Aehso’s Output

There I go again tweeting, when I should have been blogging.

For a long time I was using a Mac Mini (an early model Core Duo 1.66Ghz) as my living room media center but alas it just didn’t have enough beef to playback HD content. Mac Mini’s have integrated graphics (mine has a Intel GMA 950) which basically means that when you playback video on them the poor little CPU ended up trying to shift about huge data streams that only dedicated GPUs can really handle.

So I ended up buying a Popcorn Hour A110 which is designed for just that. The Popcorn box is a great little device – the remote is great, the playback capabilities are great but the media management and 12-foot UI are a weaker than FrontRow. Still, my Mac Mini was stored away.

Until now. When XBMC.org recently announced support cross-platform hardware decoding of mpeg2, h.264 and VC1 video content up to 1080p, well it piqued my interest. It turned out that these builds of XBMC can use a Broadcom Crystal HD PCI Express card to offload all the heavy lifting from the CPU.

Now it just so happens that the Mac Mini has a PCI Express slot but it is occupied by an Airport card. Thing is, the wifi signal in my Mac Mini has always been next to useless and besides, my living room has an ethernet router in it so I could ditch the Airport card.

Getting the Crystal HD
I bought mine from an Ebay store for about €20 – just make sure you get a BCM970012 card. Some speciality websites sell them for €80-100 but meh, I was willing to take a punt on €20.

Installing the Crystal HD
This is a little tricky since the Mini wasn’t designed to be user serviceable but if you are patient (and gentle with a putty knife) it is do-able. Just follow this dis-assembly guide and you’ll have it done in less than an hour. The only confusing parts I found were

1. the four screws he refers to are the ones holding the base of the black plastic frame onto the motherboard frame. They are not the ones screwed into the DVD drive! In my defense, 3 of them are hidden in long sleeves which made them hard to spot!
2. the wifi antenna is un-clipped by squeezing in the two black tabs that enter it from underneath.

Once you get the black frame off it’s a no brainer, just be careful not to pinch any wires when fitting it all back together later.

Installing the OS X Crystal HD Kernel Extension
There is a OS X Crystal HD “kernel extension” project – download their binary release (I took 1.0.1). NOTE that at the moment, they only advertise compatability with OS X 10.4 and 10.5 and as my Mini was running 10.5.6 I still have no idea if the kext works on 10.6.

Unpack the binary distribution and open a terminal window in that folder. Once in the unpacked folder enter:

sudo mv BroadcomCrystalHD.kext /System/Library/Extensions
sudo chown -R root:wheel /System/Library/Extensions/BroadcomCrystalHD.kext
sudo chmod -R 755 /System/Library/Extensions/BroadcomCrystalHD.kext

Kernel extensions won’t run unless they have the above owner/permissions. Ignore any error that OS X pops up at this stage.

Then run
mv libcrystalhd.dylib /usr/lib/
mv bcmFilePlayFw.bin /usr/lib/
sudo chown root:wheel /usr/lib/libcrystalhd.dylib /usr/lib/bcmFilePlayFw.bin
sudo chmod 755 /usr/lib/libcrystalhd.dylib /usr/lib/bcmFilePlayFw.bin


These libraries are required by the kernel extension (and again need to be permissioned/owned properly.

Now your Broadcom driver is installed. Load it up as follows

sudo kextload /System/Library/Extensions/BroadcomCrystalHD.kext

You should get a message saying the kernel extension was successfully loaded. You’ll only have to do this once as after reboots it’ll automatically be loaded.

Installing XBMC
The easy bit, just take the latest nightly build (I took r26715). Don’t take the Camelot build as it doesn’t have the Crystal HD support.

And that’s it. When you fire up XBMC, go to Video -> Playback and in the Renderers list, you should be able to select “Broadcom Crystal HD”. And more importantly, you should be able to enjoy full 1080p video playback without even getting close to maxing out the CPU. My little box could play back a full 1920×900/H.264 encoded stream at a full 24fps without using more than 50% of the two CPU cores.

Cheapest upgrade ever!

aehso broadcom, mac, xbmc

If you are a MacBook Pro user on the road (sans mouse) you no longer need to reach for the ctrl key to right click. Just go to the Keyboard and Mouse preferences panel and check the box for Place two fingers on trackpad and click button for secondary click and voila!

aehso mac, osx, tip

Now that I’ve been using Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter for a while I’m beginning to notice fragmentation of my contact network and event streams.  The problem goes a little deeper than “should I twitter this or/and update my FB status?” or “should I add her as a friend in Facebook or LinkedIn?”. 

Then there is also network replication to deal with – I’m getting multiple friend invites for the same people, many of whom are already in my (private) contacts list.  Don’t get me wrong, I like connecting with people!  I’m just finding myself wishing that there was a better mechanism through which all this stuff can be synchronized though.  It turns out Dion Almer is finding himself dreaming up a solution he calls The River:

In the dream I developed an application called “The River” that was a filthy rich UI that showed your one main river of events, and various rivers that would run into the main one. The river would contain: Incoming email, Status events from fb, twitter, pownce, Cool.Next, Event invites, Blog entries via rss, Photos uploaded, etc.

Dion adds a nice kicker when he suggests the following feature:

When a user signs up, they are asked for their FB/gmail/linkedin id to find people / invite them. Most services do that right now. However, there is an extra check box which states “if you see me connected on another network, automatically connect me here”. This means that you don’t have to keep accepting friend invites from the same people again and again. You should virally, quite quickly, get all of your contacts sync’d up.

I think this is an excellent suggestion but I’d take it one step further.  The River needs to do this continuously, effectively acting as an intelligent agent.  Unfortunately there are two major barriers to this ever happening:

• The agent needs to be able to verify user identities.  For example it needs to be sure that the John O’Shea in your network is me, not the footballer, the filmmaker or the humanitarian.  I can and do play football, shoot home movies and donate to charities but I’m not those people.  One problem here is none of the major social networks support associating an OpenID with a user profile so by consequence none have the required APIs.  A second problem is not many people have OpenIDs yet (that reminds me…)
• The agent needs read/write  to the users contacts and event streams within each social network.  Read can be done via RSS feeds, but write needs HTTP API access.  Of the networks I mentioned above, Facebook(api) and Twitter(api) provide this LinkedIn doesn’t (yet – they are working on APIs though).  The walled garden social network sites like MySpace and Bebo really won’t want to ever provide this.

If OpenID gains more momentum then I think all of the above is do-able.  I am of course ignoring the walled garden networks but over time they will seem more and more antiquated to their users and their influence will diminish.

This is, of course, all an extension of the older problem of synchronizing contact information between multiple email accounts and mobile phones and that nut still isn’t completely cracked.  iSync solved this to an extent but it (still) doesn’t have any decent Google mail/calendar integration. (I’ve tried ABGMerge but it created a mess to the extent that I had to revert to backups. This is becoming a real pain for me as I ditched my .mac subscription last year and I’m mainly using gmail now – suggestions welcome!)

Meanwhile something is going to have to give, and I think the first service I’ll drop is Twitter…

aehso api, facebook, mac, openid, social, web2.0

Ars Technica has a great review of the new Apple TV.  Quite why one would want to buy one of these things is completely beyond me:

…It cannot share an Internet connection with another device, and it cannot broadcast music to Apple’s Airport Express. You cannot attach an eyeTV to it, or any other TV tuner for that matter (and therefore it cannot record TV shows). It can’t play most codecs out of the box, you can’t buy content directly from the iTunes Store, and it has very limited tech specs…

Even ardent mac addicts must question the appeal of this.  There is nothing compelling about it beyond the improved 12 foot interface.

Meanwhile, my Mac Mini will survive only until I find a MythTV/Linux setup that can replace it in terms ease of use.  If only Apple would open up FrontRow in the meantime, the nice folks at Elgato could complete the integration that we all crave.  The big question for me at the moment is if OS 10.5 (Leopard) will contain an improved Front Row interface.

aehso apple, mac

Pros:

• Nice screen, looks cool.

Cons

• Ergonomics: Two potential barriers here.  First, I’m really not sure about having to use both hands (one to hold, one to point) to use a cell phone.  Seems like a step backwards in HCI to me.  My mum uses two hands to type SMS messages (makes me smile) but ten years of thumb based typing is a tough habit for me to break.  Second, the absence of tactile feedback means unsighted use will be difficult.  No more reaching into your pocket to mute, texting ‘y’ or ‘n’ replies under the table in meetings or at dinner etc. And then there are those folks with poor sight who much rather depend on tactile feedback rather than go looking for there glasses every time they want to use their phone.
• The battery.  If it is sealed into the casing heavy users will not be able to swap a drained battery for a spare charged one.  Now, if I’m on a trans-atlantic flight I don’t want to arrive in the U.S. with a dead phone just because I was catching up on podcasts (and video content) on the way over.  The second concern with the battery relates to OS X.  How efficient is a recently ported OS X kernel at running on embedded hardware, compared to purpose built mobile operating systems like Symbian? 
• The iHandcuffs.  This is a problem I have with Apple’s whole approach to managing media creation and consumption on their hardware.  (Also see Apple TV vs Mac mini for a related discussion that brings further context to what Apple are trying to achieve)
• No Java support and only ‘maybe’ Flash support in an internet browser?  Someone think of the YouTubers!  And what about all those useful J2ME apps?
• OS X but no third party applications.  Sorry, I don’t buy the justifications given.  Sounds like Apple either couldn’t be bothered publishing a polished SDK or actually want to build higher walls around that garden.
• The true cost – €1000+.  Those example estimates are based on network plans that include flat rate data access (which does not exist in Ireland yet).
• No 3G.  Just when the European mobile operators are ramping up their 3G access.  Plans to deliver 3G at sometime in the future but why not now?
• The screen.  My phone goes into my pockets and backpacks along with keys, sand and other scratchy things.  How durable will the screen surface be?  Can it be replaced after a year of wear?
• The iPhone trademark issue.  Bad news, pissing off Cisco like that and it all smells of pots calling kettles black given Apple’s history of protecting.  No doubt this will hurt Apple in the long term.
• The native screen resolution of 480×320.  Transcoding video to natively fit odd resolutions like this (shared by the recent iPods) is a pain in the ass.
• 2 megapixel cameras with no flash really are useless, they shouldn’t have bothered.

I’ve no doubt that the iPhone is a major kick up the arse for the big mobile handset manufacturers (Nokia/SE/Motorola) but remember even if Apple sell 10million+ iPhones that is still only around 1% of the total mobile phone market.  There is still lots of time for the big three to react. 

It’ll also be interesting to see how Apple fare in their dealings with the large European and Asian mobile network operators.  Cingular, with their 58million subscribers are small fish in comparison.

I suspect I’ll be sticking with my K800i or one of it’s successors.

aehso apple, mac

On both of my macs, every time I reboot I get a dialog asking me if I want to install Smart Crash Reports.  I always refuse but the dialog even reappears regardless of a “Don’t Ask Me Again” tick box that it presents.  It took me a good hour to figure out that  VirtueDesktops was responsible for presenting the dialog – it does not mention VirtueDestops at all. 

No matter how useful SCR is to the developers of VirtueDesktops the integration was clearly not well implemented.  Desktop software should never a) present anonymous dialogs and b) ignore preferences specified by user.  And to boot it turns out SCR is a source of some concern. 

I nearly uninstalled VirtueDesktops but I noticed they have ‘fixed’ this by removing SCR from more recent builds of VirtueDesktops – which ones I’m not sure though so I cannot verify the fix.  But there you go, an hour of my life gone tracking this down (and writing this post to hopefully save others similiar pain).

aehso mac

Excellent, Elgato have released an EyeTV 2.3 update that adds a full 10-foot user interface. And it can be controlled using the Apple Remote just like Front Row. It’s not quote TIVO yet but it’s a huge step forward – kudos to Elgato for listening to their users!

I’m now that close to buying a Logitech Harmony remote for my living room – the Apple Remote is cute but the 6-button design is slightly too minimalist to control a Mac mini based HTPC (and control a Philips Cineos TV and a NTL STB). The only blocker at the moment is this damn NTL DVB-C STB (a Pace Micro DC221. Two problems:

• It uses an odd IrDA based infra-red signal protocol that most learning remotes cannot transmit. Red-Eye solves this problem with a “translator” and the same guys also have a Red-Eye Serial that specifically mentions support for the DC221.
• There doesn’t seem to be much/any support in EyeTV for changing channels on the external digital STB. I did find a tool called EyeCaptain that does support mapping external channels to the EyeTV composite or S-Video input but it doesn’t say anything about controlling the current external channel.

Of course if NTL would just let me use my own DVB-C receiver then I’d be give them back their Pace box, and all my problems would go away. All I can say is roll on the arrival of DTT in Ireland (yes, I know, I’m not holding my breath)…

aehso apple, mac, tv

[Update: Fixed - the link to metrics.apple.com seems to have been updated to a correctly configured server, securemetrics.apple.com. Shame they didn't bother testing it before putting it live...]
Deciding to comment on the Apple Discussion about the Front Row DRM issue I’m having, I tried to log onto Apple Support and but my browser immediately warns that while trying to connect to https://metrics.apple.com it was presented with a certificate owned by *.112.207.net. 207.net, despite the alarm bells it might set off, is owned by Omniture (cookie monsters – read the privacy statement here, for what it’s worth)

Does anyone bother test this stuff before it goes live or is gathering those metrics far more important? If I am Joe Mac User and I want to log a support issue with Apple what would my reaction be? Umm, panic, followed by the old “should-I-shouldn’t-I” OK/Cancel button shuffle. Incredibly shoddy, for any commercial website, let alone the website of the shining light of computer usability.

Try it yourself.

aehso apple, https, internet, mac, security

<rant>
I fired up Front Row this morning for some background tunes to my Saturday-morning-flaffing-about routine and discovered to my shock that suddenly my mini is “not authorized” to play a significant chunk of my DRM-free MP3 files. My mp3 files, that I ripped from my CDs and I’m not authorized to play them on my computer. My microwave never tells me that I am not authorized to nuke my food.

It turns out others have recently encountered this issue with FrontRow too yet there is no admission from Apple (that I can find) that this is a bug they will fix which begs the question- was this implemented in the latest updates by design? Meanwhile I have to either move my mp3 files onto the Mini’s internal hard drive (where there is no space) or mess around with ID3 tags in the files. Baah!

I started buying Macs because I was sick of this sort of low level mucking around on machines running the Windows. I do enough of that at work every day, I don’t want the hassle at home.
I’m beginning to sympathise with all this talk of switching.
</rant>

aehso drm, mac, music

Via The Cult of the Mac, a stunning iPhone (iTalk) concept video. 

With fans like that it’s a wonder Apple need a design department at all!

aehso mac