Recently a good friend of mine went out and got himself a Boxee Box and the strange thing here is this box can be bought in the USA for about $179.99 whilst the UK pricing seems to be closer to £200. For those that are not in the know, the UK price should be closer to £114, so you can see why UK people will reject this box pretty much straight away. What got me thinking though was simple, will a Playstation 3 (which is now $250 or £190) do a better job then the boxee box as well as provide more content in the way of games and such?
Posts tagged Player
Boxee Box vs Playstation 3
UMPlayer Cross platform media player
Came across this open source free-ware media player that is out there for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. It can be skinned, plays just about anything and its called UMPlayer.
UMPlayer comes packed with dozens of advanced features, such as skinnable interface, built-in subtitles search, audio / subtitles sync, enhanced filter rendering and YouTube™ player / recorder, yet has a simple and intuitive user interface that was designed for ease of use.
With over 270 built-in Audio and Video codecs UMPlayer can handle nearly all media formats, including AAC, AC3, ASF, AVI, DIVX, FLV, H.263, Matroska, MOV, MP3, MP4, MPEG, OGG, QT, RealMedia, VOB, Vorbis, WAV, WMA, WMV, XVID and many more.
Justin.TV taking a few wrong turns?
The Streaming site Justin.TV has made a few core changes “for the good of the end users” and this has caused some head scratching in my behalf as to why would they feel that these would be a “good” thing? The first thing they did is introduce a new player which now has a constant bar on the bottom.
This means when you embed the player, instead of been hidden away (the controls) until you need them – they are right in your face. My Guess is too many people had no idea where the volume control was and such on the old player. Next up we have splitting of Chat rooms – when it feels there is too many in one room, it puts you in room 2 and so forth. What this means is the mods will be in room 1 while people are going wild in room 2. I have not come across an IRC Server that has problems with 200+ people in and feels the need to split into more rooms, I have no idea what this achieves. Lastly then – the IOS Justin.TV player / broadcaster which used to be free is now $4.99 – wow is all I can say and I suspect nobody will buy this anytime soon.
I also heard (through the grapevine) that they are extending the channel bans for anyone playing music, a lot of people play music in the background and banning them will drive people away. They have to do this I guess for copyright issues.
Zune Player
Microsoft produce the Zune Hardware player (an alternative to the iPod) and they also make the software which you can run on your windows PC, called Zune Player which ties in with the Windows Live system and the market place. I wanted to see what else there was out there instead of iTunes for example. I am not 100% happy with the way the software works and although a lot of people hate iTunes on Windows, I am not that bothered by it and prefer at the moment iTunes.
Host Videos on your Own Site
You make video’s that are longer then 10 minutes and you have your own site normally with unlimited space and bandwidth but you bang you head on the wall wondering how you are going to get the video’s on your web site right? I did a bit of research and could not believe how easy it was to have your very own video on your site without using or paying for extra services.
Sumvision Cyclone MKV FULL 1080p HD Player
Spotted this on bigpockets.co.uk for £69.99 – seems like a good deal and a good device.
Supports All Popular HD Video
This product supports all popular 1080p HD video in the market, including H.264, MKV, Divx HD,
MPEG 2-TS, VC-1, WMV9, then you can enjoy HD video on your HD TV by HDMI interface.
Supports USB Host And LAN Samba Client
With a USB2.0 high speed host build-in, you can plug in your USB storage devices like USB hard
disk, USB flash drive and MP3 player to extend more storage space and playback your media direct
from these USB storage. Thanks to Samba supporting in this product, you can navigate your media
stored in your PC and playback them on TV, this is much helpful in sharing your media at home.
