For those who don’t know, BT Vision is an digital television service provided by BT with no annual charges. As part of the service you get a “V-box”, which is essentially a computer running a version of Windows CE with a couple of DVB-T tuners in there to allow it to function as a PVR. It also connects to the internet and, through Microsoft’s service that they’re also going to implement on the Xbox 360, allows you to access a whole raft of on demand content.
Now, I’ve had this for a while - having decided to get it when I moved in due to it being cheap - and until last night I’d only really used it as a PVR. In this it works remarkably well, with a couple of niggles - mainly that sometimes the schedule isn’t up to date (as it gets that over the network rather than airwaves) and therefore it doesn’t adapt well to programs running a little late. I’ve also discovered that occasionally the clock gets a bit out of sync, and therefore I get the last few minutes of a show cut off. Other than these things it’s great and you can record up to two channels at once whilst watching something else that you’d already recorded (you can’t watch a third channel due to there only being a pair of DVB-T tuners).
Last night, however, I decided to investigate the on demand service. This provides a whole range of content from films (both provided by BT Vision and Film4 On Demand), to TV (BBC and Channel 4 providing a lot of content here), music and specialist know-how things (I discovered an entire section on pickles…) with prices varying from £0.79 for some TV up to £2.99 for a newly “released” film, with optional monthly subscriptions allowing you to watch an unlimited number of items from certain sections (depending upon the pack), although there isn’t one for Films. Once rented, you can watch the content an unlimited amount of times within the 24 hour period after playback starts, which is instantaneous due to it being streamed over your internet connection, and despite my connection not always being the best, it worked perfectly when I tried it out last night.
Of course, Microsoft also recently rolled out films to the Xbox 360 marketplace video store recently (in the UK at least, it’s been in the US for a while I believe). This also provides some on demand functionality, including HD versions of some films. This operates on much the same principle, only you download the film to the Xbox’s hard drive, and can start watching it any time within a 14 day period, with the same 24 hour limit after playback commences. The downloading to the hard drive, however, means that you can’t just select a film and go - and the selection is no where near as wide as that on BT Vision.
All in all, however, I think that on demand content like this is a great idea and certainly going to be used more in the future. Sure it might be more limited than going out and buying a DVD; but for one off situations where you just feel like watching something it’s great.
Tags: bt vision, films, on demand, pvr, xbox
So, the other day KDE4 was released, with a new interface and widgets and whatnot. It all looked pretty shiny, and I finally got around to installing the kubuntu packages for it this morning.
It all looked rather promising when logging in for the first time, it started up my media player of choice (amarok) and that started where it’d left off with my previous KDE3 login, although this might have been to do with me having run a pre-release version of KDE4 before. Unfortunately there wasn’t much else to endear it to me at the moment.
Firstly there’s now no longer any sort of run dialog, be it the search bar in the new application launcher thing acting as one if it can’t find anything on the menu (ala Vista) or an option on the “classic” look one. It just doesn’t exist, for me to run a command that isn’t on the menu I need to navigate the menu to find a terminal, load that, run the command, and then close the terminal. Hardly great - especially when there are apps that I need missing from the menu (kontact is an example) - I’m guessing due to lack of KDE4 packages at the moment.
Then there’s the new panel, plasma has added all these new widgets and stuff, which is great, but it seems that they forgot to include some of the settings that existed in the old ones. The task manager, for example, seems to only be able to show windows from all desktops, which I don’t want. This makes it rather hard to use once you get over a few windows open, especially given that the panel is now around double the size that I had it at in KDE3.
I was also frustrated by the keyboard shortcuts, of course I could change these - but there seemed to be no preference settings in the system settings dialog that I was forced to use due to the lack of kcontrol for KDE4 in kubuntu. This system settings thing, however, should just display the relevant “pages” of kcontrol, so I’m going to guess that the option might be missing. It also seemed to fail miserably at handling my attempts to use my “Windows” key on my keyboard for stuff, and even when I made no changes crashed when I closed it… hardly a good thing.
All in all I gave up trying to use KDE4 in about 30 minutes. Hardly great.
Please feel free to comment on how I was doing things horribly wrong, but to me it seems that KDE4 isn’t really finished yet… at least not on kubuntu.
Tags: kde, kubuntu, software
Hmm, time really does seem to disappear. It seems like only the other day that I was graduating, and now it’s less than a month before I go to New York with work for the first 6 weeks of my graduate training programme. This was all brought to my attention this week when I found out where I’ll be living for that time, and it all sounds good - even if it is in New Jersey.
Of course, time does seem to speed up at certain times more than others, weekends are a prime example of this. I swear I only just got out of bed today, and I know that no sooner will I get up tomorrow than it be time to get a decent night’s sleep before Monday’s work. (And no, it’s not because I’m sleeping all day)
Ah well, just another fact of life I suppose.
Tags: sleep, time, Weekends, Work
Well, I think I managed to surpass myself in strange ways to start the year. On the 4th day of the year I ended up live on Radio 1 talking about digging up dead animals… certainly a new one for me. Oh well.
Aside from this madness I’ve mostly been at work. Meh.
Tags: animals, radio 1, weird