoded in something called QAM, decoded by your digital set-top-box. There is a lot of money invested here in this infrastructure and it is not yet financially compelling for the MSOs to change.
  4. Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement (COPE) Act of 2006 – Specifically, this is the house version of the major overhaul of the last Telecom bill. The senate had it’s own involvement in the issue, but basically, we have a lot of rule making to be done before it’s clear who/what/where/when money will be made by this or that operator, distributor, content provider, etc. – too many rules, it’s hard for anyone to predict and thus only agile companies, ready to move after rulemaking, will gain rewards.
  5. Telephone companies have never delivered TV content before. Sure, some are supplementing their voice and internet offerings with satellite TV, but let’s face it, they are just putting their name on the satellite TV offering from another company. Licensing, broadcasting, distribution rights – well, the MSOs have a lead in this space.
  6. The MSOs and satellite companies offer premium content right now, some of it in High Definition, or HD. To compete, and IPTV offering must be better than the MSOs level of the playing field. Better technologically: Effectively, it must be better than what European and Asian operators are delivering in the early MPEG2 encoding technology. It’s almost expected now, that a true offering must be multiple HD streams, each 12-20 Mbps – not 5-7 Mbps. They also must offer DVR or “TiVo-like” services, either home based or network based, for the streams coming into the home or the movie libraries the carrier is involved with. Sometimes it is barely likely that 5 Mbps is getting down to you, must less multiple HD TV streams. The “broadcast flag” issue over who owns the right to push advertising at you and force you to watch it (also tied into the Senate bill) may hinder IPTV’s acceptance, particularly if it screws up who can and cannot produce the devices that will “play back” IPTV. Better services: Interactivity (think sports betting in some countries) may be key for adoption, something that is harder to do in today’s world (not to mention that gambling is a real political problem here in the U.S.). The success of SMS texting linked to reality TV has shown the desire for the public to interact, paying real money, but with SMS the revenue is going to a wireless carrier, not necessarily the IPTV carrier. So, interactivity within the platform (think “Deal or No Deal” kinds of interactivity.)
  7. Finally, distributing this streaming mess of bits around the house to what ever device needs it, The HDTV set, a desktop computer, a 2nd TV set, a laptop computer. Should this be Ethernet? Or Ethernet over Power cabling? Or WiFi? It’s this last point that a small company, named Ruckus Wireless, with several announcements this last week, is becoming a key player. They secured $16 million in additional financing from telco and electronics company’s VC arms. They also announced shipping wireless product for reliably delivering these video streams within the house, thus eliminating the potential wiring mess a consumer or professional installer would have to undertake. A lot of their technology is involved in the dynamic tuning aspect of the antenna systems. Essentially, they “beam” the bits to the TV set, instead of 360 degree broadcast to everyone nearby, because the antenna system locates the remote station and “locks on”. Problems with walls and beams are resolved in this manner. Essentially, Ethernet performance, without the physical cable. Ruckus has indicated that industry-wide there is an approximate cost of $400-500 for a 3 room install as part of IPTV launching. This is per subscriber.

So, quite a lot that has to come together before you can literally sit down in your favorite chair, flip on the HD to watch your favorite game over an IP infrastructure. Except, if you are in Wyoming or Kansas.