• Interests, Hobbies, Geekdom

    Streaming Videos at Home

    March 23, 2011

    I managed to setup Apple’s AirPlay, which allowed me to stream wirelessly music to speakers around the house. At that time I was wondering if it is possible to stream video wirelessly to my TV too.

    I bought a Network Attached Storage from Buffalo. This NAS supports DLNA, which is something that my TV supports too. Setting it up on my TV, it could recognise my NAS. Unfortunately, it could not see any of my video files on my NAS. After digging through the specifications of my TV, I realised that was because my TV could only play MP2 video files if streamed. If I want to play AVI files, or any other video files with another format, I will have to first copy the video files to an external harddisk, and then plug this harddisk into my TV to watch it. Is there any way that I can stream videos to my TV without use external harddisk?

    I did some research and realised there are a couple of options in the market. There is this device call the Home Network Media Player which are currently sold in the market.

    There are quite a few to choose from:

    1) AC Ryan’s PlayOn! series. The whole series supports many video formats and codecs, and most of them have wifi built in. The PlayOn!DVR was of special interest to me. This is because it will be possible to record HD movies from Starhub, for example, with this device. Sure, Starhub has its own device, Hubstation HD that does the same thing, but it can’t be shared. With this PlayOn!DVR, I could share whatever I recorded, wireless, on the network.

    Unfortunately, after reading through the forums, it seems like as a result of throwing almost everything except the kitchen sink into their devices, their firmware struggled to deliver their promises.

    2) Apple TV. Now it seems that this nifty product from Apple is actually quite a monster, provided it was released from its chains. The problem with Apple TV was that it could only go through iTunes, and play format that iTunes recognise. The only way to get around this, is to jailbreak it, and then install the excellent xbmc on it. Once xbmc has been installed on it, it is an excellent device.

    Getting the Apple TV in Singapore is a problem. Either I have to purchase it in USA, then use vPostUSA to get it deliver to me, or I purchase it from the various people who sells it online. Once that is done, I have to jailbreak it, and then install xbmc. Though the process may be relatively simple, and usually I will not run away from a challenge like this, however for this time I decided I want a device to plug and play.

    3) Seagate has two products that do what I wanted. One is the GoFlex TV, and the other is the FreeAgent Theater+. The wifi adapter is not in built, which means I will have to buy a USB Wifi Adapter into one of its USB ports. iOmega also has a few similar products. And so does Western Digital.

    After going through my options, I decided to get a Western Digital TV Live Hub. Firstly it has onboard storage space of 1TB, I may never know if I will play video files from this device, so I thought having an onboard storage space was nice. Also, this device supports my Buffalo Wireless-N NFINITI HighPower USB 2.0 Adapter. It is important to check if the device that you want to buy, allows the wireless adapter that you want to use. It has to do with the chipset within these wireless adapters, and whether the network media player has the drivers for these chipset installed within them.

    Setting up the WD TV Live Hub was a breeze. I just connect the HDMI cable from its HDMI port to the one in my TV. Plug in my wireless adapter. Once power on, I used the remote control to setup the wireless network connection to my house’s wifi network. Once that is done, I get it to read my NAS shared drives, selected one video file, and play it. The streaming of the video file was smooth, without any jerky movement. Also, it could recognise ALL my video files, and plays it without any errors.

    The only problem that I encountered was a sudden random freeze in one video file. Reading through the forums, it seems it was a random event, and most probably should be fixed in a future release of the firmware.

    So I have wireless music streamed to speakers in my house, I have a wireless Network Attached Storage setup, and now I have a wireless Home Media Player setup. It is really a wonderful experience, to be able to get rid of more and more wires, and integrating various home appliances with gadgets and the Internet.

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  • Interests, Hobbies, Geekdom

    Apple AirPlay

    January 27, 2011

    I hate clutter. Which is why I hate having wires connecting all my electrical appliances and gadgets. They are hard to clean, and they gather dusts. Also it is a nightmare trying to hide them, I mean how do you connect your rear speakers for your TV and PC in a 5.1 or 7.1 speakers setup?

    So it is with great delight that Apple announced AirPlay as one of the major features of their iOS 4.2.

    What is AirPlay?

    AirPlay is Apple’s way of letting you play your music and videos on bigger and better speakers and screens around your house, without plugging anything in. Imagine this, you stream music and videos from your PC, to your TV, hifi, speakers, portable devices etc, all done without any wires. Neat right?

    To test out whether it really works, I went to buy a Apple’s AirPort Express. What it does is that you get it connected to your home’s wireless network. Then you plug in your speakers, hifi etc. It has a USB port, a Ethernet port and a socket for audio cable. I decided to connect my JBL speakers to the AirPort Express using the audio cable.

    It was not as easy as plug and play, I did encounter the following problems:

    1) I was using the legacy 128bit WEP protocol to secure my wifi. Somehow the AirPort Utility, which is used to configure the network settings of the AirPort Express, just could not recognise the HEX password. In the end I had to switch to WPA before AirPort Express could recognise the password.

    2) Each time a wrong setup done at the AirPort Utility was committed to the AirPort Express, I had to manually hard reset the AirPort Express before my AirPort Utility can detect the AirPort Express again. Due to the problem I had with the WEP protocol, I had to perform this hard reset a couple of times.

    3) When my AirPort Express was finally setup correctly, my iTunes just could not stream music to the AirPort Express, throwing an unknown error. I initially thought it was because of the audio cable, but after changing to another one, it was still throwing an unknown error. On a hunch, I disabled my Windows Firewall, and finally I could hear music streaming from my JBL speakers! The funny thing was that I allowed all Outbound traffic in my Windows Firewall and disabled all Inbound traffic. So why is it that the AirPort Express need to make an Inbound connection back to my PC?

    Despite the problems encountered, the feeling of hearing music streaming to my JBL speakers, controlling it using my iPad via the free Apple application, Remote, was really surreal and definitely worth the trouble of setting it up. I will be going to grab a few more AirPort Express, so that I can have music streaming throughout my house.

    Now if only I can control my house’s lights and electrical appliances the same way too!

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  • Interests, Hobbies, Geekdom

    Hard Disk

    November 8, 2010

    The old hard disks feature one or more rotating rigid platters on a motor-driven spindle within a protective enclosure. Data is encoded magnetically by read/write heads that float on a cushion of air above the platters. It is noisy and quite big in size.

    Now the new type of hard disks are called flash-based Solid-state Drive (SSD) use microchips where data is retained in non-volatile memory chips and contain no moving parts.

    Comparing both of them together,

    Here is a link that compares both of them side by side.

    The use of flash-based SSD was one of the main reason why it is possible for the MacBook Air to look like this:

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  • Interests, Hobbies, Geekdom

    Sparks Fly

    October 27, 2010

    This song somehow just…. seems to connect.

    The way you move is like a full on rainstorm
    And I’m a house of cards
    You’re the kind of reckless that should send me running
    But I kinda know that I won’t get far

    And you stood there in front of me
    Just close enough to touch
    Close enough to hope you couldn’t see
    What I was thinking of

    Drop everything now
    Meet me in the pouring rain
    Kiss me on the sidewalk
    Take away the pain
    Cause’ I see sparks fly whenever you smile

    Get me with those green eyes, baby
    As the lights go down
    Give me something that’ll haunt me when you’re not around
    Cause I see, sparks fly whenever you smile

    My mind forgets to remind me you’re a bad idea
    You touch me once and it’s really something
    You find I’m even better than you imagined I would be
    I’m on my guard for the rest of the world
    But with you I know it’s no good
    And I could wait patiently but I really wish you would

    Drop everything now
    Meet me in the pouring rain
    Kiss me on the sidewalk
    Take away the pain
    Cause I see, sparks fly whenever you smile

    Get me with those green eyes, baby
    As the lights go down
    Give me something that’ll haunt me when you’re not around
    Cause I see, sparks fly whenever you smile

    I run my fingers through your hair
    And watch the lights go wild
    Just keep on keeping your eyes on me
    It’s just strong enough to make it feel right
    And lead me up the staircase
    Won’t you whisper soft and slow
    I’m captivated by you baby
    Like a fireworks show

    Drop everything now
    Meet me in the pouring rain
    Kiss me on the sidewalk
    Take away the pain
    Cause I see, sparks fly whenever you smile

    Get me with those green eyes, baby
    As the lights go down
    Give me something that’ll haunt me when you’re not around
    Cause I see, sparks fly whenever you smile

    – Sparks Fly, Taylor Swift

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  • Interests, Hobbies, Geekdom

    Nabaztag

    October 16, 2010

    Nabaztag (Armenian for “rabbit”) is a Wi-Fi enabled ambient electronic device in the shape of a rabbit. Nabaztag was designed to be a “smart object” comparable to those manufactured by Ambient Devices; it can connect to the Internet (for example to download weather forecasts, read its owner’s email, etc.).
    The company went bankrupt in 2009 due to the long period of technical difficulties, and was bought over by Mindscape.

    I believe it has a lot of potential, once all the technical difficulties can be sorted out. Hopefully with a new ownership, this will be possible.

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  • Interests, Hobbies, Geekdom

    iPhone4 Singapore

    August 24, 2010

    After getting my hands on iPhone4 here in Singapore through M1’s preorder, and queuing 2 hours+ just to collect it, here is a list of my comments after using it for almost 2 weeks:

    1) It feels solid, holding it in my hands just feels more right than my old iPhone3G. It is not heavy, and putting it beside my old iPhone3G makes the old iPhone looks more plastic.

    2) The retina display is really awesome. Again putting it side by side with my old iPhone3G, the colours on iPhone4 seem to be brighter, sharper and generally more pleasing to the eye.

    3) Battery Life. With the iPhone4, I started using it as my main phone. Using it for work daily, I must say the battery life is really much better than my old iPhone3G, but still way behind my 2 year old Nokia N97.

    4) The iPhone4 runs all my applications much faster. Using the Whatsapp application on iPhone3G was painful, with me typing faster than the words appearing. With the iPhone4, everything is so  much faster. Playing Godfinger, for example, was so less frustrating than before.

    5) HD video recording. It is really incredible, the video quality was top notch, and really impressive.

    6) The Apple’s death grip problem? It really exists. I have tested this in a few locations in Singapore. But since the coverage in Singapore is generally pretty good, this is not a serious problem. I have yet to encounter any drop calls because of this.

    Suffice to say, iPhone4 should have been the phone that Apple releases originally, instead of waiting 2 generations for it.

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