Random weekend thoughts

I’m one week into my iPod Touch trial. So far so good. I do enjoy the technology, no doubt. The question I have to answer for myself is do I want to keep it and forgo an iPhone in a year when my Verizon contract comes up, or take it back and hold out until Jan. 9, 2009. I’ve gone back and forth many times. I’m not up for buying an iPhone and jailbreaking it to use as an iPod so that’s not an option. Suggestions? Let me know.

Watched Pan’s Labyrinth on HD DVD yesterday while sick. Good movie, great HD DVD. Sound was amazing, especially in the scenes in the caverns and enclosed spaces. Great spatial representation. I’ll try to post a more extensive review over the weekend if my cold continues to regress. Also checked out Blade Runner but I was on several cold medications and pretty much dead-tired so I need to give that another viewing. Managed to pick up 300 and Bourne Identity for 10 bucks apiece at Hollywood video over the weekend, bringing my collection of soon-to-be-collectors item HD DVDs to eight.

My home theater PC is shaping up a little at a time. So far I’ve got it into my entertainment center, hooked up to my Samsung 50-inch DLP via VGA with a wireless keyboard/mouse combo. I ended up cancelling and restarting my Netflix under a different name to get full access to my four PCs again (I’ll be much more careful this time). We’ve enjoyed watching Heroes and 30 Rock from Netflix, video quality is suprisingly good, if a bit soft.

Still having trouble with HD content, be it from sites like KoldKast TV, Miro or via OTA broadcast. It’s the same issue with all content, very jumpy. I have a 512MB NVIDIA 7600 card so I don’t think it’s the graphics card. The only other thing I could think is I need more than the 1.5 MB RAM I have or that the 2.8 GHZ P4 I’m running is just too old to take it (the machine is probably 4 years old). Meanwhile my other PCs are torn apart while I “borrow” pieces to see if I can get this one running, since it’s the only machine with Windows Media Center in it. My next step is to take one of my bigger machines that have more RAM and put the TV tuner card in and just see if I can get HD content working in those. If so, I might just order a copy of Vista Home premium to get the Media Center feel.

If you’ve had experience with HD on PCs and have a suggestion, drop me a comment.

New source for HD video on the web and the iPod Touch

Couple quickies today:

First, I came across a piece recently about a new video service on the Web called Miro (it used to be the Democracy player). It’s an open source desktop application that works a little like iTunes. I haven’t had a ton of time to play with it yet, but I was able to download some HD content and it looked pretty good.

Basically there are channels that you can subscribe to, as well as being able to pull in video from YouTube, Google, etc. It looks very interesting, I’ll give a more full report in a little bit after I’ve had time to experiment more.

Second thing is I got an iPod Touch yesterday, the 8GB variety. I’m holding out hope that the rumors of a price drop on the 16GB and the removal of the 8GB will happen in the next 30 days so I can swap them out, but to be honest the extra 8GB is not essential to me.

So far I’m enjoying it quite a bit. I’m going to treat the 30 days as a trial period to make sure I’ll really take advantage of all it offers. So far I’m loving the instant access to the internet and email, and the video quality looks good but I haven’t watched anything yet of length.

Two things that popped out to me as things the iPhone has that the Touch doesn’t; a speaker (so no showing people YouTube vids without headphones) and a camera to easily add faces to the contacts. The Google Maps feature that allows you to pinpoint your location also doesn’t work, although Google Maps works just fine. That feature seems more of a cool to show people item than something really useful unless you travel a lot.

More on this as I get used to it. If you have a Touch (or an iPhone for that matter) let me know some of the cool apps you’ve downloaded and some tips on the best way to get video onto it.