Making the RCA Media Player Usable

ElectronicHouse.com

This is an RCA Wi-Fi Streaming Media Player. I got it when I got a Sony HDTV for the bedroom.

I have two comments on that purchase:

The remote for this RCA player is utter crap. And two HDMI ports will not be enough.

Tekzilla has pointed me to the solution to the second problem. You can now get HDMI switches that auto-switch, which means, for example, you have the cable box on port 1, the Blu-Ray player on 2 and the RCA Faux-ku on 3. You generally keep the DVR-having cable box on and the other two off, so, when you turn on the Blu-Ray, it auto-switches to that, and switches back when done. I need one. But that's not the point today.

The point today is that the remote for the RCA Streaming Media Player is crap. And the button battery it comes with is weak. But, thankfully for me, I can program my Logitech Harmony 200 remote to talk to it. And, while it is not the best of the Harmony line — I got the low-powered one as a test and preview for the bedroom before I got a better one for the living room — it is quite a lot better than the one that came with.

Honestly, I wish I had gone with a Roku, but I didn't. I'm reasonably happy with the unit (Pandora and Netflix work fine, Hulu less so). But the first issue with this device is now rectified.

Netflix As SpeedTest

This is cool. 

When you think about it, watching a movie from Netflix or something is a great way to test a network. This is a graph of different big ISPs and their throughput.

In the metric below, we’re filtering for titles that have HD streams available, and for devices capable of playing HD streams (which also filters out mobile networks), to highlight what’s achievable in terms of HD performance on the various ISP networks.

What I find interesting is the high numbers for Comcast. Their light-blue line is consistently #2 on this graph here. I have said that nobody loves Comcast, they either hate Comcast or resign themselves to having to have them, but the data clearly puts them as having a good network.

(Thanks, LifeHacker)

TV Workflow Considerations

I have a Vista machine with a 300GB drive and a TV tuner.

I have an XP machine with a 40GB drive that's connected to a TV.

I have a Linux box that has an out-facing SSH connection.

I record a few sets of shows.

• Things the family would like
• Things that I'd like to share with friends
• Things I want for myself

Things in the first set, I'd like to have on or at least accessible to the laptop. Having 40GB, it won't have much if any room for files, and the dvr-ms format means a file could be up to 1.5GB. I would like to down-convert the shows for my friend and place them in a directory where my friend can get them.

Problem is, the Linux machine cannot see the Vista machine. Well, yeah via Gnome but not via fusesmb, so I can't really make a crontab. So, if I really want to do this, I have to learn how to do scheduled tasks on Vista Home Edition.

And ffmpeg seems to be hit-and-miss with opening the videos. Don't know what to do about that.

TV: Conjecture about White Collar

I didn't intend for this space as a place for me as a place to talk about TV, but it's where I have cut tags to protect people from spoilers. C'est la vie.

White Collar is a show on USA Network. The main character is Neil Caffrey, a con man. He was caught by Peter Burke, an FBI agent. He escapes on the cusp of his release, looking for his wife. Peter catches him again, and, in part inspired by his sense of fairness, springs him to serve as a consultant. There we have the premise.

At one point, Peter is looking for a way to get a warrant to enter a warehouse he is sure but cannot prove is the location of a crime scene. Neil, a criminal not a cop, wonders why they just don't go in. Peter then passes him the Big Book of Warrant Law. Neil reads the Big Book, figures it out, and gets himself and the ankle bracelet location tracker dragged into the warehouse. Peter knows the game when he follows the machine-gun-toting FBI entry team into the warehouse, quoting chapter and verse as to why he can go in without a warrant. I don't know that Peter knew what he was doing when he gave the book, but he certainly knew when he got there.

Consider, for a moment, The Sting. That's the great con movie, and while we're in on great parts of the con, we don't know the final bit until the end. Same with the Ocean's Eleven remake. The audience can't know it all. So, what's the underlying con for White Collar.

We don't know what's going on with Neil's wife, but we know

• Neil knows Peter about as well as Peter knew Neil
• This includes Peter being smart and liking smart, and we mean really smart. He has great ire over the large number of Harvard graduates in his unit who are not nearly as on-the-ball as he is.

He had to know that Peter would come after him if he escaped. If he just waited a month, he would've been a free man, rather being chained to Peter for four years, but now he has a badge. Presumably, he thinks he needs that kind of backing, the kind of backing that can fill a warehouse with armed agents in very little time, to confront whoever has his wife. Which makes an acceptable series-long Big Bad.