Windows Media Center may not make it into default Windows 8 installs, but the team of crack programmers behind the highly excellent XBMC media player is working hard to dull the pain. The newest addition to the open source software completely revamps XBMC's audio code and brings support for 7.1 HD audio formats, along with a lot of other goodies.
If you're getting sick of waiting for a slice of your very own Raspberry Pi mini-PC, fear not; the cavalry will soon be arriving thanks to an unexpected rival: Via, the longtime mobo makers. Yesterday, the company announced its Pi-like "APC 8750" board, a $50 Android-powered PC complete with processor, memory and a host of I/O ports.
The Plex media server is purdy, flexible and capable of handling gobs and gobs of metadata, but one major hurdle has been holding it back: relatively skimpy device support. Yeah, you could run Plex on Google TV, some LG products and (starting recently) Roku, but that was about it. That's poised to change with a new beta release that adds support for the widely utilized DLNA protocol.
The recent Netflix wackiness may have sent some subscribers running, but it wasn’t enough to keep Netflix from gobbling up the Net’s bandwidth for yet another quarter. A new report says the streaming media powerhouse accounted for roughly 33 percent of all peak downsteam traffic in that time frame – even after 800,000 subscribers left for greener pastures recently. As big a slice as that is, the number may only increase as ISPs bolster their series of tubes.
Hulu’s good for stimulating more than multi-billion-dollar buyout bids; as it turns out, the service can send impatient content-seekers to illegal P2P downloads in droves, too. Just a few weeks ago, we speculated whether or not Fox’s new eight day delay for online content would send those of you without a cable subscription to Pirate Bay, or if the online horde would patiently wait the extra week for their Family Guy fix. Well, the policy’s gone live, and it looks like online viewers aren’t the sit around and wait type.
The U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agency has been the Dirty Harry of the World Wide Web the past year or so, shooting its virtual guns and taking down websites playing host to copyrighted materials. Fire first and silly legal questions be damned! Now, the gung-ho nature of "Operation in Our Sites" (see what they did there?) could be coming back to haunt ICE. Puerto 80, the owner of Spanish sports site Rojadirecta.com, has petitioned the courts for the return of its seized website – and it has the EFF in its corner.
In "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," an irate mob lynched the creator of the Infinite Probability Drive because the one thing they couldn't stand was a smartass. With the "Commercial Felony Streaming Act," the US government is doing its best impersonation of that angry mob. Nobody's going to be lynched on Capitol Hill, but the bill aims to punish smartass pirates who have been using a loophole in existing laws to stream copyright-protected works with minimal fear of prosecution.
The PR tune being danced by Netflix and the cable companies is so nice, it's almost nauseating. Neither side wants to step on the other's toes, so all the press we see is PR spokespeople assuring America that, yes, there is room for both operations and no, Netflix isn't cutting into cable's customer base. A new survey conducted by the Diffusion Group suggests that might not be entirely accurate; even though cable isn't losing too many customers to Netflix, the industry's definitely losing money thanks to digital streaming.Ditch the discs! We show you how to rip, convert, store, and stream all your media—while retaining the highest possible level of quality
Listen up, mediaphiles, because this might just be the last time we tackle the preservation of physical media in the hallowed pages of Maximum PC.
