Stream movies with a Sony BDP-S370 Blu-ray

This is a Sony BDP-S370. It's a blu-ray player. It also plays DVDs, and SACDs (and normal ones) and perhaps even VCDs if anyone still has any of those. It costs around £120 and I just bought one.

I didn't buy it for any of those functions (although playing DVDs is nice since my old DVD player is dead naff), I bought it because it is a DLNA certified 'network media streamer' or whichever phrase you prefer to use to describe it. This means that if I share my folders full of videos on my home PC, then attach the blu-ray player to the network via it's RJ45 socket, I can watch all of those aforementioned videos on my big living room TV. Happy days!

Actually this isn't something new and exciting for me, I had an xbox 360 in the living room which can perform the same function. But this is a £100 box that also doubles as a super duper new fangled blu-ray player and a DVD player too. Plus it's much smaller. Plus it's much prettier. And it doesn't make any noise (well... a teeny weeny amount of noise, inaudible as far as I'm concerned). Anyone using a 360 to stream media can attest to the ridiculous volume levels you need to set to drown out the console's noisy fans.

Anyway the point of posting this is that, whilst all these sexy functions are obviously great, getting it working isn't always incredibly easy. If you are running Windows 7 on your 'server' PC, you are set. Good to go. No problems, Windows Media Player 12 will act as a DLNA server and your PC will appear in the 'network' tab on the S370's main menu (as long, of course, as you have enabled media sharing in the Network and Sharing Centre). If, however, your media server is using XP or (dare I say it..) Vista, you need a separate server application. It took a lot of goes to find one that worked (I had TVersity running when I had a 360, no go with the BR player) but I finally did and it seems entirely perfect. It is...

TVMOBiLi - tvmobili.com

Installation is simple, and setup is all via a web interface. Once you've installed it, and assuming your BR player is turned on, it should appear in the 'discovered devices' section of the status page like so.

On your S370 your computer should appear in the list of network services. Now you can navigate through all the folders you should choose to share through TVMOBiLi - simply go onto the 'settings' page in the web interface (I'd strongly recommend a bookmark / favourite for this page!) and tap in the details under 'New Directory' at the bottom. You might want to remove the default shares - the usual crap like 'my videos' etc.

After that it's time to enjoy your vast library of intellectual programming from the comfort of your sofa!

The S370 can also, should you be interested in buying one, access the BBC iPlayer service and Demand Five. Oddly enough the Demand Five service is the faster and more easy to use of the two, but regardless of that just having them directly on the TV rather than using a computer is an excellent feature. It also supports several other 'on demand' services dependant on geography, I'm obviously using mine in the UK. It's well worth a hundred quid (£120 at time of going to press, sorry looks like I got a bargain!) of anyone's money.

The steps above will also apply to users of the BDP-S570 (flash gits) and any Bravia television sets with DLNA capabilities.

Indie devs not fans of the new new xbox experience

I like the look of the new xbox dashboard, it's pretty clean. But it's also kinda sparse, as if they cleaned up a bit too much. I can't find any of the stuff anymore! Which is precisely what indie game developers are worried about...

The Xbox 360's newly launched dashboard has been met with criticism from developers of Xbox LIVE Indie Games as the console's bake your own service is demoted to its darkest corner.

Once a prominent part of the Game Marketplace, Xbox LIVE Indie Games are now bundled together with the Avatar Marketplace and Game Room as part of a new section titled Speciality Shops – a move that has attracted derision from developers.

"I'd like to know the rationale behind it - at least then the community could try and come up with constructive alternatives, rather than being pushed further into obscurity," said App Hub forum user and developer of Indie title Clover Deej in comments picked up by Gamastura.

uk.xboxlive.ign.com

Fable III seems to be taking names

Hooray, killing dogs!

These kind of games are not for me. This has been a very popular example of 'these types of games' and I guess all those millions of people can't be wrong.
Well... they can actually. But I'm sure they're not.

uk.gamespot.com

Red Undead Redemption

Rockstar want another tenner. Looks reasonably fun though.

Now for some really important gaming news from IGN

Look, Atari pants.



Don't get me wrong, this is a fantastic use of time and resources. But why is IGN producing it?

THQ just don't give a damn

"Frankly, the last thing I think the industry needs now is new hardware. You look at the games coming out on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 now and they look stunning,"

"Better graphics? They're pretty darn good now. Better sound? No. Gameplay? Probably not. So I think the ways games are evolving now is really a direction we're going. Where it's going to be is in the play experience; richer stories, better characters, production values that are much more like movies."

"I think that's the direction, rather than technology and graphics. I think those days are over."

Interesting thing for a games publisher to say. I wonder if THQ will produce some seminal games after spouting that. Let's have a look at their schedule. Oh look, Smackdown vs Raw 2011.

uk.xbox360.ign.com

Stunning digital city art, tourists and travel

These are really beautiful

Some people interpreted the Geotaggers' World Atlas maps to be maps of tourism. This set is an attempt to figure out if that is really true. Some cities (for example Las Vegas and Venice) do seem to be photographed almost entirely by tourists. Others seem to have many pictures taken in piaces that tourists don't visit.

flickr.com via bbc.co.uk

iPads will kill us all

A study from the July Journal of Applied Microbiology found a high risk of transmitting pathogens from glass surfaces like the iPad's to human skin. "If you're sharing the device, then you're sharing your influenza with someone else who touches it," coauthor and Stanford doctoral student Timothy Julian told the Sacramento Bee. "If you put virus on a surface, like an iPhone, about 30 percent of it will get on your fingertips." From there a virus can travel to your nose or eyes and infect you.

This was Steve's plan all along...

gawker.com

Windows Phone 7 hits

Microsoft today unveiled a new range of smartphones it hopes will rival the phenomenal success of Apple's iPhone.

The company wants its new operating system, Windows Phone 7 (WP7), to put its mobile business back in the running against not just Apple, but also Google, which makes the Android phone software, among others.

Speaking at a launch event in New York this afternoon, Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer said: 'Everybody should be able to take a look at a Windows Phone and say it can represent me.'

Pretty snazzy... and if Stephen Fry, obviously the most intelligent man in the world, likes it... it must be good!

dailymail.co.uk

I want one of these

Boxee is a pretty swish media-computer type front end, spun off of the excellent XMBC project.

Now Boxee comes in a box, and it looks hella cool. Apple TV can get to.. well, it can go away.

How cool is that? It plays just about everything through HDMI in full 1080p (assuming the content is hi-def, obviously) including, alledgedly, BBC iPlayer and assorted other on demand services. It also does an arse load of other clever stuff, which I'll let you read about on their own site.

It's coming pretty soon, and price looks like being about £200. That's twice as much as the apple TV, but it does more than twice as much stuff.

I can't wait.

boxee.tv and blog.boxee.tv