If you have a large music collection like me, you suddenly realize what a pain it isto cart your library around so you can listen to your tunes at work or on the go.  I have an 60gb iPod full of stuff, but that’s only about 1/6 of my music. Not only does it take me forever to move that many songs on to an iPod, it even takes longer for me to whittle down the songlist to make sure the essential stuff gets on there.  The end result is that my iPod song list never gets changed and it is hopelessly out of date.  It’s also a pretty big pain to find the music I’m looking for using the iPod’s user interface.

A couple of my old work colleagues started their own company several months back and now they are finally coming out of stealth mode with their new free web service, Jukefly.com, which lets you listen to your music from anywhere that you have an internet connection.  At this point, I basically have an iTunes style user interface built into my web browser, and I can play any of my songs at work as if I were on my computer at home.  

 

What’s cool about Jukefly is that instead of uploading your music to a server, you simply download a small app that sits on your home computer and communicates with their service. There is no uploading of music or messy configuration and with your music just stored in single location, all you music and playlists are always in sync with the service. Within minutes of signing up, I had access to all my songs and could play them on any computer that has an internet connection.    It’s really handy, and even at this early stage of development, it seems to work seamlessly.

It also has some cool social features that I think will be cool as the site grows.  While you are playing any tune on your computer, you can comment on the song or artist, or see what others have said about it.  It also lets you see other users who have that song and browse their collections to see what other music they have that may be interesting. You can also make other people your “friends” similiar to other social websites, and by doing so, you can play their “shared” playlists.

I think Jukefly has a lot of potential over other music sites I’ve encountered.  I like the idea of having one repository for all my music, playlists, etc. so things are always in sync, and from what they’ve said, they’ll have an open api available in the near future which I think will potentially make it something like the flickr equivalent for music when it comes to widgets.  Potentially, developers could create widgets for facebook and the like that compare and contrast music libraries, playing patterns, etc.

You can check it out here. 

There has been a growing buzz that Microsoft will make a big announcement next week at CES in regards to the Xbox 360 and via The Escapist, it looks like Microsoft may license the platform  to other companies.  According to the article: 

According to a Joystiq report, Seattle Times columnist Brier Dudley has suggested Gates may announce that Microsoft “may be preparing to license the Xbox gaming platform to consumer electronics companies.” If true, outside manufacturers such as Toshiba could build Xbox 360-based gaming consoles that would also integrate other technologies, such as DVR capabilities and an HD-DVD drive. Toshiba is tied closely to the speculation due to previous rumors that the company was already at work on a new and more advanced Xbox system.

This could be a great move by Microsoft which has been struggling on the XBox hardware front with many hardware failures. While now the XBox brand is only associated with gaming, it has become more of a powerhouse for video playback including full support as an MCE extender, as well as a UPnP media streamer.

Next week will be interesting.

Once a person makes the leap and buys a high def television, they quickly come to the realization that standard definition video content looks ugly in comparison.   Providers of connected media players are all now trying to fill the void in their product lines by adding players that support high def content.  The Pinnacle ShowCenter 250HD is one of these players, and at a sub-$200 price point, it’s an attractive product. 

The 250HD supports a ton of video formats including WMV (including DRM), MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, XviD and can support up to a 1080i resolution.  It also has a nice selection of inputs including digital audio so it can accompany your home theatre setup rather easy.  The only input missing, which many people will miss, is HDMI but with other products in this price category such as the Netgear EVA700, this is par for the course. 

 

 The first thing I noticed about the product when I cracked open the box was how small it was.  It’s a bit bigger than a Nintendo Wii, but not by much and I appreciated the look of the box in my home theatre setup.   The one negative is the remote which feels pretty cheap and cheesy.  Many computer peripheral companies trying to enter the home entertainment market underestimate the value users place on the remote and it’s safe to say that Pinnacle didn’t spend much R & D to come up with something fancy.  It’s functional and gets the job done, but I think they added it in without much thought of how and where it would be used.

If you have a Windows PC with Window Media Player 10 or above, setup is a snap and I had streaming video within a couple minutes.  The user interface is functional but not revolutionary but it gets you to your content quickly without a lot of hoopla.  I threw a good set of video content at the 250HD, and for most formats, it handled it well.  I noticed some choppy audio in some of my 1080i wmv movie files, but by and large, it handled my video library well.  The one sore spot for me was AC3 audio, which it didn’t handle at all for me, at least using the standard stereo audio cables (it may very well support it through digital audio although the documentation on the Pinnacle website was spotty).

 

 

All in all, the ShowCenter 250HD is a good product, and at the sub $200 price point, it competes well against other products in the market. If you have a lot of video content on your PC server and want to throw up a lot of pixels on your big screen at a little price, the 250HD is worth considering.

I downloaded the latest firmware update for the XBox 360 last night which included support for streaming Divx/Xvid movies, and it really is a nice update and worked really well.  I threw a couple test videos the box and they all worked well, and the ability to change the aspect ratio on the fly was a nice addition for people who have videos from different sources that have different aspect ratios. The only minor annoyance is the lack of support of Divx/Xvid files via the Media Center Extender interface.  The Xbox has two options for streaming video from a PC, one called Video which works with any PC running WMP 11 that has it set up to share video.  The second is the ability to use the XBox as a full Media Center Extender if you are running MCE on your home server; that works well for streaming live or recorded television (if you use it as a DVR), but the video library embedded in MCE won’t stream Divx movies to the XBox.    You can still get to your videos the first way, but you need to leave MCE on your XBox to do it.   Hopefully they’ll fix this in the future since MCE is a pretty good product and when connected with the XBox, it makes a great way to distribute video.  

Via MissingRemote.com, the MediaPortal guys announced a new fully re-written version of MediaPortal that includes uPnP support so you can use it more as a Media Server as opposed to a standalone product.

I’m really looking forward to taking it for a spin.

Missing Remote has the list and it’s a handy checklist to use on the spouse when she inevitably asks, “Why is there a computer sitting in our living room?”

I really hope it’s true. It would make life easier for streaming videos throughout the house. We should see pretty soon since rumors are that the XBox 360 fall update will it in early December.

http://kotaku.com/gaming/rumor/is-xbox-360-getting-divx-321004.php

Found via eHomeUpgrade, there is a great article from Robert Green on how to set up your PC server to stream video to your PS3 or XBox 360. Also, there’s a handy list of software products that act as UPnP servers.

Engadget spotted a new HD Media Streamer called EZFetch which sounds pretty cool from the specs. Available for $249 online, it supports a lot of formats and is capable of producing a 1080p output should you have 1080p content. It includes a DVI output with a HDMI adaptor included in the box. It also includes integration with Nokia NSeries phones, if that excites you in some metaphysical way.

Sounds like a cool product at a low price point; the world needs more media streamers with open standards to compete with the AppleTV.

On October 22nd, SanDisk introduced a unique product TakeTV, a usb thumb drive and media player mashup to simplify playing downloaded video on your television.    NewTeeVee.com has an excellent article describing the product and it’s accompanying download service, Fanfare, which has shows from CBS and Showtime, among others.

The product includes a specialized thumbdrive that attaches to a remote, and a simple dock to connect to your television.  The idea is that users can just plug in their thumbdrive and download a show, and use the old fashion sneakerNet to hook it up to the television.  There is no need to hook up a networked device and have another computer running acting like a media server.  At $99 for the 4GB model (there is a $149 8GB model as well) , it’s a low cost solution for getting your tv connected.

On the content side, SanDisk has introduced FanFare, which is a online web service providing encrypted content that can only be played on the TakeTV.  FanFare comes as a windows application that seamlessly downloads shows from their server and puts them on the TakeTV thumb drive.

The sub-$100 price point seems like a magical place to be, but I wonder if it wouldn’t be worth $50 more to buy a Zune ($79 if you can find it on woot.com) or other full portable video player that has the ability to play video on the TV.  The trick really is making the download fast and easy, but with the small 1Mbit DSL connection, it still can take hours to download a movie depending on the format.

The lack of screen and portable playing I think could be compensated if it support HDTV, something that the current version lacks.  With HDTV sales taking off, this kind of product could find a better niche over an iPod or Zune by supporting HDTV resolutions.  Watching standard resolution video on an HDTV is just turning into a drag and finding a way to get downloaded content easily will be the next battleground for connected devices.

It’s an interesting take on a common problem, and with it’s simple implementation and price point, it might make some fans.