Staffan Malmgrens blogg

So, a while ago I came across an interesting little device called Showcenter, from Pinnacle. It’s a A/V appliance (same size as a typical standalone DVD player) that plays various kinds of media (primarily MP3 music and MPEG 1/2/4 video) from your home media server. It exists in a wireless version as well, but since I have a small apartement and don’t mind a bit of cable strewn about, I opted for the wired version.

I’ve now played with the device for a few weeks, and I’m mostly happy with it. I’ve tried various forms of HTPC boxes running Freevo/MythTV, but never became happy with them. Maybe because they were based on PC boxes (noisy fans, failing hardware, complicated remote control setups), but maybe more because they were so open ended. With a PC and free software you can practically make the box do anything, as long as you’re willing to put some time in. There’s always some aspect of the system that can be improved.

While that’s fun, at the end of the day I spent way more time tinkering with the system than actually playing media on it. I briefly thought about building a cheap Mini-ITX box and running something like KnoppMyth on it, but the Showcenter is just simpler (and cheaper as well). Sometimes the lack of extensibility can be a good thing.

Of course, the device has it’s problems. Mainly, the system seems to be built for people that have maybe 50 albums in MP3 form and maybe a movie or three to play. The application running on the PC that serves the content over the network have serious problems handling my media collection (~15000 MP3 files, and several hundred TV series episodes). Furthermore, it’s based on the concept that you “import” the media into the app, relies on ID3 tags being correct, and limits video file browsing to a single level of folders (eg. if you have a folder named “Scrubs/Season.1″ and another named “Friends/Season.1″, they will both show up as the genre(!) “Season.1″. Look, I have all my content nicely sorted in folders, just let me browse the file structure, OK?

Interestingly enough, all communication between the PC server and the device is over HTTP (on a non-standard port), and the entire user interface is built with HTML. This opens up some very interesting possibilities:

The interface can be replaced. There exists no less than three open source replacements: OpenShowCenter, Oxyl~Box and Swisscenter, all built with Apache, PHP and MySQL, and running on both Linux or Windows. I’ve only tested SwissCenter, but it works great, and lets you navigate your existing folder structure. It has several other nice features (album art viewer and incremental search are my favorites), and it can even update itself over the web. It does have one annoying bug, in that the video list view only shows the part of the filename up to the first “.”, so that if you have two files, eg “lost.s01e02.hdtv-lol.avi” and “lost.s01e03.hdtv-lol.avi”, there’s no way of telling them apart from within the UI. I keep the original software running as a backup for that, which of course is possible since they’re web servers. Just run them on different ports.

The other possibility this entails is that the server doesn’t neccessarily need to be on your own home network. If you have a friend with another Showcenter and a decent broadband connection, you can play each others media collections. High-res video might be a problem unless they have less than 1 mbit/s upstream, but it should work well for MP3’s at least. I intent to try that out as soon as I convince any of my friends to go out and get a device of their own. As far as I can tell, this is legal under Swedish copyright law (the “privatkopiering” exemption).

[Aarrgh, I just lost the entire review because dasBlog suddenly decided that I wasn’t logged in, and when I went back, the nice and friendly HTML-editor-form didn’t keep my text… And now I can’t reproduce it]

I had to find out what all the fuss about this band was about. On the surface, there’s nothing that special about DOLL. It’s rock. It’s nicely produced. They build really convincing moods with small means. A good case of “less is more”. While the uptempo tracks are instantly recognizable and easy to get into, it’s the slower numbers like “Breathe breathe” and “There’s a last time for everything”, with their slower, moodier sounds (making good use of keyboards), that win me over. Some songs are so intense that I can’t stand to listen to them when I’m around people. Not many bands have that effect on me, and while it’s a little frightening, I can’t recommend this record highly enough.

So, while shopping for new music last saturday, I picked up the debut CD from The Bronx, on account of the fairly glowing review from DSC’s Patrik Hamberg. I’ve only listened to it once, but so far I like it. Like a more chaotic version of The Hives, or perhaps more like a modern day version of The New Bomb Turks. I think this record has room for further growth.

Other records purchased this Saturday:

• Korn: “Korn”
• Nas: “Illmatic”
• Marit Bergman: “Baby dry your eye”

Opinions on those records may be forthcoming.