James Lloyd

I have this weekend completed a new upgrade to my media center solution at home,  replacing the old Silverstone LC-16 based xbmc-live system with a mac mini. This upgrade is largely for aesthetics how ever I have had some other minor success.  the Mac Mini in question is the 2010 model, not because still has the DVD drive in it as i agree with apple that optical media is dead. The bluray drive in my LC-16 still only having been used once to check if it worked. The 2010 model was instead because the 2011 models have a choice of intel or ATI graphics which IMHO are a bit less than awesome.

Had a discussion yesterday with a colleague around what is cloud, where I found us in a fairly heated discussion around what cloud actually meant, so I thought I’d write down where I’m coming from. For the consumer cloud represents a wonderful world where your data is accessible where ever you go via web based applications provided as SaaS.  However enterprise appears to hijacking the term to identify how they would actually provision these services.  This though only subtly different, is an incredible poor piece of marketing and doesn't do what service providers can actually offer any justice. My point is that anyone can provide a Software as a Service (SaaS) by going into Best Buy and purchasing a DL360 putting it in a data centre somewhere. That is a cloud service, granted probably a terrible one.  What service providers can and should provide on top of that is resilience and scalability.  One of the areas getting talked about a lot as being “cloud”, in my neck of the woods is t...

I have been using XBMC on ATV2 now for a just over a month as the media centre for the main bedroom and it is proving to be well worth the £101 or $99 (Grrrr) for the hardware. Since the initial release Greenpois0n has released an un-tethered Jailbreak.  Which makes life a lot easier; previously you would have to boot the ATV2 whilst it was hooked up to your laptop. Which when doing your initial configuration would be a right PITA. There are still a couple of issues of note. The wifi didn’t work for me at all after the jailbreak which I need as have no Ethernet in the bedroom.  This was actually easily fixed by ssh on the ATV2 and running the following:

My ATV2 arrived today, which I ordered straight away after I header on twitter that the xbmc team had ported to iOS .  Obviously im being a bit bleeding edge here.  However I'm currently watching a 1080p trailer from my nas with zero visible frame drops. XBMC is a bit buggy currently but we'll let them off its only been out a couple of days. My main issue currently is the resolution of the AppleTV 2 it natively outputs in 1280x720 or 720p.  Which is fine im currently using it on a 1080p Samsung 2333hd and looks better than you'd expect for upscaling.  The big problem is ironically on a 720p,  now because of reasons I fail to understand (despite trying) 720p TV's generally have a resolution of 1366 x 768, a signal of 1280x720 is going to appear out of focus. It's still unclear as to whether the 720p output is hardware limited or whether we can adjust it to better suit 720p tv's (madness). Conclusion is it works and it works well,  the number of features xbmc brin...