Disney joins Hulu

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HTPC for Your Audio Visual Multimedia needs

For consumer who prefers HTPC, we carry custom made HTPC that supports all video and audio formats playback especially on Bluray medias and Audiophile grade audio. The good thing about HTPC is that you can play all types of format regardless of audio or video. Plus you get to play games, online games as well as web surfing on the same machine provided you are familiar with using keyboard and mouse.

Product Descriptions:

Silver Stone Home Theater PC LC17

Intel 5200 DuoCore Vista Ultimate

Support 1080P WMVHD/ TS, H.264

4GB RAM with 1TB WD HDD

Asus Xonar HDAV1.3

Hi-Fi class Audio Quality with SNR up to 118db quality audio for all 7.1 channels

TI Burr-Brown PCM1796 * 4(123dB SNR, Max. 192kHz/24bit)

Cirrus-Logic CS5381* 1 (120dB SNR, Max. 192kHz/24bit)

Dolby Home Theater Technologies & DTS Connect

High Quality Switching Mode Power Supply with Hi-End HTPC Casing

Wireless Mouse and Keyboard

Retail RM3,499

Dvico Media Player

A month ago since I last posted. Have been busy testing Dvico products and several hifi products.Dvico player is definately a good investment for those who are interested in storing BD medias in the hard drive. I've customers who have huge collections of BD who bought this product and converted all hardcopy to softcopy for easy access when travelling. Though the size is not as compact as the "cheapo" RMVB players that you got from the normal computer stall for less than RM200, but the quality is unbeatable by any market media players.

Video quality on a Full HD displays regardless it being LCD or Plasma is hard to see the resolution drop. Unless you are to project it on a 120" full HD projector, you will not be able to get any flaw from the output. Audio is flawless as far as I can comment. It supports DTS-MA, DD-TrueHD, LPCM, DTS, DD, DD-EX, DTS-ES.

Loading speed is fast within 30 seconds to load a 1TB Western Digital SATAII 32mbCache filled with movies. Took around 1 minute to load two 1.5TB Seagate HDD via USB 2.0. It supports subtitle and audio track during playback. With 3rd party firmware loaded, you will be able to read BD rip with all menus intact.

Warning: Beware of CLONE Dvico product in the market which sells a lot cheaper and has no product warranty. Please check with Dvico authorized dealers before geting yourself one.

Plex keeps getting better and better and better...

This is just so cool - I mean, the one program thing I was looking for next week was Charlie Rose. And here I was thinking I'll just watch on the computer when Plex says, why? you can watch on y our mac mini home theater - because, and if I may steal a line "There's an app for that!" Look at all the sweet goodness which has arrived!

Click here for the official Plex link:

We can’t help it, writing plug-ins is addictive. Here are a bunch of new ones to keep you happy and entertained in front of your TV. A step closer to killing cable?

Charlie Rose has thousands of hours of interviews with highly interesting people. Everyone from J.J. Abrams to Sean Penn to Yo-Yo Ma has been on his show. (HEY! Don't forget world famous film director and screenwriter Ramin Bahrani! (who was interviewed by Charlie Rose last week!)

The Comedy Central plug-in, written by Scott, provides lots of stand up comedy, roasts, and episodes from shows on that channel.

This next one was requested on the forums, and was quite simple to code. There is a ton of great news content on here for fans of the New York Times.

Written by Gordon Johnston, who’s been kicking some serious ass, the NBC plug-in offers hundreds (if not thousands) of hours of programming, from old-school shows like the A-Team to the latest season of ER.

This last one is my favorite, being that I’m a big fan of indie music. Recommended if you like the Pitchfork Media plug-in, the site has lots of great up and coming artists.

Plex 0.7.15 released: Improved Music Experience

Looks like a new version of Plex is out and touting all new features and improvements for your music listening pleasure.

Click here for the official link to the story or read more below:

April 23rd, 2009 | Category: Release | Author: elan

We’re coming to the end of the Plex/Seven series, so we’re primarily focused on bug-fixes, but we did find the time to add a few new things for your enjoyment. Many, many thanks to all the people who helped out with this release. In the next few days, we’re going to release a few new plug-ins (and updates to existing ones) that make use of new features/bugfixes in this release, so be sure to update as soon as you can! The release can be downloaded here.

• NEW: One of the complaints we’ve heard is that the visualizers available with Plex, while cool, sometimes cause seizures in kids and household pets. Others say that it leads them to look forward to 4:20 PM. In any case, James and Mike B (of MediaStream fame) teamed up to bring you a sexy new option: The Now Playing visualizer. Select it just as you would any other visualizer, and take it for a spin.

• NEW: We’ve added support for ratings in Plex Media Server content. So in the next revision of the Netflix plug-in, for example, you’ll now see star ratings, as you will in another new plug-in that will be released shortly.

• NEW: Do you ever find yourself struggling to shuffle a playlist, or play an album straight through, by displaying the playlist, toggling settings, and then switching back, having forgotten what you were doing in the first place? James added a convenient Shuffle item on the context menu to make that struggle a thing of the past. Together with the new Now Playing visualizer, we’re hoping you find music playing just a little bit easier this release.

• NEW: New iLife art (thanks to the talented tassitassi). You see some of it peeking out from the screenshot above. (Note: you’ll have to whack your existing cached art at ~/Library/Application Support/Plex/userdata/Thumbnails/Programs/Fanart/)
• NEW: Our friend Kent has been hard at work on analyzing our user data. Among other things, he’s discovered that our Swedish users rock! There are more Plex users per capita in Sweden than any other country. He compiled this data by looking at the Sparkle update requests. To make his job a bit easier, we’ve added a token to each update request that’s unique for each computer. We’re sending a one-way hash of the computer’s MAC address, which when broken down into plain English means that (a) we’ll be able to figure how many total computers are running Plex and (b) we can’t use the data to obtain any information about your computer.

We’ve also fixed a number of bugs in this release:

• FIX: The context menu was broken for the Favorites section.
• FIX: We weren’t saving the ’show extensions’ setting correctly in advanced settings.
• FIX: James fixed a long-standing (since Plex/Five) scraper hang with tvshow.nfo.
• FIX: We got a patch from rgrove (thanks!) that ensures that LAN cache settings are used for SMB shares.
• FIX: Caching was disabled, which caused no end of trouble playing back Internet content.
• FIX: We added Lanczos back to the OSD upscaling menu.
• FIX: We increased the size of the default fonts. I have to personally apologize for that, apparently I ate too many carrots as a baby.
• FIX: Crash/hang when exiting after playing a video.
• FIX: Also a longstanding bug, the occasional lack of GUI sounds after playing videos (thanks to Kent for helping me track this down).
• FIX: The Plex Media Server is a Universal Binary again.
• FIX: Ryan helped me fix a DTS->AC3 transcoding channel mapping bug.
• FIX: A Plex Media Server crash (when stopping a WebKit video shortly after starting) was fixed.
• FIX: We’ve made the list view give more room to text. After all, scrolling text is hard to read.

• FIX: Stopping a video with 5.1 audio could be a bit slow.
• FIX: The clock could display letters (e.g. “kk:49″). Thanks to Daniel for helping me track this one down.
• FIX: James made the thumbnail searching code respect the dvdthumbs advanced setting (so you can add support for Front Row style preview.jpg files).
• FIX: Double speed playback of 22KHz audio in videos (e.g. some FLV video).
• FIX: Enhanced the caching of directories to work well with the Plex Media Server (much quicker backing up to parent directories).
• FIX: Isaac fixed a few confusing strings.
• FIX: Improved Russian strings (thanks to friendly).
• FIX: Blurry fanart. Thanks to tassitassi for bringing it to my attention and to jmarshall for the fix).

We also added a few new Media Server plug-in features and fixed some bugs:

• NEW: Support for typing a string in the site config (requested by Rick, useful for authenticating into Flash sites).
• NEW: We allow specifying a dead zone in the seek bar site config, which can help make a tooltip disappear after a seek.
• FIX: Preferences weren’t being correctly escaped, which could lead to problems logging into Netflix, for example

Harmony Remote - "Exit" goes to main menu issue resolved

I think I forgot to post this, but I was having an issue when watching a show that pressing the Exit on the Harmony 550 was taking me all the way back to the main menu screen and I couldn't access the other episodes of the show without a lot of hassle.

Turns out the solution is pretty simple. Just go into your Harmony remote software and remap the "Exit" button. You want to change it from "exit" to "esc". That solved the issue for me and I haven't had any issues since.

Display/TV update: issue resolved

So earlier I had made some posts about turning on the mini and TV and finding "snow" on the TV instead of the screen. Well, after a week now with the new Monoprice mini DisplayPort ->HDMI, I haven't had any display problems.

I haven't had a chance to try out the iphone remotes yet, which I hope to do sometime next week. Also, I have found myself still liking having a keyboard for some reason. Occasionally, if I reset the Mac Pro for an update or something, the shared folders get dropped from the mini, and I need it to reconnect, etc., so, I am thinking of getting a mini bluetooth keybaord. I'm not sure which, but, something pretty small, obviously...

All in all, after a couple of weeks, I love the setup. I think the only thing I thought I might miss was that my bother, an amzing movie director, is being interviewed by Charlie Rose this week sometime (well, it has already been filmed, but is being aired this week) and I thought oh how will I see it - turns out all the shows are online, so no big deal. His movie is Goodbye Solo, so check it out!

But back to the mini, the setup rules. I don't miss cable, I don't miss Tivo and everything works pretty much flawlessly. I have all my TV shows, no commercials, no missed shows which come on at the same time, DVD movies work great, Hulu on Plex is a dream, Netflix on Plex is just awesome (I watched 2 movies in the past week on watch it now).

That's it for now..