I love my TivoHD so I’d highly recommend it.

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. 

- 2630+ Online TV channels
- 6910+ Video clips
- 4750+ Online Radios
- Dayly updates
- Rating System
- Regular or full-screen mode
- No additional equipments required
- Multiple formats support (Windows Media & RealVideo)
- Easy to use
- Free
- Full-screen mode
- Channels from more than 100 countries.  

I’d like to see an MCE plugin for this; that would be super cool for my home setup.

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.

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.

Under the agreement, Nero will develop a software solution that will bring TiVo features to the personal computer. Capitalizing on the growing PC TV tuner market, it will answer the consumer demand for a trusted PC-based DVR experience for use with the estimated 50.8 million PC TV tuners that will be sold worldwide by 2011, according to In-Stat research report published in April 2007.

I wouldn’t mind running the TiVo software on my home server as a replacement for other DVR software (it’s MCE at the moment but I do like BeyondTV and SageTV as alternative commercial products), but I believe part of TiVo’s strength is its brand recognition and if they are serious about entering the retail market, I’m not sure why they don’t build out their own product and market it directly.

My guess is that this is less about collaborating on PC DVR Software but the beginning of TiVo asserting its intellectual property rights on its patents. My guess is that sometime soon, providers of software like BeyondTV and SageTV will get a note in the mail stating that they’re stepping on TiVo’s patents and they’ll need to pony up or get sued.

(Hat Tip and Discussion: SlashDot.org)