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iPod touch: device lust

Sep 7

Posted by Vic in Hardware | No Comments

They’ve done it to me once more, those folks at Apple.  In 2003, while I was in the US for a residency trip, I fell in device-lust with the third-generation iPod.  I brought one home, and I’m still using it (on its original battery, I might add, although there’s a bit of a telltale bulge developing on the rear casing).  Now, a new range of iPods has been released, and I’ve got that familiar tingling in the back pocket… and an unexpected reflection on technology’s progress (or lack thereof).

A little while back I decided that my next portable audio device would not be an iPod.  I really don’t want to be tied to the Mac for something as simple as music and podcasts, and figured that I must be able to do these things with Linux.  To this end, I experimented with using Amarok to talk to my iPod but it just didn’t work well — corrupted playlists, Amarok refusing to simply unmount the iPod without giving it a soft reset, which caused it to reboot and remount again.  Tools like Rhythmbox and gtkpod were no different, which is hardly surprising since they all use the same libraries for actually talking to the iPod.  So, I decided that as long as the iPod still lived it would be enslaved to the Mac, and my music would stay managed by iTunes until such time as I could justify replacing the iPod.

Creative nearly had me a few months ago: the Zen Vision:W (I think that’s what it’s called, their wide-screen video device) has a good feature set…  but it just didn’t look right.  The 60GB version was too chunky — too thick, mainly — and the interface just felt wrong (although I concede that a little bit of time cleansing myself of iPod interface conditioning would probably have got me right).

Now, Apple has released a new range of iPods… and has again made the competition look old.

Many of you out there will be unfamiliar with the hype around the iPhone — as it is a North-America-only (USA-only?) device at this time, that’s not surprising.  However if you have seen it (or even only pictures of it) and you are outside iPhone-owning territory you may well have wished that the iPod functionality of the iPhone was available as a standalone device unencumbered by the regulatory crap that a phone has to comply with.

Well, wish no longer — that’s pretty much what the new iPod touch is.  All I’ve seen about this thing is on web pages — firstly on Wired and then on Apple’s web site — but I am head-over-heels in device-lust with this thing. :(

There isn’t much I can say about the features that Apple can’t say better (besides, this wasn’t meant to be a ra-ra post for the thing).  Check it out at Apple’s site: locally to me, that’s here at Apple Australia.  Of note though are the fact that it has Wi-Fi built-in, and comes with the Safari web browser, integrated YouTube browser, and integrated connectivity to the iTunes Music Store (you can buy music from the Store on the iPod, and when you next sync to iTunes it will merge the purchased music into your iTunes library).

I have to say though, the biggest surprise I got was when I went to the Apple Store to check the price.  While waiting for the page to load, I did a swift estimation and figured that the 16GB version would be over AU$800.  I nearly fell on the floor when the figure came up: AU$549.  My current iPod cost me around US$420 at a time when the Aussie dollar was lucky to fetch 60 US cents.

The one feature which took my breath away is probably one that I will never see though.  Apple has penned a deal with Starbucks to hook the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store component of the iPod touch into Starbucks free Wi-Fi.  Whenever you walk into an enabled Starbucks, the iPod touch automatically recognises Starbucks’ Wi-Fi network and hooks up.  Wait, it gets better.  When this happens, your iPod touch will show the details of the song playing in the store at the time, and give you a link to the iTunes WiFi Music Store to buy the music.

Why did that take my breath away?  Because right back to when I was at Uni, this kind of integration has been foretold but has always been “somewhere in the near future”.  The petrol pump that would automatically register the car’s chip and charge the fuel to the owner’s account.  The food packaging, fridges and pantries that would update the shopping list on your wristwatch, and the supermarket trolley that read the shopping list and displayed the layout of the supermarket with the locations of your needed items shown.  This is the “vision of the near future” that I was given by technologists (and instead we got RFID).

I was once standing in the Borders bookstore in South Yarra and heard a lovely song that moved me deeply (and no, I’m not prone to being overcome by store music).  A fortnight later I was in Singapore and heard the same song while having breakfast with Susan in the hotel restaurant.  On both occasions there was no-one around who would have been able to assist me locating the song — such is the way of telco-piped ambiance — and I was left to Googling remembered fragments of lyrics (successfully, I must say, for that’s how I was introduced to The Sundays).  I’ve never bought music online, but if I could have looked at the device in my pocket and instantly known what that song was, they’d have gotten a sale for sure.

Thinking about the technology behind it, it really is madenningly simple (says he with perfect hindsight).  Something like a DAAP server (wouldn’t even have to be one in each store) streaming to the store’s Wi-Fi, and an AirPort with an amp and speakers attached (instead of the usual piped music affair) picking up the same DAAP stream.  Regardless, to think that at least a little bit of that “vision of the future” is at last a reality is, well… nice.  I feel a little older, but in a good way. :)

Alas, the iPod touch guided tour video shows the start of the rollout of the “Starbucks” feature: a map of the continental USA, with New York City marked for September, Seattle in October, then LA February 2008 and Chicago in March.  Apple’s iTunes Starbucks site says “major metropolitan areas in the US by the end of 2008″.  No mention of internationals.  Sigh.  Oh, but the feature works with iTunes on a PC and with the iPhone too (so now we have three ways to miss out, right?).

The new iPod range is available now, with the exception of my new objet d’adore which is on the Apple Store for advance ordering with availability at the end of September.  Other newcomers are massive capacity iPod Video: now called “iPod classic” and starting with 80GB capacity or go to a whopping 160GB version, new iPod nano that’s shorter and wider than the old one but now does video, and new colours for the iPod shuffle.

So much for my tech spending freeze…  I figure I’ll spend the next few weeks researching what life would be like with one of these — whether going down to 16GB storage would actually hurt or not; how movies really look in H.264; whether I’d have to re-encode all my movies, or worse, encode them in H.264 as well as MP4 (since the few times I tried to play back H.264 encodes using XBMC were less than joyous); whether the video functions would even be relevant since all I ever do is listen to podcasts.  Then, when the thing is actually in stores… just go and get one anyway.

Tech addiction sucks like that.

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Linksys WIP330 – another tale of hardware woe

Jul 2

Posted by Vic in Hardware | 1 Comment

I was on eBay not long ago and happened across a listing for the WIP330 (big brother to the WIP300) for much less than local retail.  I decided to take advantage of: a) the good price, b) the current strong position of the A$ versus the US$, and c) it was within 1 hour of closing and the vendor was giving 10% off…  and bought it.  I honestly should not have bothered: this is a terrible piece of equipment, and now sits beside my bricked Cisco 7970 as the worst online auction purchase I’ve made.  But first, a little history…

Some time ago I saw some reports of Linksys releasing a couple of Wi-Fi VoIP handsets.  Reviews looked moderately promising, but as one of the devices (the “prestige” version) was based on Windows CE I was disappointed in the lost potential of the device.  But then I saw that eBay listing, and I jumped immediately into Gadget Acquisition Syndrome justification mode.  ”Sure, it’s based on Windows CE, but haven’t you always told people that you believe in horses-for-courses?” said my inner gadget-junkie.

So about a fortnight later the thing arrived.  I charged it for a decent amount of time, then configured it for my wireless.

“Failed to connect”.

Google then revealed a litany of people being driven crazy by this device’s inability to connect to a WPA-PSK network.  At this point I began to feel very much like Stuart Langridge of LugRadio fame, who only discovered after buying a new laptop that his research had failed him and he had indeed bought a laptop of “military-grade proprietariness” (as I seem to recall one of his fellow LugRadio presenters described it).  Had I known that in 2007 a manufacturer of networking equipment (backed by probably the biggest name in corporate and Internet networking today) could release a device that would not connect to a secure network created by THEIR OWN BRAND OF ACCESS POINT (a Linksys WRT54GS[1]), I might have researched that issue further.

Some hope was provided in the form of a firmware update.  Unfortunately, like most pieces of networking kit, firmware updates are delivered over the network…  In this case, the thing couldn’t connect to the network!  I had to shut off encryption on my network for the length of time it took to perform the update — which was doubled by the fact that the firmware on my unit required an interim upgrade to a staging release before the final update (to wip330_v1_02_12S) could be applied.

So with firmware upgraded and encryption re-enabled on my wireless, I tried again…

Same error.

At this point I was very keen to follow this advice and eject the rotten device from my life, but on that page I found the hint that got things working: my access point had AES as well as TKIP enabled, and the WIP330 seems to choke on AES.  Disabling AES on the access point finally got the WIP330 on the network.  At this point my son wanted to watch something via XBMC, and I found that the client Wi-Fi device through which his XBox attaches still had AES defined so could not connect to the network…  Turn AES back on, get the other device attached again, disable AES in it, disable AES in the access point again, and I was set.

Or so I thought.  Later in the day, the WIP330 was off the network again.  Trying to re-connect to my network brought failure, but power-cycling the device got it online again.  Sure enough though, an hour later it was off the network.

One hour.  3600 seconds.  The (default) rekeying interval of a WPA-PSK network.  The chuffing thing fails to complete rekeying and drops the wireless connection.  This time Google has been no help — I guess not enough people persisted through the AES problem to have the thing on the network long enough to hit the rekeying failure.

So right now the thing is useless to me.  I’m even contemplating dragging out my old 802.11b access point for the phone (and another couple of old WPA-incapable devices) to run on, but I think the last thing my neighbourhood needs is another 2.4GHz wireless network.

To try and balance this, I will mention a couple of things I like about it.  While it was on the network, it was easy to connect to Asterisk and get talking.  The device is light (bordering on too light) and the screen is just brilliant.  Sound quality was a bit dodgy, but then I haven’t had a chance to use it for long enough to know for sure (and then I was only talking to myself via the Asterisk echo test application).  One other thing that’s nice is that Windows CE is largely hidden.  There is a browser on the device, which uses the Windows flag as its progress spinner, but other than that it’s out of the way and not screaming “look at me, i’m CE”.

Like I said, however, the fact that in 2007 Linksys can release a device that has such problems just getting connected to a network is a great disappointment.  At this stage I think the best that can come of this device is that enough bad press is spread that they don’t sell at their RRP, forcing the price down and making it affordable enough for some crafty Linux hackers who could put an Open firmware on it.  Or, hope against hope, perhaps Linksys will see their channel back-up with units that won’t move, and switch to a Linux firmware themselves to get them going.

In the meantime, I’ll keep Googling for “wip300 wpa-psk piece of junk”…

[1] To be fair, my WRT54GS is running OpenWRT and not the stock Linksys firmware.  But the binary that provides WPA-PSK in OpenWRT does come straight from Linksys’ firmware…

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My media and Apple TV

May 1

Posted by Vic in Hardware | No Comments

No I did not buy an Apple TV — but seeing them on the shelves at the local Hardly Normal has got me thinking about the dilemma-in-the-making that is my media centre dream.  It all comes down to bandwidth, or lack of it to be specific.  Of the two locations at the Crossed Wires campus that ideally need access to the MythTV backend (or would be good spots to put a backend instead of where it currently is, in our bedroom) neither have wired network access.  My days of streaming low-bitrate MPEG4 and MP3 to XBox Media Centre over 802.11g spoilt me into thinking that all video will stream over 54Mbps…  Not so television!

So, points in favour of Apple TV:
* It has convenient TV-out capability
* It should stream content from the Slug, since I installed mt-daapd/Firefly on there
* Inbuilt 802.11n, so I would just have to upgrade to N-capable Wi-Fi to solve a little of my no-wired-network woe
* It seems to be hackable, so a MythTV frontend might not be out of the question
* It’s not an XBox 360, nor is it a Playstation 3

Points against however:
* The hackability is a bit of a question mark, and not really something to rely upon (as Apple may shut the gate on any of it with a software update)
* Like I need another timewasting hardware device in the house
* Without a MythTV frontend, it doesn’t really solve any problems w.r.t the TV-watching problem (even if video can be automatically exported from MythTV in a iTunes/DAAP-friendly format, I’d need to use another interface like MythWeb or a different MythTV frontend to program the MythTV backend)
* Where’s the “TV” in “Apple TV” anyway?  :)  (oh yeah, you plug it into one, of course… :( )

In a like vein, I’m trying to get LinuxMCE running (so far in a VMware guest) to see if it solves any of my backend troubles.  It looks very promising, but the installer seems to be a bit crumbly — my first install attempt was without sufficient disk space; even after increasing the space the installer just couldn’t get going again.  Lesson learnt, I’m doing the install again with more disk behind it to see what happens.

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More on XBMC — ‘Lets go to the movies!’

Jan 18

Posted by Vic in Fun, Hardware | No Comments

My experiences with XBMC are still happy ones.  I’m learning to live with its lockups (usually caused by me making vicious, unprovoked attacks on it by doing things like pressing buttons on the remote)…  No, that’s too harsh :)   In seriousness, I’m very impressed — almost as impressed with it as I am with how much disk space I’m going to have to buy if I want to rip my DVD collection to play on it!  (I’m beginning to wonder why I’m entering this in the Fun topic…)

I was explaining to a friend just the other day about how DVD was different to CD.  ”Audio CDs,” I said, “are a completely different format to data CDs, which meant that the first CD drives for computrs could not even read music CDs.  With DVDs it’s easier because all DVDs are basically data discs — the ones with movies on just have a special directory layout, and the movie is just simple computer files on the disc.”

What an idiot.  How I regret ever saying anything so stupid!

Over the last week I have tried more than a dozen combinations of software on Mac OS X, Linux and Windows to do the job of getting thosse “simple conputer files” off the DVD and onto my server so that we can view them on XBMC.  First complication is the fact that XBMC currently does not understand DVD menus, and only understands how to read a VIDEO_TS directory if it’s on a physical DVD.  So my first grand plan of simply copying VIDEO_TS to my server was a failure.

Here started my journey into ripping and transcoding.  A journey that has taken me from Mac the Ripper and Handbrake, through drip and quickrip, past countless forum pages and mailing list archives and a side-trip into Forty-Two, to arrive at ffmpegX (Mac) and dvd::rip (Linux).

I almost gave up on dvd::rip when I first set it up.  It has a cluster mode, and I naturally assumed that my Pentium-4 2.4GHz-HT clustered with my dual-Opteron server would make mincemeat of my DVDs (figuratively of course).  Unfortunately the Opteron is not strong on this sort of work (or perhaps the Gentoo ebuilds for the transcode package are not well optimised for AMD64), and the Pentium-4 was held back because it accessed the files over NFS.  That, combined with the fact that I had repeated errors and failed transcodes, drove me back to the Mac.

Not that that’s a bad thing.  Most of the software around is optimised for and benefits greatly from the Altivec engine.  Having a w00ty dual-G5 Power Mac is also a help ;)   Mac the Ripper takes no time at all (well, okay, about 5 minutes) to rip a DVD — maybe a bit longer for a hefty DVD9 — although I do only rip the main feature to save a little time.  Then, using either Handbrake (for simple jobs) or ffmpegX (for better access to tweaking knobs) I make an AVI or MPG out of it.

There are two costs to all of this: 1) time, and 2) storage.

Time: this is actually a double-edged sword.  Not only does it take a sodding-long time to actually do the transcode (luckily you don’t have to sit by it) but I then have to transfer the file to the server, then light up XBMC and give it a test.  Not necessary to watch the whole thing (usually the first minute or so is enough to tell you how far out of sync the audio is).

Storage: I thought that editing Mini-DV and mastering that to DVD takes storage…  There is no way I will rip my whole DVD collection.  Apart from the fact that there are some movies that you just have to watch in original quality (oh, didn’t I mention that?  Yes, transcoding does require you to sacrifice some picture quality, although you do have a little control over just how much you do lose), I can’t justify putting more storage in the server just to watch the occasional movie.

So what will I use this for?  Some things are ideal — I can see the kids videos that get played on endless repeat being done this way.  Nicholas will be able to do it himself without us worrying about DVD drawers and smudges on discs (just have to make sure I can lock out the “educational videos” from his set ;)   And, some things like the Bottom stage shows and episodes that we put on just for a laugh sometimes.  But not Matrix — not in MPEG4, anyways ;)

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XBox modding

Jan 9

Posted by Vic in Hardware | No Comments

Fun for young and old!  Seriously, if you’ve got some time to kill (and potentially an XBox to kill as well!) you can take the opportunity to stick it to ol’ Bill Gates up in Redmond and hack his little console machine.

Depending on the application it can be a pretty cheap way to get the power you need: I can get a brand-new console for A$244 retail (without going to a real discount shop, or I could brave the second-hand and private sale market and save even more) and then sell the controller on eBay for a few bucks — for that money, I get a Celeron/Pentium (reports vary) 733MHz with 64MB of RAM, a 8-10GB hard disk, built in 100MBps Ethernet, in a low-power moderately compact form-factor.

That’s right — the XBox is just a PC.  Sure, it has no keyboard or mouse, but it is made of standard PC components.  The only thing stopping anyone from running normal PC programs (such as Linux, or normal Windows) is the software protections that Microsoft designed into the XBox system to stop it — and it is these protections that XBox modding defeats.

There are quite a few people about building clusters of XBoxes for doing…  well, whatever someone who wants a cluster but can’t afford a real one would do with a cluster.

Anyway, back to my modding adventure.

Late in 2003, I was invited to present at the Darwin Linux User Group annual Install-Fest.  One of the presentations (not mine) was a cracker — basically, the presenter stopped at the local shopping centre on the way to the venue and bought a brand-new XBox, and proceeded to apply a software exploit and install Linux.  It was what I’d always wanted to do to the XBox I bought when I was working in Auckland, but never got around to.  Even after having seen it done, though, I didn’t get my finger out and do it myself.

The exploit that the presenter at DarLUG used is known as “MechInstaller”.  It was one of the early programs that exploited bugs in games.  The first game with an exploitable bug was “007: Agent Under Fire” by Electronic Arts, but soon afterwards Microsoft themselves released the game “Mech Assault” that contained a similar bug.  Basically, you “obtain” special files that look to the game like a “save-game” (a file containing saved progress through the game).  Instead of being real game progress data however, the file contains code that triggers the bug in the game and defeats the protection that Microsoft built into the XBox to prevent it from running unauthorised programs.

MechInstaller was the first exploit that I tried — but first I had to get a copy of the game.  Having heard that Microsoft had fixed the exploitable bug in later versions of the game, I figured that buying a “pre-played” copy of the game would increase my chances (and save me a few bucks on a game that I’d rarely play).  What I should have done is research if there was a way to determine if you had a patched copy of the game — because sure enough, I got home and found that the exploit didn’t work with my copy of MechAssault.  Boo hoo.  At this late stage I did the research and found that the DVD media of the original game had different identifying markings than the patched version, and what the markings were.

Susan joins the story at this point — she volunteered to go back to the game shop and play “Gamer’s Girlfriend” to try and get me the right version of the game.  Whatever she said to them worked, because she got it!  MechInstaller was GO, and before long I had a Linux system running on the XBox!

Now I had to choose which Linux to run.  Being a long time Gentoo user I was interested in Gentoo or Gentoox (a customised Gentoo specifically for XBox), but Xebian (or Ed’s Debian) has the best and longest track record in the XBox Linux scene so I pulled down the CD and went for it.  Before long I was booting the CD, installing, and rebooting off a real Linux system on the XBox.

Now what?  It was always my intention to use Linux on the XBox for media streaming.  Xebian comes with the Freevo package already installed, but I didn’t see that it would really suit the task.  I found the XBMP and XBMC projects (XBMC the descendant of the first, XBMP) which looked very attractive.  There was also a XBMC competitor that looked like a customised Gentoox build running MythTV, but again it did not seem to be exactly what I needed.  So, XBMC it was.

The folks that maintain XBMC do not build binaries of it.  Legally, XBMC can only be built using the Microsoft XDK — which is well beyond my price reach and far beyond the budget of this project (from what I understand the XDK is one of these “if you have to ask the price you can’t afford it” things).  A project to build a Free DK for the XBox, but XBMC will not build cleanly this way.  So how can you get it?  I cannot say — but if you poke around places like XBox-Linux and XBox-Scene for long enough you will find out.

Having found a way to get XBMC, I had to install it.  This is where things got interesting…  The MechInstaller was good only to perform a very basic modification to the XBox Dashboard (the program that provides the funky green blobby control panel on the XBox when it’s not running a game) that allows you to boot Linux.  Using MechInstaller, you always had to first boot up the XBox to the Dashboard, then select the “Linux” option that appeared, in order to run Linux.  Booting automatically to Linux, or running some other program (like XBMC) from the Dashboard, did not seem to be possible.  I started to face the possibility that the only way to proceed would be to replace the BIOS in my XBox with a BIOS that would allow other programs to run.  I set the project aside for a little while (during Christmas and New Year) while I contemplated doing possibly irreperable damage to my XBox…

When I came back to the XBox, I stumbled onto a new breed of software exploits: the UBE, and its descendant the UXE.  The original exploits like MechInstaller had a flaw — they were a two-part exploit.  The main bug they exploited was the buffer-overrun exposure in the game, but they also needed a gap in the way the Dashboard operates to make the needed Dashboard change.  Microsoft was busily patching this up, using updates to the XBox kernel and Dashboard in later builds of the XBox, but also using the “XBox Live” service to update the software on XBoxes without warning or permission from owners.  Some games also had updates to the XBox software, that were automatically applied when the game ran.  Consequently, by the very latest versions of the XBox software it was getting very difficult to use the existing exploits.

Then came the UBE.  While it still relied on a game with the exploitable bug, the trick it did on the XBox was different.  I don’t know the details, but apparently by the time the second version of the UBE was released (called UBE2) only the very latest PAL XBoxes could not be modded out-of-the-box — and even those could be done with a small and reversible change before running the exploit.  The UXE takes this even a step further — apparently any XBox can be modded.  There is a utility called ltools that you can use to install an exploit (now it provides UXE) and install one of a variety of alternative Dashboards which run at bootup instead of the Microsoft one.

UXE provided my answer to running XBMC.  I used MechInstaller’s Emergency Linux system to get the ltools files over the network to the XBOX, then I used the MechInstaller to restore the previous Dashboard (probably didn’t have to do this, but figured that the ltools installer might not handle a box that already had an exploit installed).  Then, I started MechAssault and loaded the ltools savegame.  What appears is one of the available alternative Dashboards for the XBox, and by pressing a couple of buttons I got the ltools installation script.  When it was time to run, a mini Linux system booted and did the work: first, it made a compressed copy of the XBox C: partition, then it did its real work (copying or modifying files, etc).  When I restarted, the XBox booted into my chosen Dashboard (MXM).

After that I installed XBMC by copying the files over the network using MXM’s built-in FTP service.  After selecting “Reset Menu Cache” in MXM and rebooting, XBMC was available in a new Applications menu of MXM.  My fun with XBMC was about to start!

About the only thing I’d like to do now is make the XBox boot up to XBMC.  Running via MXM only adds two button presses to the startup sequence, but if I’m going to be running XBMC all the time I might as well boot straight there (and if I need to run the M$ Dashboard or MXM I can do so from XBMC).

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XBox Media Centre

Jan 9

Posted by Vic in Hardware | No Comments

Only a couple of weeks after going all gooey over SqueezeBox and SlimServer, I’ve found another way of doing media streaming at home.  I’ve now joined that rebel group known as “XBox-modders”, and have a machine at home now running the XBox Media Centre.

XBox Media Centre requires a modded XBox to operate, though as I found out a software-mod-only XBox is fine (given the apparent illegality of mod-chipping in Australia).  See another post for more info about how I modded.

XBMC lets me play my library of MP3s, listen to Internet Radio, watch movies (including ripped DVDs, apparently), and (perhaps most importantly to us right now) browse our digital photo gallery — all using the XBox DVD remote.  It comes with its own streaming protocol server, which appears not to stream as such but rather just serve files, but does run on Linux (an ebuild for Gentoo was all ready to go).  The interface is via TV, which makes sense for viewing movies and pictures but not so much for audio (of course you can turn the telly off once you’ve made your selection, or buy/build one of the LCD screen modules that XBMC knows how to address).  For the truly keen there is a web server built into XBMC as well, that lets you control some functions from a browser (it worked alright with IE, but Safari on our Power Mac gave it trouble, and there are reports of unfriendliness with Firefox).

Cost-wise, XBMC has really only cost me an XBox (yes, I already had one, but unfortunately for one who said that he only ever bought an XBox in order to run Linux I’ve built a bit of a game collection, and until only very recently I believed that the only way I could run Linux or XBMC from bootup was to replace the XBox BIOS, an operation that would have rendered the XBox unable to play games.  So I bought a new XBox for playing games, and modded the existing one.  Then I found out that I didn’t need to replace the BIOS…  Sigh…).  I also bought the “Advanced AV Pack”(?), the little output box that gives you S-Video and optical audio output from the XBox.  XBMC knows how to handle the digital output, and generates a superb-sounding AC-3 stream to our Yamaha amplifier (I never thought 128kbps MP3 could sound so good).

So is XBMC the “way to go”?  Well, I’ll let you know.  I’m happy so far — except for the freezes that have happened a few times, and the extraordinary amount of noise that comes out of the thing to keep the heat down (heat being a possible cause of the lockups, because I had not turned on a setting in XBMC that instructs it to increase the fan speed in response to rising temperature).  I’ve yet to try a DVD in it yet, and the promised visualisations do not appear when playing music…  Its competition is media streaming boxes like the Netgear MP-101 (which only does audio, has no digital output and requires proprietary Windows-only server software), the D-Link Media Gateway (?) (which does video and pictures but again requires Windows-only server software), Pinnacle’s media box (similar to the D-Link), and the SqueezeBox (great design, terrific software and community, but ghastly expensive by the time it lands in AU, with no video or picture capability).  For now I think I’ve made the right call.

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