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Sky have been promoting their Sky Player service for quite some time.
At the moment you can access it on the XBox, though for some odd reason the XBox version doesn't have access to the "premium" content ie. Sky Box Office.

So if, like me, you don't have a phone line setup with your Sky box and you don't run Windows, your options are a bit limited.

You can, however, watch Sky Box Office on your desktop.

Word of warning. To use the Sky Player you will need to have the latest version of Microsoft's Silverlight installed.

For some bizarre reason the player will load fine in Firefox, but trying to watch anything using Firefox will not work. You might have better luck than me, but I ended up switching to Safari. In Firefox it seemed to be stuck permanently "buffering".

So what's the experience like?

To be honest I can't really complain. I'm using a 27" iMac, so once I was in a comfortable chair I was able to enjoy a couple of films without any issues. You can easily view the films in full screen view and the quality on a 27" screen was fine. It wasn't as good as watching on my TV with my full surround sound, but that was my choice (albeit one dictated by circumstance).

Renting films is pretty easy. Once you have an online account with Sky you can signup for their "wallet", which you can add funds to in order to watch films and other paid content.

It is unfortunate that the standalone player software is not available for the Mac as I suspect it might give more options in terms of quality and control. The Silverlight powered stream works fine, but has very little in the way of controls.

All in all it's not an unpleasant way to watch Sky Box Office films legally!

As part of my "let's use those domains" plan I finally put a new Home Cinema Discussion site live at the weekend.

I picked up the domain about a year ago, but it had been sitting "gathering dust", so I'm happy to see it's now in use .. hopefully the site will get some traffic and attract a few active members in the coming weeks / months...

Now where did I leave that list of domains?

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I've been toying with the idea of getting some form of media server solution setup for quite some time. I had initially been interested in setting up some way of streaming all my audio CDs, but more recently I was interested in doing something similar with AVIs and DivX.

I don't use Windows that much and I currently don't have a functioning desktop PC at home (hard drive death).

So that leaves me with my MacBook Pro and an Xbox360, which I got a few months ago from Microsoft Ireland.

The Xbox does have support for video and audio, but the problem is getting the files onto it or to it..

Fortunately there are solutions available.

Connect360, which costs $20, is a simple, yet powerful, bit of software that can help turn your Apple Mac into a media source for your Xbox.

Download the installer, run it and then tweak the settings a small bit and off you go.
I currently don't have iPhoto installed, but it recognised both the Xbox and the various multimedia files on the hard drive of the Mac.

The only other setting that I tweaked was the location and scan frequency for "movies":



The one possible downside is that the Xbox itself will display absolutely all the directories and subdirectories of the source, so you could end up doing quite a bit of scrolling to find the file you want to watch.

In terms of supported formats, the Xbox seems to support most of the common ones that you're likely to encounter, though some AVI files I threw at it wouldn't open.
Passing them through Avidemux seemed to resolve a lot of the problems.

Of course, if you can't view the file using something like VLC on your Mac, then trying to get the Xbox to open it is probably futile.

The Xbox's user interface for playing AVIs etc., is reasonably intuitive and includes basic play, pause, fast forward controls.

Being able to watch various video formats on a decent sized screen with the audio going through my AV receiver is a significant improvement over trying to watch them on a 15" laptop screen with "tinny" audio.

There are, of course, other ways of doing this.

In terms of commercial software there is also a package called Rivet, which retails for slightly less than Connect360. According to this review Rivet has better structuring in terms of the navigation of files on your Mac.

I also came across a "free" way of doing streaming, but haven't had a chance to try it out.

Since I'll be in Sydney when Transformers 2 is released going to see it "down under" seems to make sense...

The IMAX looks like a good option, so if anyone else is going to be "down under" for ICANN and wants to see it, why not hook up?

There's a screening just after midnight and according to Michael Bay some of the scenes were shot for IMAX ...

My home cinema setup has grown over the last year. First of all I had a TV and DVD, then I added more bits and pieces and upgraded various elements. While the experience of watching a bluray is definitely enjoyable, the number of remote controls I'd ended up with was proving to be painful!

The solution was to invest in a universal remote control and since Amazon are now shipping electronics to Ireland ...

First off let's have a quick look at the home cinema gear I'm using:

The tv is a 42" LG, there's also a Sky+ box. Of course you have to have an AV receiver, so I'm using an Onkyo TX-SR875, which has a healthy number of inputs and outputs.

Since I like watching bluray without having to worry about region issues I have a US import Panasonic DMP-BD30 as well as a Sony BDP-S350. I've also got a Toshiba HD-E1 for HD DVD. And since I also like music I grabbed a CD "jukebox" on ebay which can take 6 cds (Onkyo DX-C390).

Basically you end up with one remote control per device and switching from one audio source to another, one HDMI to another etc,. means interacting with 4 or 5 of them when you simply want to move from watching the TV to watching a DVD boxset.. Painful isn't the word!

Enter the Logitech Harmony...

It's an elegant device which comes with a docking station and USB cable, as well as instructions and software cd. The device is roughly the same size as a normal remote control, but that's where the parallels stop.

The docking station doubles as a charger, so you don't have to worry about batteries "dying" (last time that happened to me the volume control kept randomly adjusting itself from whisper to deafening!).

Setup is quite easy, though it does take a good half hour to an hour to get it right.

In order to preserve your sanity I'd recommend using a laptop for the setup process, as you will need to do quite a bit of backwards and forwards between various devices and the computer in order to get the remote programmed correctly in my experience.

Loading the software onto my Mac was easy and it automatically updated itself to the latest version as soon as it was installed. Once the software was installed on my laptop it was a simple matter of adding the various devices and their model numbers and telling the system how you wanted things to interact. You can choose, for example, to have any device that is not in active use power off, thus saving on electricity.

The first time you plugin the remote via USB it will do a firmware upgrade and then transfer your presets across - or what it hopes are the correct presets. I'm sure some people are lucky enough to get it right on the first attempt, but I had a couple of minor issues sorting out the switch over to the various video inputs etc., Fortunately the remote is "intelligent" and you can "teach it" using your old remote via infrared (it has an infrared input in its base).

After the initial setup and a bit of testing and tweaking I now have a single remote that "knows" how to seamlessly switch from watching TV, to a DVD or bluray with a single touch. It automatically powers on the various devices you need, rejigs the inputs / outputs / sources etc, and powers down any device you're no longer using.

If, as seems to happen the odd time, it can't switch the TV over to the correct input you can easily fix it directly on the remote which has a very simple and intuitive troubleshooter.

Is this device for everyone?

Probably not, as it would be complete overkill unless you had multiple devices hooked up.

However the setup is easy. You need a bit of patience to get it right, but the Logitech software is easy to use and incredibly flexible and intuitive. The fact that you can pretty much "teach" the device using your existing remotes over infrared means that even if you don't know what model device you are using it can probably "learn" to replicate its actions.

Am I impressed? Yes!

The only question I'm asking is why on earth I didn't get myself one of these when I had 4 remotes!

Pricing from Amazon UK would appear to be pretty competitive

This year's Oscars were dominated by Slumdog Millionaire.

I liveblogged the evening / night over on FilmReviews and lost track of how many awards Slumdog picked up - was it eight?

Since I arrived in Cork last week I've been doing some serious catching up on films. Carlow has a cinema, but it's not exactly "amazing" (the new one is still not open!!)

This morning I took advantage of the 11am showing's really low price (€3) to see Inkheart, while over the last few days I've also seen and Bedtime Stories.

It sure beats driving all the way to Dublin to catch a film!

I knew that this year's post-Christmas sales would be tempting, but I didn't really expect to end up grabbing deals before I'd even had breakfast!

AllPosters are running a clearance sale, so I picked up a framed Iron Man poster this morning with a 40% discount!

I've also got a few emails from other places, such as Amazon, with details of other crazy discounts. The next couple of weeks could really hurt my wallet!

About Adam, which stars Stuart Townsend and Kate Hudson, is a good bit of fun.

You can pick it up on MoreDiscs for a mere 99p (+ postage)!

I'm curious.

Do people own bluray players yet?

Or are you all still waiting for something....

Please vote on the poll