There’s good news and bad news when it comes to watching streaming internet video. The good news is that there are now many new legal ways to watch video on your PC (think of web sites like Hulu, YouTube, and even NetFlix with it’s new streaming service). Those sites have an amazing amount of content available and more and more is getting added every day. Hulu lets you watch full episodes of hundreds of TV shows like “The Office” and “The Daily Show” as well as a growing catalog of movies with very few commercial interruptions. NetFlix allows their subscribers to stream over 10,000 movie and television selections (see my previous posts here and here). And YouTube lets you watch just about anything that isn’t copyrighted (and even some content which is).

The bad news with many of these services is that you’re still tethered to the computer. Hulu and YouTube are designed to be viewed from within a browser. NetFlix works the same way, although it does offer the Roku NetFlix Player which can be connected directly to your TV (read about that here).

I’ve talked about various ways to be able to watch that content on your television instead of on your PC but, outside of Roku’s NetFlix Player, most of those solutions get pretty complex. But now there’s a new piece of software out there which may finally allow you to easily watch that web content on your television. It’s from MediaMall Technologies and its name is PlayOn. Let’s take a look.

[Read more →]

In a previous article I talked about the "Watch it Now" feature available to NetFlix customers (you can find that post here).  That feature allows users to stream some of the massive NetFlix catalog over the internet so that they can watch the content on their PCs without having to wait for the DVD to arrive in their mailboxes. 

One of the main problems with using Watch it Now is that you are required to watch the video content using a special Internet Explorer plugin, and that means that you can only watch that content on a PC instead of on the TV in your living room.  The solution to that problem was to use PC or a laptop which was hooked up directly to your TV.  Now there’s a better solution, and its name is vmcNetFlix.

[Read more →]

In a previous post I’d talked about how to run MythTV, the very popular multimedia software, under Microsoft Windows (you can find that post here). The basic problem is that MythTV only runs under Linux — there’s no such thing as a port of that application to Windows. That previous post talks about [...]

[Read more →]

In the past I’ve shown how easy it can be to run a full Linux operating system from inside of Windows (see my previous posts VMWare: See How the Other Half Lives and How to Create Your Own Virtual Machine Using VMWare Player). In both of those examples the Linux OS runs inside of [...]

[Read more →]

These days just about everything used in a home theater, from DVD players to video game consoles to amplifiers to the televisions themselves, is some type of computer. Because they are computers, many of these devices have capabilities far beyond their originally intended purpose. D-Link, for example, makes a line of DVD players [...]

[Read more →]

One of the most frustrating things about stargazing (aside from the cold) is not being able to actually find the objects you’d like to look at. Picking an object of interest while you look at a map of the heavens in your nice, warm house is very different than finding that object when [...]

[Read more →]

I’ve had a DVR (”digital video recorder”, such as TiVo) in my home theater for years. My DVR allows me to schedule TV recordings and watch them at a later time, freeing me from being a slave to the TV network broadcast schedules. In fact, I’ve become so accustomed to this way of watching television that I don’t even really know when the shows I watch are actually broadcast. When I sit down to watch my television shows I’m shown a list of recordings which my DVR has made for me and I choose a show to watch from that list.

Now what if I told you that there was a way to do that same thing with much of the video which you watch on the internet? There is, and its name is Miro. Let’s take a closer look.

[Read more →]

One of the annoying things about surfing around the web is that just about every website you visit wants you to create an account for yourself. To make matters worse, all of those accounts want to know a lot of the same information about you: your name, your address, your phone number, etc. Not only is typing that information over and over again more likely to result in a typo, it’s also tedious.

Most websites also make you choose a username and password so that you can log in when you visit the site. If you’re like 99% of the other web surfers out there you make your username and password the same for all of the sites you visit. From a security perspective that’s a dangerous thing to do since it means that if any of those sites get compromised it may be possible for a hacker to learn your username and password and log into any of those other sites while masquerading as you.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could create your account information once and have that information shared across all of the websites you visit? How about logging into your account once and not having to log in again as you surf around the web? OpenID is an open-source technology which may someday be able to turn that promise into a reality. How does it work? Let’s check it out.

[Read more →]