Comments on: Apple TV finally of use

By: mohammed

mohammed — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 11:53:35 +0000

Dear mark regarding the apple tv I was wondering whether u can purchase movies and videos using you kuwait account on itunes or do u need an american account?

By: Adrenaline

Adrenaline — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 13:26:30 +0000

I have always wondered about that red light coming out from the headphone port…now i need to get an Optical Mini Adapter

By: Haitham

Haitham — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 20:19:21 +0000

On a side note, the new macbook line design looks less of a Mac.

By: Gus

Gus — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 15:15:31 +0000

For the same price you can get the new incredible Popcorn Hour A110 (USD 215). It supports all codecs known to mankind, and supports SATA and USB slave connectivity, and HDMI 1.3a for Dolby TrueHD…I’m waiting in the queue to get mine

http://www.popcornhour.com/onlinestore/

Cheers,
-Gus

By: Mark

Mark — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 13:01:47 +0000

Star Dash you don’t have to be rich to buy a PS3.

By: Star dash

Star dash — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 11:19:38 +0000

You must be very rich, I can’t to afford to have any

By: Mark

Mark — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 10:25:04 +0000

Actually the Mac Mini has a built in optical out, its the headphone jack. Just use a mini-toslink adapter do a search for it on amazon you will recognize it and actually might have it at home since it comes with most fiber optic cables as an attachment.

If you have a macmini install Plex
http://elan.plexapp.com/
its based on XBMC.

As I mentioned above, its not about the ability to play divx movies, there are a ton of devices that do that. The advantage of XBMC is the way it organizes your media files for easy access.

By: Adrenaline

Adrenaline — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 10:06:13 +0000

I patched my AppleTV when i first got it so i can save and play DIVX movies on it but after using it for a while i decided that my Mini Mac is far more superior, its connected to my HDTV via an HD cable and i can browse the net on and watch my DIVX movies stored on my old G4 using the FrontRow.

I will give this a try and check if i get a better surround sound, since the Apple TV has and optical audio out and the mini only have a normal audio out port.

By: Mark

Mark — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 07:34:52 +0000

K: yes it does but if its 720p it depends on the bitrate it will drop frames. the solution for that is to convert high bitrate .mkv files to .mp4 which is less of a stress to the apple tv’s 1ghz processor. It will NOT play 1080p unless you want to watch it like a photo slide show.

Rayboy: If you have a few files you can use the 360 or the PS3. But if you have terabytes worth of shows and movies you NEED something much more advanced. XBMC has a library mode which is what makes it specials. Basically it scans all your content, grabs information about everything from imdb.com and thetvdb.com and then uses that information to create a library for your content. You will have full info about your media files like ratings, who stars in it, synopsis, dvd cover, genre etc.. and it will organize your content. So it will group all the movies together and all the tv shows together and organize the seasons under each. Then it also keeps track of what you watched so if you’re rewatching all of seinfeld you can keep track of what you’ve watched already and what you haven’t.

Its really advanced and I’ve honestly just summarized it very quickly above but it does so much more.

Here download it and try it if you want
http://xbmc.org/download/

By: Rayboy

Rayboy — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 07:24:21 +0000

im streaming content from my servers directly to the XBOX 360 console and it seems work well. it seems to be all inbuilt into the original XBOX interface. only thing is that on the server or pc .. you need to have the latest Windows Media Player.

By: K.TheKuwaiti

K.TheKuwaiti — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 06:55:11 +0000

Does it play MKV files?

By: Mark

Mark — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 06:00:46 +0000

I have a PS3, and the Xbox 360, that has nothing to do with XBMC. XBMC only works on the original xbox, the big fat black one…