Elgato turbo.264 mini-review

A couple months back, the people at elgato sent me a turbo.264 to test out. It's a USB-based hardware encoder for converting any video file to AppleTV or iPod format and comes with software that controls the device. It's a small black plastic stick not much larger than a keychain thumb drive and their site boasts large speed improvements over other conversion methods.

On my Mac Pro desktop (quad core, 2.16Ghz), my results were mixed. Comparing against the best AppleTV/iPod/iPhone converter I know, VisualHub, I did not see any speed improvements when converting an identical file using both the turbo.264 and VisualHub (with VisualHub set to the highest quality setting for AppleTV output). The software application that comes with the turbo.264 doesn't offer any quality settings beyond the output (AppleTV/iPod high quality/iPod low quality) and shows preview keyframes. I assume if I was using an older powerbook or slower macbook I might see some of the advertised speed differences.

On the positive side, the video quality on output files was great. I encoded several identical source files in both VisualHub and turbo.264 and even with VisualHub's settings on the highest "go nuts!" quality, video playback on my AppleTV was smoother and sharper with the turbo.264 output.

So in the end, I didn't see any speed increases, but video quality was noticeably better when using the turbo.264 over a software-only solution like VisualHub. Is the turbo.264 worth the ~$100 price versus a $23 piece of shareware? Possibly, if you're using a laptop mac or older G4 hardware, but for me the quality difference isn't enough to justify the price difference.

A week with AppleTV: A Review

AppleTV is the long awaited living room component of the iTunes/iLife/iMac/iPod world created by Apple. A little over a week ago mine arrived and after 20 minutes or so of setup I was enjoying my entire iTunes library on my TV. Let me just say upfront that despite a few drawbacks, I really like AppleTV and I suspect anyone with a decent home theater system and a decent sized media collection in iTunes would also find it handy.

The positives

Setup was a breeze as I connected the AppleTV unit to my A/V rack with component and digital audio cables. I'm a heavy user of iTunes and the iTunes Music Store, so I was happy to see all my content was easily streamed in just a matter of minutes. A month or so ago I got the new Apple Airport Extreme (with wireless n) and with the AppleTV about 25 feet away, everything in my iTunes library streamed without a glitch.

Like TiVo, the AppleTV is all about the interface. With a simple remote and a simple list view, it's easy to surf through an entire library of movies, tv shows, and music across several computers. It seems like you'd need more buttons on a remote and you'd need more options in a video interface, but like the iPod the beauty is in the simple but powerful interface. There's nothing in the way and you can get to any file on any computer in your house with just a few clicks.

I found the buying process for new movies and TV shows easy and fast, with most films downloading within an hour (usually around 1.5Gb in size) and TV shows downloading in 20 minutes or so. While that's not instant, it's a heck of a lot faster than Netflix and beats going out to the video store. I usually didn't wait for my AppleTV to sync with my main computer, instead just streaming the newly downloaded shows right to the device. Video quality from the iTunes Store is about 640x480, which puts most video somewhere better than most cable channels but not as good as standard DVD format. With high action movies, this becomes obvious, but with most TV shows and especially with anything animated, you barely notice. Since the system is only designed for widescreen TVs, there's never any need to adjust aspect ratios or zoom in on cropped video -- everything filmed in 16:9 fills your screen.

Overall, I'd say the video quality was on par with DVDs I've converted to divx or xvid -- it's far from perfect but good enough for most video.

The negatives

The biggest drawback to AppleTV is the price, at $300 for the unit itself, on top of the widescreen TV you need to own as well as the $2-$15 you'll spend on each show or movie. However, if you compare to similar devices that enable viewing of downloadable movies, an Amazon Unbox powered TiVo goes from $200-800 with movies going for similar prices, and HD movies downloaded to an Xbox360 or PS3 will set you back $400-600 before you ever buy a single movie. Then again, those other devices play games and record TV while the AppleTV does nothing but stream media.

I was surprised the unit didn't ship with any video cables, especially when people continue to be scammed over high HDMI cable prices. For $300, Apple should have thrown a short $5 cable into the box. I was also surprised that the video specs touted 720p playback capabilities, but the iTunes Movie Store doesn't actually sell movies in that format. I really thought they'd up the quality in time for the release of AppleTV.

My personal music/movie/photo collection runs around 120Gb in size, so I found the included 40Gb drive inadequate for anything other than a few movies and all my photos, but since video streaming was smooth on my network I stopped syncing it all to the device. Luckily, guides have already sprung up to let you upgrade the hard drive to something larger.

Conclusions

Overall, I'm happy with my AppleTV. I've used iTunes as my music organizer for the past five years so it was easy to move my content over to my TV. Buying shows and movies is a snap and it's great to be able to enjoy them on a full-sized TV in a living room instead of crowding people around your monitor. I could see myself dropping Netflix someday if the iTunes store ever offered cheap rental prices (as opposed to requiring you to "buy" them at full price). Though the unit seems expensive, I'd say the alternatives are right up there in terms of cost, and though it's not HD quality, I found movies looked much better on my AppleTV when compared to the movies I downloaded from Amazon Unbox to my HD Tivo.

If you follow any sort of video podcast, this device is perfect. No longer are you bound to a computer or your tiny iPod screen, with AppleTV you can finally enjoy many free video podcasts as they were meant to be shown -- on a large set.

I'm also interested in seeing what hackers do with the device. The AppleTV is sort of like a smaller Mac Mini, running a real OS on a real computer, and it serves as a good reference device for people to tinker. I can't wait until someone releases a real-time transcoder that can stream any video format on the fly. For the moment, I've found VisualHub on the Mac to be a godsend. You can throw a video file in almost any format at VisualHub and it'll quickly convert it to an AppleTV friendly format.

Bottom line: If you're an iPod owner and you use iTunes for music and video and always wanted an easy way to move that content into your living room, I'd say AppleTV is a great buy. For others, it's probably a bit too costly to consider.

The Sony 46" 1080p XBR2 Review

After months of research and testing, I recently purchased a Sony Bravia 1080p 46" XBR2 tv set. What follows are my experiences with the unit.

Out of the Box

Unpacking was simple and straightforward and Sony thankfully has cut way back on packaging material. It took me a couple hours to properly mount it on my existing wall-mount, due to vast differences between my old plasma set and the back design of the Sony (different screws, placement, etc).

As with most new flat-panel TVs, the default configuration after turning it on is too bright and too blown out, color-wise. HD cable looked harsh, Blu-Ray movies looked too contrast-y, and video games hurt my eyes. CNET and the AVS Forum have some good calibration guides with all the settings you'd want. Personally, I went with CNET's settings but I toned down the filter from warm2 to warm1 and I followed the AVS forum settings for the DRC feature.

Picture Quality

With the new calibration settings in place, the picture quality really shined. 1080i cable feeds looked amazing, DVDs looked great, Blu-Ray a little better. While my Nintendo Wii (at 480p) looked a little worse than my previous EDTV plasma, my new Sony PS3 (review coming soon) outputting at 1080p looked absolutely fantastic with perfectly sharp text and life-like reflections. I didn't detect any cloudiness defects in dark scenes that some reviewers on amazon have found. During high action playback or fast camera pans, the 8ms response time did show slight pixelation at the edges of objects on screen, but not as bad as previous LCD TVs I'd looked at a year or two ago.

Standard definition TV looks pretty good on this set, much better than I expected (I'd read review after review of every 1080p LCD set on the market and how analog cable channels looked bad). With my Series 3 TiVo set at best quality, even analog cable channels are sharp enough to not show artifacts during anything but the highest action scenes.

Conclusions

I'm happy with the purchase and loving the bigger screensize (I went from 37" to 46"). I'm not a huge gamer, but games are definitely more fun and easier to play the larger your screen is. In regards to this set's resolution versus my old ED plasma, I would have to say there is a difference, but from 7 feet away on the couch it's not a huge one I was expecting. I'll write more about that point in an upcoming post.

I have the Sony wall mounted above a fireplace, in a living room with lots of windows. The brightness of the LCD shines through day and night, and definitely out-performs my old plasma in bright daylight. All my video sources are connected with a single HDMI cable (hooked to my Denon A/V unit), so I don't have to do much switching or even use the remote beyond turning it on (which I already programmed my other remotes to do) and I haven't had to use the included speakers because I've got 5.1 surround sound instead. After initial setup, it just plain works.

List price on the TV is $3799, but it's available at Amazon now for $3299 and I found street prices at most stores ranging from $3400-3600 for this model (Jan/07).

Holiday Gadget Guide: BDI's Avion line and the Slingbox Pro

I just uploaded a review of my newest addition to my home theater: a BDI Avion 8528 audio/video cabinet. I'm very pleased with and can't say enough good things about it: it looks incredible and functions well -- something few a/v furniture companies get right. My full review contains all the details.

I also extended my earlier Slingbox review posted here last month over on the Gadget Guide.

The Denon AVR-2307CI Review

Over on the Holiday Gadget Guide, I posted my review of Denon's $799 A/V unit with the iPod adapter. Overall I'm really happy with it, everything sounds great and instead of 8 or 9 cables leading to the back of my TV, there's just one HDMI cable handling output (all video inputs go to the Denon unit). I was impressed by the easy setup and I've currently got six different sources all playing nicely on the unit.

The first 24 hours with a Wii

After a bit of struggle, a few failures, and a lot of waiting, I found myself yesterday morning standing in a store with a Wii in my hand. I've been reading about the system and looking forward to the innovate controller for months, so I was happy that I became one of the lucky few to score one. Now, it's not a video recorder by any means, but they are going to end up in a lot of home theater setups this xmas, so I figured I might as well post a review here.

The packaging and setup are top-notch, right up there with buying a new iPod. The instructions are pretty simple and most of the behavior of menus is intuitive. Unfortunately, the device only ships with RCA cables for hookup, with component video cables going to stores in a few weeks. It tops out at 480p, but that's ok because most games aren't photorealistic, where HD could really shine.

I'm a casual gamer in that the only current system I have is the DS lite, and that's mostly for playing tetris on plane flights or before I go to bed. I have an old xbox I use more for movie streaming than games but I used to spend hours on playstation 1 and 2s before I got rid of them years ago. The Wii is obviously light-hearted fun and has games and an aesthetic to match. It isn't aimed at hardcore gamers (the xbox360 and ps3 have you covered), but more towards casual and non-gamers.

I bought a few games for it but so far I've had the most fun with the sports game that came with the system. Playing tennis, boxing, and golfing using a virtual controller is a blast. My wife, who rarely plays games loved boxing.  Even though the sports games have an obvious unfinished look (characters don't have legs or arms), the games use the motion-sensing remote in the most interesting ways. I can't wait until proper golf, boxing, and other sports titles come out.

Among the other games, the motion controller isn't used as extensively for play. Excite Truck is a lot of fun, mixing semi-realistic looks with simple gameplay that even kids could control by tilting left and right, forwards and back. The Tony Hawk title is similar, using the controller to steer and go faster, along with a lot of button combos to do tricks. I also bought Zelda, but I've barely scratched the surface of it.

One cool aspect of the Wii is that it ships with built in WiFi. Once on my network it downloaded updates and I could buy old school nintendo games from its online store. I tried it out by picking up Donkey Kong and Mario Brothers (NES) and it worked great, with each game about $5. Games downloaded in just a minute or so and are playable indefinitely.

Another thing I'm looking forward to is the multiplayer aspects of the Wii. Extra controllers are in short supply now, but I'll pick up a few extras when they're easily available. As much fun a Wii game can be, four people in your living room driving cars, hitting tennis rackets, or fighting with swords is infinitely more enjoyable. Nintendo's Gamecube was famous for multiplayer abilities so I suspect once I get more controllers and more games get released, it'll be a fun thing for parties.

Overall, I'm happy with it and can see it being interesting long after the newness wears off. It's fairly cheap ($250) compared with most game systems and is great for kids and casual gamers. That games that shipped on launch day are enough to blow minds and I'm looking forward to all the games that will use the motion controller in the future. While the xbox360 and ps3 have much more realistic games and audio/visual capabilities, the Wii is just plain fun.

Tivo Series 3 Review, Holiday Gift Guide reveiws

After owning a Series 3 TiVo for a couple months, I sat down to write up my thoughts on it, which I've posted over here. There aren't a lot of surprises: it's a great box but really expensive, making it a difficult decision for even fans of TiVo.

The review is part of Federated Media's (they handle ads here for me) new Holiday Gadget Guide featuring posts from a variety of popular tech blogs, running from today through the end of this year. I'll be posting a new review of a Home Theater/PVR product each week until Christmas.

Next week I'll be covering the Denon AVR-2307CI home theater amp and the iPod integration that goes with it.

Slingbox and the Series 3 TiVo

I'm a big believer in having only one TV in the house, but I do sometimes like to watch lightweight comedy shows while I work on my computer and it would be handy if I could watch last night's TiVo'd programs when I'm riding on my bike trainer. Since multi-room viewing (MRV) isn't an option in the Series 3 TiVo, I looked around for any hacks that would allow for extracting video and streaming across the network.

Lucky for me, a quite popular product already exists and as I found out, it's dead simple to add it to a s3 TiVo. I was concerned that I'd have to disrupt my home theater setup and pipe video into the slingbox (as HDMI) and out as a lower quality stream (component video) to my TV. Turns out, the s3 TiVo outputs video to all outputs at once.

The setup literally took five minutes from the time I started to the time the Colbert Report was playing on my desktop. I downloaded the mac beta client and installed it on my mac. I connected RCA cables from the TiVo to the slingbox and placed the IR blaster near the front of the TiVo. I walked to my computer, connected to the slingbox, configured briefly, and was done.

I still remember seeing a slingbox for the first time almost two years ago, so I know I'm late to the game, but thanks to the way video output works on the s3 TiVo, adding a Slingbox Pro or Slingbox AV is trivial and won't disrupt your current setup.

I haven't tried watching TV away from home yet, but I can do both of the things I set out to do: I can watch TV in a window on my desktop and I can use a laptop in the garage to watch some TV while I spin out the miles on my bike. The video quality on my 802.11g wireless network is very high, just about as good as standard def output on the TiVo.

Usability tweaks in the Series 3 Remote

I love my new series 3 TiVo and I'll post a review in the next few days, but one thing keeps jumping out at me whenever I use it, and it's the new remote. After using it for a couple weeks, I have to say I don't like it, and I've figured out the problem.

Take a look at the button layout of an old Tivo remote and compare to the new one:

Did you notice how the volume/channel rockers moved up, and the thumbs up/down moved down? That little change is a big problem.

I've had a total of five TiVos over the past six years and with all of them, I've been able to use it by feel, without looking, thanks to the simple tight layout. All the normal things I do when watching TV like change channels, alter volume, and fast forward are within easy reach. You can leave your thumb in one spot and reach them all. The direction/select stuff was always at the top, but once you learned how far to "jump up" the remote with your thumb, it was easy to select a show, then start watching it and changing volume while zipping through the boring parts.

With the new remote, it's taking a long time to learn how to jump over those thumbs up/down buttons without looking. Now, maybe it's my muscle memory here that is the problem, but I've used other remotes and they often keep the most frequently used buttons together within easy reach.

Here's a highlighted view of my remotes, showing the differences:

I know that years of research went into the remote design. In my past interview with the head of user experience at TiVo, she covered the design of the remotes. I am surprised by these changes, since I don't often rate shows after the first couple weeks I own a TiVo. To help the suggested recordings engine, I might triple thumbs up the 4-5 shows I love and do the opposite with the ones I dislike, but after that early learning period, I don't use it at all. With the new remote, the ratings buttons are always there in the way.

On the other hand, I use the volume button constantly. Every channel has different volume levels and even within a single recording the ads are going to be much louder and dialogue is going to be quieter than action sequences. With a baby in the house, I'm using the volume button more than the fast forward these days, so from the moment I started using it, I noticed this new change.

Another minor quibble: the play/ffwd/rwd/slow area now has bigger buttons which is a good thing, but the buttons have sharp edges and similar shapes. With the old remote, the buttons are much smoother when your thumb is resting on them and the less important ones (like the slow button, which I use maybe once a month during an instant replay of sports, but otherwise not at all) are much smaller and less likely to be hit by accident.

Again, maybe it's just me and I realize these may sound like minor quibbles, but I definitely feel like the new remote isn't as easy to use and I'm constantly looking down at the remote to make sure I'm hitting the right button, which is something I haven't had to do in years with the previous TiVo remote designs. I'd love to hear the reasoning behind the change in the button layout.

iSquint: killer OSX app for video iPods

I wanted to see what all the hype was about, so I broke down and upgraded my iPod to a new black 60Gb video model last week. I moved over the iTunes videos I'd bought but soon after looked around for programs to help move existing movie files onto the iPod.

Handbrake (and Handbrake lite) are well-known free OSX programs that will convert your DVDs into iPod video formats. There are many useful guides out there for using it.

From the Handbrake lite site, I quickly found iSquint, for converting video on your hard drive into iPod format. The application can convert virtually any video format and in all the things I've thrown at it, everything has worked great. It's pretty amazing actually -- no matter the bitrate of audio, the compression format of video, no matter the source of the video... everything ends up in a compatible format. So that means if you've got a few random bittorrent episodes of a TV show in all sorts of crazy formats, chances are it'll work just fine in iSquint.

After using it for a week or two, about the only thing I'd suggest is that the default quality settings sometimes degrade the audio and video slightly too much, but the fix is easy: I just up the quality one notch higher on the sliders. Conversion is fairly fast on my 2Ghz G5 iMac, with video recompression going about 2x real-time (it takes maybe a half hour to convert 1 hour of video). Whenever I want to use iSquint, I let it do its thing when I go to bed, so it's not really in my way or dragging down my typical activities.

If you have a mac and a video iPod and were wondering how best to convert existing movie files you have on your hard drive, iSquint is the easiest and most straightforward option I've found.

For PC Users: word on the street is Videora works pretty much the same as a great video converter.