Category Archives: home theater

Give Amazon credit for great data on Blu-ray Lord of the Rings

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I’ve been among the many movie fans disappointed by the studios’ greedy Blu-ray releases. Last year’s issue of the Lord of the Rings trilogy (non-extended editions) was probably an all-time low. New Line Cinema paid the price, with so many one-star reviews on Amazon that the discs were eventually consigned to the store’s virtual discount bin for half off.

Now, with the release of the extended edition LOTR trilogy on Blu-ray in a “limited edition,” Amazon, at least, seems to be more concerned with customer satisifaction.

The first thing you notice on the pre-order page is a warning alerting you that a non-limited edition version, presumably with just the longer movies and not the days’ worth of extras will also be released soon (presumabaly at a lower price). But scroll down futher and there is a really cool and useful chart of all LOTR DVD and Blu-ray releases.

Now you can see pretty clearly which movies and extras that are on the upcoming discs you already own from buying previous sets. That may hurt sales of the “limited edition” some — do you really need to have a copy of “Cameron Duncan: The Inspiration for Into the West” in high definition if you’ve already got it on the Platinum series DVD set? Maybe not. But it is a really pro-customer move by Amazon for which they should be applauded.

Getting iTunes to sync standard def videos to your iPad

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We’re big fans of the recent PBS Masterpiece series Downton Abbey and bought the high-definition version from iTunes to watch on the big TV that is connected to our Mac mini media server. But when my wife asked me to load the series onto her iPad recently, I ran into an annoying syncing problem based on iTunes’s default treatment of the iPad.

iTunes wants to sync the space-wasting high-definition version of any movie or TV show you own in HD onto the iPad despite the device’s less than high-def 1024 X 768 pixel screen. This was happening even though we also have the standard-def version. iTunes just ignored it. So I couldn’t manage to fit all 7 Downton Abbey episodes (iTunes only sold the British-aired 7 episode version even in the US) with the other music and apps and so on that live on the wife’s iPad.

Messing around with iTunes, I couldn’t find any option or setting until I re-plugged in her iPad. Low and behold, in iTunes, on the “Summary” tab for the iPad, scroll down to the list of setting and there’s a check box for “Prefer standard definition videos.”so if you want iTunes to sync standard definition video to your iPad by default, click it and go.

The future of Apple computing isn’t all led by Apple

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There’s a great video up on Macworld’s site of a conversation between four highly knowledgeable Mac pundits about the “future of the Mac.” The participants were Daringfireball’s John Gruber and Tidbits’ Adam Engst along with Jason Snell and Dan Moren from Macworld. The discussion was interesting and worth the 48 minutes or so of my time, but I was struck by one kind of shocking oversight or blind spot demonstrated by all four panelists. In looking to the future of the Mac, there was hardly any mention of any products, services or software besides Apple’s. I think Dropbox may have been the only non-Apple company mentioned in a forward-looking way.

That’s a real shame because while Apple has led the personal computing revolution for pretty much the last decade, whether it be via Mac OS X, the iMac, the MacBook, the iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad etc, there have been plenty of important developments from others and plenty of misfires from Apple. And Apple is far too smart to ignore what others are doing well. The future of the Mac will most likely involve a fruitful and innovative mash-up of the best ideas both from within and without Apple.

Start, at the top, with Google. Clearly the future of the Mac is going to be more cloud-based. Apple has built a huge and mysterious server farm in North Carolina, principal purpose TBA. The newest MacBook Airs are also clearly intended to be more cloud-connected. But Apple is not a pioneer in cloud services — the opposite in fact. There’s no Apple cloud video or music services yet and its MobileMe offering is so overpriced and lacking as to be a joke to even many of the Mac faithful like me.

I’ve been a paying MobileMe subscriber for many, many years. In the beginning, I used web hosting, web-based email, web bookmarks list, syncing of data across multiple Macs and even paid for extra space to use for cloud backup and file sharing. In the past few years, though, competitors have surpassed MobileMe in nearly every area and I find the only thing I really need it for anymore is automatic syncing of my Mac address book. Gmail is the best web mail, Firefox syncs my bookmarks, Dropbox and Mozy do cloud-based file storage and backup and Bluehost and WordPress do my web sites. If Google improved its Contacts service, which needs a HUGE amount of improvement, I might not rely on MobileMe for anything anymore at all.

A second area of focus for future computing developments will come from cloud-based entertainment. For a while, Apple seemed to be almost purposely ignoring the potential. The second-gen Apple TV finally seems to be a recognition that streaming video is the best option for many scenarios but Netflix, Amazon, Xbox, Tivo and others have been here for a while. Streaming music from Spotify, Rhapsody, Napster and others also beats iTunes in some ways. I love the model popularized by services like Amazon’s Kindle and its online video store, where the company maintains all your content in the cloud for download to your various devices whenever and where ever you want. And it’s galactically simpler than maintaining an iTunes server in your home. Don’t even get me started on the mess Apple made of our various iTunes libraries with the iTunes Plus upgrade program. Blech!

In the Amazon model, if I want to read a new book on my Kindle on the train to work, I buy it and download it there. Later in bed, I have my iPad and I download it there. A few weeks later, I need to quote a passage at work so I fire up the Kindle for Mac program and access it there. I wish iTunes worked the same way for all the zillions of dollars I have spent on movies, TV shows, music and, now, apps.

Finally, not all hardware innovation arises out of Cupertino’s labs. As I blogged about yesterday, I think the new Motorola Atrix 4G smartphone is the first step towards a promising converged computing future. The Atrix has a speedy dual core processor, up to 48 GB of storage and fourth-generation mobile connectivity (I know, I know, AT&T’s 4th gen network is kind of bogus, but roll with me). Its HDMI port is capable of outputting high-definition video. A notebook shell dock turns the Atrix into a laptop and a media dock and wireless remote connect it to a TV.

(Update 2/3/11 – oops, Motorola seems to be way overpricing the laptop dock)

Once upon a time, laptops were so underpowered and expensive relative to desktop computers, few people could really function with just a laptop. But Moore’s law and all that has brought us such ultra-powerful laptops that it’s now the norm. Personally, I rely on my 13″ MacBook Pro Mac PowerBook as my sole machine (with external storage and the fantabulous Apple LED Cinema Display as my dock at home). In a few more years, with super-powered smart phones, proliferating docking options and cloud-based storage and services, the Atrix model will predominate. Peter Rojas’s great proposal to standardize docking interfaces also makes a lot of sense in this future.

And just as a final aside on the Macworld panel, I think the future of desktop computing will not be the iOS “every app in full screen” model, which the panel seemed to think was a real possibility. Lots of research has been done showing people are more productive using larger screens and multiple screens to keep more of their work in front of their eyes. Right now, I have MarsEdit open to write this post, two browser windows for finding links and background material and a Skitch window for grabbing screenshots. If I had to hit control-tab or something every time I wanted to remember what i had just read or to see the web page I needed to reference in this blog post, I think I’d go batty.

I found it a little condescending the way the panel seemed to assume the most important or most common user of the future would be the your-65-year-old-mom type. In fact, if anything, I think younger generations are more comfortable with all things computer-y, even the wild and crazy practices of having multiple windows open on-screen and having files stored in a “documents” folder.

NB This essay was inspired in part by that kitschy, trashy 1990s television show Time Trax. You remember, the one with the future cop who traveled back to 1993 with a super-computer-powered credit card.

Your thoughts, arguments and corrections, as always, welcomed in the comments.

Trouble finding the best blu-ray versions of Harry Potter

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I’ve written before about the difficulty of finding blu-ray movies that look good and avoiding those that look worse in high-definition. Certainly, the modern and lushly filmed Harry Potter film series looks good in blu-ray. But which edition should you buy? Regular blu-ray disks or the pricey ultimate editions.

Unfortunately, the Warner Brothers studio has made this choice a lot harder than it should be by changing their ultimate edition playbook midway through the release schedule. The first two ultimates, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, included extended movies with deleted scenes added back into the full flick. They also had copies of so-called digital editions that you can load directly onto an iPod or other portable devices.

But the next two ultimates, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, veered away from the fan-friendly model of releases one and two. These editions shuffled the extra scenes to another disk, so no “extended” cut of the movie is available. And the iPod-friendly digital editions have to be downloaded off the web.

Not surprisingly, the two later disks have been hit by a one-star rating campaign on Amazon. These kind of campaigns can bite, as we saw recently with the Lord of the Rings blu ray disks.

Depending on your blu-ray budget, it also may be worth factoring into your decision equation that Amazon is selling a bundle of the basic versions of all six movies for under $70 while each of the first four ultimate versions costs at least $34.

Earlier Coverage: One star boycotts may be working (10/4/2010)

Internet TV a long way off because that’s how they want it

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(screenshot via nytimes.com)

(updated 10/22) There’s a really important article semi-buried on page B3 of the New York Times today: Internet is a Weapon in Cable Fight.

You should go read it but the short version is that the Fox network is fueding with cable provider Cablevision over payments for carrying regular TV stations on the cable system. These kinds of so-called retransmission disputes break out all the time and the usual consequence is some TV channels get pulled from cable viewers until the negotiations are done.

But this time, Fox tried something new. They also decided to block anyone using Cablevision’s INTERNET service from watching shows online via Fox.com and they forced Hulu.com, which they partly own, to do the same. The block applied to anyone who had Cablevision as their ISP, even people who didn’t subscribe to Cablevision’s video service (such as people who use DirecTV). In essence, Fox is saying Internet viewers only get to watch online because cable viewers are paying retransmission fees.

And that may be fine if you’re happy to pay those fees. But it’s murky at best for those who want to go all online and cut the cable. It’s the same urge to preserve dying revenue streams that prompts the wacky windowing of movies online because they have just hit pay-per-view. And as long as it goes on, it’s tough to escape your cable connection.

UPDATE: Now comes news that the networks ABC, CBS and NBC are locking out Google TV users from their web sites.

One-star boycotts may be working

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There was a lot of debate over the past few years about consumers rating down books, movies and other products with one-star reviews because of issues not directly related to the quality of the entertainment. Rather, fans were upset about formatting, pricing, obnoxious digital rights management and other media deficiencies. Authors and producers whined but Jason Kottke cut right to the heart of the matter in a March, 2010 post, “The new rules for reviewing media,” which I quoted heavily a few months later in a post about unworthy Blu-Ray disks. In today’s multi-device, multi-screen, multi-option world, matters of formatting and media and pricing and DRM and so on are just as relevant to a consumer’s entertainment purchasing decisions as the quality of the content.

Now some evidence that those one-star boycotts are having an impact.

I got one of Amazon.com’s usual email tip sheets today, this one filled with heavily discounted DVD and Blu-Ray disks. Most of the goods were what you’d expect like the 25th anniversary edition of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in high-definition. But there amidst all the junk — with a pathetic customer rating of 1-1/2 stars — was the Blu-Ray collection of the three Lord of the Rings movies selling for more than half off the cover price. How can it be that one of the most beloved and profitable movie franchises of all time is hated and rejected on beautiful, high-definition Blu-Ray?

There’s a simple reason and I’ve discussed it before. The studios decided to release this wonderful set of movies only with the shorter, seen-in-theaters versions, not the extended director’s cuts that came out later. It seems after rooking us for double-fare in the original DVD release, New Line Home Video thought we’d fall for that trick again. No dice. Customers got up in arms and, now it seems, stayed away in droves. The one-star boycott appears to be working.

UPDATE: Next major battle? E-books priced for more than the hardcover versions? The New York Times reports on crazy Kindle pricing of the latest Ken Follett and James Patterson tomes. Oy vey.

Caught up with too many remote controls for the home theater

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One of the biggest problems so far with our home theater set-up is juggling the three remote controls plus keyboard/track pad needed to operate all the various devices.

The Samsung TV has a control as does the Samsung Blu-Ray player. Each of those two controls can sort of control some of the functions of the other’s but there are maddening gaps in functionality. The Tivo also has a remote that partially control the TV set, but not the disc player (oh how I miss my first generation Tivo Toshiba box with built in DVD player).

Seems maddening that even the two remotes from Samsung aren’t interchangeable. For example, either the TV or the disc controller can switch input sources. But one particularly annoying problem is when you change the input, a hideous semi-transparent pop-out menu continues to block more than half of the screen for 5 minutes after you’ve made your selection unless you hit the “exit” key on the TV remote. There’s an exit key on the disc player remote, too, but it doesn’t make the menu go away. The TV remote has no “menu” button for skipping annoying previews on DVDs. And the Tivo remote can change inputs but can’t make the ugly menu disappear. All three can change the TV volume. Hooray!

Using the attached Mac mini requires changing the input source via one of the three remote controls, hitting the “exit” button on the TV remote and then picking up our Logitech Novo keyboard. That was to be expected, but seeing as it’s the fourth input tool, it’s not helping our perception problem here.

Possible solutions? One would be to shell out for yet another remote, a universal remote. Logitech’s Harmony remotes seem to have a lot of functions but the versions that are simplest to operate cost a lot of money. For even more money, Phillips has its line of Pronto universal remotes that look really cool (pictured below) and can even control your lights, your thermostat and so on. May be hard to program, however, according to some reviewers. Samsung makes a universal remote but it’s not Tivo compatible. I wonder if it has an “exit” button.

Phillips Pronto universal remote

Another angle of attack is the doo-hicky you can attach to an iPhone or iPod touch that will allow it to send out signals just like the TV remotes. One called the L5 Remote includes a cool red plastic doo-hickey. Thinkflood’s RedEye seems to translate controls commands sent over wifi from your iPhone into IR codes that your TV can understand. The problem here is keeping your iWhatever in the vicinity of the TV or some kid detaching the doo-hickey and losing it.

So any suggestions out there in the peanut gallery? Anybody have experience with any of these alternatives?

This post is part of a continuing series about using a brand new Mac Mini with an HDMI port (purchased in June 2010) connected to a high-definition television. To read all of our adventures jumping through hoops, losing remotes and forgetting the password to bypass parental controls, see this page with all my DIY home theater posts.

New AppleTV may be great but it solves nothing

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“I, for one, do not think that the problem was that the band was down. I think that the problem may have been that there was a Stonehenge monument on the stage that was in danger of being crushed by a dwarf.”

Steve Jobs gives great gadget and he was in fine form on Wednesday introducing new iPods, a revamped iTunes and a completely overhauled AppleTV. Can the mighty Jobs finally jump-start the digital living room entertainment future? I don’t think so. While there’s a lot to like about the new AppleTV, it still fails to address the major impediments. We remain, sadly, stuck in a convoluted and costly transition period.

If you’ve followed the home theater hijinks on the this blog, you may remember that my high definition TV gets one (expensive) set of programming from Verizon cable with tuning and DVR capabilities from a Tivo box. Blu-Ray and DVD come via a separate Samsung player. And downloadable and streamed Internet video from iTunes and web sites arrive on a connected Mac mini. Monthly fees go to Verizon and Tivo with extra charges to iTunes and disc retailers. Occasionally we buy downloadable content from Amazon on the Tivo, too. That’s three boxes, four remotes and a big mess o’ cash.

Digital TV programs and movies come and go from these different platforms, sometimes disappearing to protect other distribution outlets (and revenue streams) while carrying inexplicable price differences and incompatible DRM locks.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Music fans can choose from among millions and millions of songs to buy from a bunch of competing retailers that can be played on any device of their choosing. Or, they can pay a modest monthly fee and get access to the proverbial jukebox in the sky. Sure, the music labels have too much control over pricing but competition among retailers means songs go on sale all the time. We’ve built up a gargantuan digital music library at this point that we can listen to in any room in the house, in the car, on a business trip and so on.

Plenty of folks have great ideas about the real answer should be. Don MaCaskill has a detailed blog post (“What the AppleTV should have been“) seeking a far more open model, with content makers and distributors allowed to hook in and set their own business terms (ie HBO makes programs available only to HBO cable subscribers, Hulu streams to anyone). Khoi Vinh is thinking along the same lines, hoping content makers and gear makers can all get on the same page and simplify (“Apple Blinks in the Living Room“).

Another thing that would help would be a truly converged device. Long ago, Tivo allowed other manufacturers to license its software. We had one of these first generation boxes, made by Toshiba, that included a Tivo plus a DVD player and burner. This eliminated the need for a separate DVD player though it did not have a cable tuner and required a jerry-rigged cable box controller. Since then, Tivo boxes have incorporated cable tuners but eliminated disc players.

So what’s holding up video? To paraphrase the Spinal Tap quote above, I do not think the problem is with the gadget makers. I think that the problem is the entertainment and cable industries’ dwarves trampling on our TVs and iPads and smart phones. And because the old ways of selling and distributing video entertainment remain incredibly lucrative, nothing Apple does is going to be much help. The annoyingly limited, fragmented, inconsistent and costly realities of the digital video marketplace look to be entrenched for the foreseeable future. For anyone with even the slightest bit of optimism about this situation, I’m afraid it’s going to be a long, long wait.

Find the best Blu-Ray movies ’cause some don’t look so good

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As the super-duper-hyper-amazing home theater plan moves into high-gear, I’m discovering an unfortunate side-effect from high-definition television. Lots and lots of shows and movies don’t look any better in high-def and, in fact, many look worse. We have a couple of sources of HD programming including HD shows on our Verizon Fios cable, HD downloads from the iTunes store and Blu-Ray disks via a Samsung BD-C6500 player.

The other night we were flipping through HD movie channels and hit on a movie we really like, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. But in high-def, there was too much snap to some of the colors and the actors faces frankly looked a little too real. Then again, the Blu-Ray copy of James Cameron’s epic western in space, Avatar, looked stunning and fantastic in HD while the also-included DVD paled in comparison.

This all ties in to a great post Jason Kottke wrote after some people started giving one-star reviews to the Blu-Ray version of the Lord of the Rings trilogy because the included movies were the theater cuts and not the director’s cuts. Some people, particularly people in the content producing business, whined that it wasn’t fair to trash a disk just because a desired version wasn’t yet available. But Jason made the absolutely brilliant point that in this day and age, formats and versions matter, especially when big book publishers and Hollywood studios want you to pay two, three or four times for the same basic content. He concludes:

Newspaper and magazine reviewers pretty much ignore this stuff. There’s little mention of whether a book would be good to read on a Kindle, if you should buy the audiobook version instead of the hardcover because John Hodgman has a delightful voice, if a magazine is good for reading on the toilet, if a movie is watchable on an iPhone or if you need to see it in 1080p on a big TV, if a hardcover is too heavy to read in the bath, whether the trailer is an accurate depiction of what the movie is about, or if the hardcover price is too expensive and you should get the Kindle version or wait for the paperback. Or, as the above reviewers hammer home, if the book is available to read on the Kindle/iPad/Nook or if it’s better to wait until the director’s cut comes out. In the end, people don’t buy content or plots, they buy physical or digital pieces of media for use on specific devices and within certain contexts. That citizen reviewers have keyed into this more quickly than traditional media reviewers is not a surprise.

So at least as far as collecting HD content to own, where is a poor Blu-Ray buyer to turn? Here are a couple of ideas and please — please — add more of your suggestions in the comments.

1. Amazon.com customers have posted zillions of different kinds of lists and in the Blu-Ray area everyone is focused on Kottke’s exact point: which movies are worthy of Blu-ray treatment. To find some of these lists, go to pretty much any product page and scroll down until on the extreme left side of the page you see the box called “listmania” which includes two relevant lists and a search box. Type “blu-ray” into the search box. Some great lists come up including ones I’ve perused by Elizabeth Hinton (“This is a list of Blu Ray films that I have found to be worth spending the extra money for– Even if you already own it on DVD”), Porfie Medina (“Blu-ray Disc movies you can show off on your 1080p HD TV”) and Thivanka Rukshan Perera (“The myth: old movies won’t look good in high-def”).

2. Obviously, movies that have won — or even been nominated for — the Oscar award for best cinematography are likely to be great choices for HD viewing. Sure, you can go to the official Oscars site but that’s not nearly as user friendly as the CinemaSquid site’s search engine. Here, you can find all the winners and nominees for any award that are already out on Blu-Ray in a sortable list with viewer ratings specific to HD features, links to buy in different countries and so on. Check out their best cinematography listings to see what I mean.

3. Ask around. Early adopters have been watching Blu-ray movies for a couple of years now so before you buy a disk, ask a friend. I can tell you that so far, I am 3 for 3. I bought Blu-Ray versions of Avatar, Star Trek (the recent rebooted version with Chris Pine) and Pride and Prejudice (the recent one starring Keira Knightley) and all three look magnificent in high-definition.

Other suggestions for sources of Blu-Ray advice are, as I said, extremely welcome in the comments.

Using a new HDMI Mac Mini with my TV: Early days

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This will be the first in a continuing series of posts about using a brand new Mac Mini with an HDMI port (purchased in June 2010) connected to a high-definition television. To read all of our adventures jumping through hoops, losing remotes and forgetting the password to bypass parental controls, see this page with all my DIY home theater posts.

Searching along with my fellow TV and movie junkies for the home theater holy grail, I’ve wandered in the wilderness for many years. We have a pretty typical 21st century entertainment consuming household with adults and kids watching cable TV, DVD movies and stuff from the Internets including Youtube videos, purchased movies, shows and music videos and, increasingly, rented movies. Hardware-wise, we’ve been hooked on Tivo for a few years now, we obviously have many iPods, the occasional iPad and, though our music collection is entirely digital at this point, a gazillion DVDs. For purchased downloadable content, iTunes is our go-to choice though increasingly we rent from Amazon Unbox which can send flicks straight to our Tivo.

When Apple TV hit the scene in 2007, I took a long, hard look. In many ways, it seemed like just what I wanted: an easy to set-up, easy-to-use digital storage box for all our digital photos, videos and music that could be played back via HDTV or stereo. But the limitations were much too limiting — only compatible with a few video formats, — and the tiny storage capacity was even more ridiculous. So I passed.

I also began avidly followed the niche crowd that was trying to use Mac Minis as souped up Apple TVs. The challenges involved get clean digital signals with sound to the TV screen as well as finding a good software interface to manage a multimedia library. It never quite seemed simple enough to be worth all the trouble.

Until now…

When Apple recently unveiled a new, souped-up Mac Mini with an HDMI connection — the exact port needed to send both sound and video to an HDTV set — I jumped. It was time to get off the sidelines and join the experimenters.

The first choice was which Mac Mini to buy. I opted for the server version which has two speedy 500 GB 7200 RPM hard drives (totaling 1 TB) and no DVD drive. Since the plan was to rip all our DVDs to the hard drive, the only physical disks I’d be wanting to play would be Blu-Ray and Apple’s drives aren’t compatible with that higher definition format. The server Mac Mini’s double the storage and faster drives made it the more logical choice.

Once the little guy — and I do mean little — arrived, I hit the next challenge. The server operating system had no iLife programs — no iTunes or iPhoto. Luckily, iTunes is a free download and I own a “family pack” of iLife 2009, so it was easy to load up the new server with those two critical programs. The server mini did come with Apple’s limited if serviceable front-end for playing media on big television sets known as Front Row.

After installing the software, I copied all the media files from my laptop where they currently live to one of the server’s drives and imported them into a brand new iTunes library. That went pretty smoothly, though some audiobooks purchased long ago wanted to be authorized by Audible.com and my account had apparently used up its allotment of authorized computers. A quick email customer service sorted that out.

Then I brought the mini into the family room and connected via an HDMI cable to our Samsung HDTV. The display automatically configured itself to the proper 1080P output although the edges of the screen, including the critical top menu bar, were out of view. But there’s now a simple setting to fix that problem in System Preferences > Displays called Overscan. There’s a slider control you adjust until the invisible outside edges become visible. I believe that was one of the issues that drove folks crazy a few years ago trying to get minis and HDTVs connected. I also had at the ready a Logitech diNovo Edge bluetooth keyboard (Mac edition). This guy has a touchpad built-in so you can sit on the couch and wirelessly operate your TV-connected Mac without a mouse. Very handy. It also has dedicated buttons to bring up Front Row, control the iTunes player etc. (You have to install Logitech’s control center program to get the special buttons working properly).

I called up Front Row and it played everything just fine. Sound initially emanated from the mini’s own tiny speaker until I went to System Preferences > Sound > Output and selected the TV.

I had an old Apple infrared remote, the one that looks like a pack of gum, lying around but it seems unable to make a connection to the 2010 Mac Mini. I verified that the Mini does indeed have an infrared receiver, so that’s just a matter of grabbing the newer Apple remote that’s more tubular in shape at some point. UPDATE: No — as commenter Mikeo below points out, the server mini just has communication with the remote turned off by default. To turn it back on, head to System Preferences > Security and unclick the check next to “Disable remote control infrared receiver.”

Alright — well, that’s as far as I’ve gotten in the first couple of days. Future plans include ripping a whole bunch of DVDs, experimenting with other user interfaces like Plex, seeking out some streaming web video and using an iPhone or ipad as a remote control. Check back later…