dirtystylus

Streaming from Mac to PS3

Took a stab at setting up media streaming from the Mac to the PS3 and found it to be relatively straightforward. There’s a few options for doing this, the first being Elgato’s EyeConnect and the other being Twonky Vision. EyeConnect appeared to be a little more polished and installs as a System Preference Pane, so I tried that one first. Unfortunately, while I could browse my media just fine, playing the media usually didn’t work. Occasionally I would get a song to play or mp3 to load, but most of the time I ended up with a generic network error message. I’ve noted a few online forum messages that imply that the latest firmware update (v2.0) to the PS3 seems to have broken things for EyeConnect, so hopefully this is just classic blip in the relatively new space of media streaming and they’ll have that patched up quickly.

In the meantime, I’ve installed the Twonky Vision media server, which runs quite well. Management is done via a web panel, and so far playback has been pretty solid aside from the occasional hiccup. Resetting the media server’s client table usually solves those issues. The drawback is that for some reason AAC files (even unprotected ones) don’t play – they’re listed as “Unsupported Data” in menu listings. Thankfully most of my music is in regular old mp3 files, but it’s still a bit disappointing given that the PS3 actually can play AAC files just fine. EyeConnect supports unprotected AAC, but of course getting it to actually play the files without constant network errors was impossible.So this solution works ok for now, and I’m going to ride out the 30-day demo on the Twonky Vision software while keeping an eye out for EyeConnect updates before plunking down for one of them. It’s nice to be able to route my media to the home system without using an iPod dock (or an AppleTV).

NHL 08

Played the NHL 08 demo this past week on the resurrected office XBox 360. I was very impressed. Graphics and sound were eye-poppingly good. I hadn’t played NHL 07 so the control scheme was new to me, but I found it to be very intuitive. The puck mechanics feel very realistic, and thankfully the checking is closer to reality, with fewer of the explosive checks that seemed to come so easily in previous years.

The Kings are already two games into their exhibition season (they started camp/exhibitions early because they’re off to London to start the season in October). They recently split a home-and-home against the Ducks. It’s nice to hear that they might actually have a proper second line with Handzus centering Nagy and O’Sullivan. That’ll take some pressure off Kopitar/Cammalleri and Frolov. That does leave Dustin Brown on the third line, however, and I was thinking late last season that he was just starting to put some scoring touch to his hard-hitting game. Hopefully he won’t regress in that area playing with guys like Armstrong and Calder.

I ended up getting the Supreme One90 gloves (I probably should’ve stayed away from nikebauer.com, they make the One90s sound like I’ll suddenly turn into Dany Heatley) and the Intake helmet; both should arrive in time to get broken in at this Wednesday’s clinic.

RROD Metal!

This video seems appropriate, given that all four people in my office who own an Xbox360 have had to send it in for repairs, sometimes multiple times. And now the office console has given us the less-common single blinking red light, denoting an unknown hardware failure. Quality.