Monthly Archives: June 2009

DLNA and my New TV

Originally uploaded by Al404

I bought a new TV last week – a Sony KDL-32V5500. It’s a mid-range set, but is still fantastic compared to what you could get a year or two ago. Most 32 inch LCD panels seem to be only 720P (or 1366×768), and one thing that attracted me to the Bravia is that it’s 1080P (and the fact that the price was comparable to even generic panels).

One of the first things I noticed was that it has an ethernet port. It’s used for a feature called DLNA, which is a standard for streaming media between devices on a home network. This TV has two modes – a standard media player mode, or “renderer” mode. When acting as a media player, the TV reads files directly from a server device such as a NAS or computer with DLNA-compliant software running on it. When in renderer mode, the server transcodes the media into standard mpeg, before streaming it to the TV.

In terms of the end experience the two modes are similar, as you can pick and choose what to play via the TV’s interface in both modes. The difference is where the decoding is done (TV or Server). The advantage of renderer mode is that you can play any format which the server (generally a computer) can decode, which is far more than they could ever hope to build into a TV set. The disadvantages are that it requires a lot more bandwidth and resources on the server computer, and also much more capable software, as it has to be capable of transcoding the video stream. You also need a reasonably powerful CPU, and since the decoded stream has much less compression than the original, you need a gigabit network to stream even 720P losslessly without stuttering (forget about wifi).

DLNA seems to be a fairly new feature on TV sets, and the software base is not well developed. I tried a couple of basic (non-renderer mode) solutions such as ushare (included in the Ubuntu repositories), and minidlna, which is apparently developed by a Netgear employee for their NAS products. Minidlna seemed to work reliably, but I quickly found that the TV can not play most of my media collection, as few files showed up in the list (those that did show up worked reliably though). I recommend minidlna over ushare, as it’s more current, and ushare is apparently no longer updated.

I then stumbled across PS3MediaServer, which was designed to stream media to the Playstation 3. It’s an open source Java application, and does exactly what I want it to – transcode and stream media to a DLNA device. Unfortunately, the release version can only stream to the PS3 – the betas have support for some other devices but this a very new feature and it’s not without problems. But it’s good enough for now if you can put up with having to restart it now and again. As an added bonus it’s also cross platform, and can be run on Windows, Mac and Linux.

It did take a bit of tweaking to get right though. The most serious problem was that AVI files weren’t showing up, because the config file for the Sony Bravia 5000 series assumes that they can play all .avi files directly without transcoding, which mine certainly can’t. So you have to add .avi files to the “force transcode” list on the transcoding settings tab. I also found that bandwidth limiting seems to have no effect, and using anything other than the default Mpeg2 quality seems to stop media playback from working. It’s the best solution I can find for the moment though, so if you want to give it a try you can download the latest beta here.

For now this is no media PC replacement, but if you’ve already got TiVO/MySky or another set-top box and just want to play the occasional file from your computer it’s worth a look, and much less cumbersome than hooking up your laptop each time.

For anyone else researching DLNA stuff, here are some other useful links:

Olympus E-P1, my next camera?

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DPReview have a preview up of the soon-to-be released Olympus E-P1. I was thinking seriously thinking about getting a Panasonic LX3, but this looks like the perfect travel companion:

E-P1 side by side with the LX3 (source: dpreview.com)

Perhaps the only barrier could be the price – I’d expect it to be somewhere around the level of current prosumer DSLRs (50D, D90) which is a bit of a step up from the LX3 (close to double, probably more once you add lenses). But image-wise this is more DSLR than compact, whereas the LX3 is much more of a compact. In a portable camera I wouldn’t miss the viewfinder so much, but the poor contrast-detect autofocus would be its major downside compared to the 40D, and the Panasonic G1 which is based on the same system has much better autofocus.

And even with the 17mm “pancake” prime lens it’s still bulkier than the LX3, so there’s definitely room for both models. But with the E-P1 the micro four thirds system just got a whole lot more interesting, and this is tempting as a “do-it-all” camera to replace both my point ‘n shoot and DSLR.

Either way, I can definitely see myself owning a micro 4/3rds camera at some point in the future, but it might be worth waiting for the E-P2, which will hopefully refine the concept (and include Panasonic’s autofocus system).

Update 22-6-09:

It’s available on pre-order in the states at $799 US. Using the Canon 50D as a price index, the cost here at retail for the 14-42mm kit should be about $1450-1500 NZD. Which is about what I paid for my 40D body, so not too bad, in fact slightly cheaper than I was expecting. It’s quite a lot to spend on a downgrade, but for traveling it might just be worth it.

What a concert…

The Art of Paul

The New Zealand Government and the Microsoft Deal

Implications for Education

I put these musings into a different section, as it’s a different angle. I work in the education market, and the Ministry of Education is a state service, so this is going to have an impact on our company, although probably not a major one.

The Ministry of Education also negotiates a separate deal for the use of Microsoft software in schools, and it is important to note that this is a separate deal. The pan-government deal is for state services, thus it would cover the Ministry of Education’s internal IT systems but not schools themselves. This comment from the Ministry of Education clarifies the point:

The Microsoft Schools Agreement is totally separate to the pan-government Microsoft licensing agreement that was mentioned in the Computerworld article. The new Microsoft Schools Agreement is still under negotiation, but talks are proceeding well. The current agreement lasts until December 2009. The new agreement would cover the period from January 2010 to December 2012. The products covered by the new agreement are likely to remain largely the same. An announcement regarding the new agreement will be made to schools once negotiations have been concluded.

So an agreement to bulk-license Microsoft software in schools is still likely. However if the talks break down it will be interesting to see what the impact on other vendors is, as Novell also have a bulk license deal with the Ministry. I look forward to the announcement.

Further reading: http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/news/561FB33C30FEB478CC2575C400737916

Grababid.co.nz and Penny Auctions… my take

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I recently noticed an ad for www.grababid.co.nz while browsing gmail. It was advertising LCD tvs for $1, no doubt because I had been bidding on such items on trademe, and the keywords would have been fairly prominent in my inbox (don’t you love targeted advertising?). Normally I ignore crap like this, but it looked like a New Zealand auction site so I had to check it out – anything that competes with Trademe is good for the market in my book.

Except perhaps, in this case.

I visited the site and at first glance it looked promising – $1 reserve auctions for high value electronic goods. The problems become apparent quite quickly when you dig deeper.

Grababid is a “Penny Auction” site, and placing bids on is not free. You have to pre-purchase a quantity of “bids” in packages. The site encourages you to buy larger packages of bids in two ways – by giving you more bids for your dollar in larger quantities, and also by giving you 30% extra on your first purchase.

I’d encourage you to read the following wikipedia article (which is not up to the usual wikipedia standard but informative none the less). What it comes down to is that bids are placed which increase the sale price by a fixed amount (say 10c, not sure what it is in grababid’s case). The last bid placed wins the auction, but each bid extends the auction to give other “players” (let’s be straight here, you’re playing a game) the chance to bid. The final sale price is usually well below RRP, but since each bid that is placed has already been paid for, the auctioneer collects fees for each bid in addition to the sale price. So for a $1 start auction with a bid price of $1 and an increment of 10c that finishes at $100, the auctioneer has actually collected over $1000. The “winner” probably got a good deal, but the other bidders/players all have lost out. Note that the price appears to be fixed at $1 for many of grababids auctions, so it’s basically just the last person to bid $1 that wins…

In game theory terms the players are playing a game of brinkmanship, where each bid placed lessens the reward. But in the case of a website there is a third party – the webmaster – and they hold all the cards. The potential for abuse is huge as the webmaster can easily deprive any player of a win simply by placing a shill bid, which would be almost impossible to detect as only the webmaster truly knows who placed each bid. It would also be rather easy to create the impression of a busy site by running a whole lot of bots, and grababid actually does seem rather busy at first glance…

The point is, that unless you like games where the odds are stacked against you (i.e. you’re a gambler), you’d be wise to avoid sites like grababid. I’d sooner do my research and shop around than throw money away trying to “win” a game of brinkmanship. The fact is that if they weren’t making a margin on the goods they’re selling, they wouldn’t be in business. Given that margins are already rather low on electronic goods it makes far more sense to shop elsewhere.

You might also be interested to know that despite the .nz domain name and the skytower graphic in their logo, Grababid.co.nz was registered by someone in Hong Kong with a German registrar:

domain_name: grababid.co.nz
query_status: 200 Active
domain_dateregistered: 2008-07-08T12:38:27+12:00
domain_datebilleduntil: 2009-07-08T12:38:27+12:00
domain_datelastmodified: 2009-05-01T11:14:51+12:00
domain_delegaterequested: yes
%
registrar_name: Key-Systems GmbH
registrar_address1: Prager Ring 4-12
registrar_city: Zweibruecken
registrar_province: RP
registrar_postalcode: 66482
registrar_country: DE (GERMANY)
registrar_phone: +49 6332 791850
registrar_fax: +49 6332 791851
registrar_email: info@key-systems.net
%
registrant_contact_name: Jerry Reddig
registrant_contact_address1: Flat 5, 10/F, Yuen Shing Ind. Bldg.,, Yee Kuk West Street
registrant_contact_city: Hong Kong
registrant_contact_postalcode: 1033
registrant_contact_country: HK (HONG KONG)
registrant_contact_phone: +852 4246860 7
registrant_contact_fax: +852 11111 1
registrant_contact_email: purchase@grababid.com

Also note the existence of grababid.com, grababid.co.uk, they’re all the same thing (it doesn’t appear that much localisation was done other than the graphic).

I’ll leave it to you to decide whether or not you want to join this site, but it should be fairly apparent that I won’t be buying my LCD TV from there.