Amazon Video on Demand

I've recently fell in love with The Office, not the one I work at, but the one on NBC every Thursday night at 9:00 PM E. Since I'm just now tuning in I wanted to catch up with some previous episodes. Buying the DVDs is costly, Season 1 costs $22.99 on Amazon.com, and only six episodes aired that season. I found a way around this, however.

Pepsi Points was my answer. I've never been a big Pepsi fan, I would choose Coke if given the option, but I never really cared which carbonated beverage was washing down my lunch. That was not until I saw the Amazon.com logo plastered on the Pepsi bottle (The amazon logo has since been removed) which piqued my interested. I decided to start buying Pepsi products from the vending machine at work and see what I could actually get with Pepsi Points (I had been collecting Coke caps, but the promotions were either a) lame, b) too expensive (read: I couldn't drink that much coke in my life) or c) drawings which I knew I could never win). I soon discovered that with 5 Pepsi Points (1 point per cap) I could download most any MP3 on the Amazon.com MP3 store (totally DRM Free by the way), or with 12 points I could download an episode of a TV show. Since then I have been continuously collecting Pepsi Caps (even to the extent of picking them up when in public) so that I could earn more music and TV shows.

The experience of the Amazon Video on Demand store (previously the Amazon Unbox store) is pretty seamless. It's not the best ever but it is better than most for what it does. First you have to download the software from Amazon.com. Then you go to Amazon's Video on Demand store and select the video(s) you want to download, choose your method of payment and to which PC you want to download them to. You can also choose to watch the videos online without downloading the software if you wish. Once the videos download to your computer you can watch them whenever you want on your computer or use a Windows Media Extender like the Xbox360 to view the videos. The videos do carry a heavy DRM lock unlike the Amazon MP3 experience. Some of the frustrating things for me about the expirience is that you can't just transfer the videos to another computer; you have to download them again (there is an option to import videos into your library, but you have to be connected to the internet because of the DRM restrictions). Another problem is that I can't watch the videos on my iPod Touch. There is a mobile transfer option and I thought that I could watch them on my Samsung a727 phone which wouldn't be optimal, but it would be an alternative. However, the videos wouldn't play on my phone for some unknown reason. Amazon does offer help on the mobile option and provides a list of Microsoft certified Play for Sure devices if you happen to have one of those.

All in all this service is great as I can watch my videos in a good resolution on my TV through the Xbox360 media extender, but I would like to be able to watch these on my iPod. I don't see that happening in the near future, though, because I can see how that would be a conflicting interest for Apple as they already offer these videos in their store.

Google Chrome

Well, Google Chrome has been out for a few days now and I have to say I like it. If you've been keeping up with my posts you should know that I regularly use Opera as my web browser. So far I don't think that has changed. Chrome is laking some very important features that Opera includes, such as syncing bookmarks, no Mac support, and a built in RSS reader just to name a few. I do like how the bookmarks are set up similar to Safari. As far as the RSS feeds go I've been getting by using Google Reader online, but sometimes I'm not connected to the internet (Shock!) and I would like to be able to read previous posts on some blogs. With Opera I can go back and reread blog posts because it download the feed to the hard disk and I can read them when not connected. Google Reader requires a connection to the internet to load. At first I downloaded Chrome on my work computer and as soon as I tried to run it an error message came up saying that the program failed to initialize in memory and nothing would happen. So, I installed the browser on my laptop and it worked just fine. After a couple of days a solution arose on the internet. Chrome does not play well with Symantec programs. See Chrome runs each tab in a sandbox so that if one tab crashes then it will get rid of that tab and it's instance in ram, allowing the other tabs to run smoothly. Symantec doesn't like this feature and thinks that Chrome is trying to do something funny to your memory so it blocks it. How do you get Chrome to run with Symantec? Well you turn the sandbox feature off. Can you do this through the setup or options? Sadly Chrome doesn't have an option for turning off sandbox, so you have to edit the shortcut icon that links to Chrome. In the target box you have to add a space and --no-sandbox after the last quotation mark.



This will turn off the sandbox feature and allow Google Chrome to run alongside Symantec programs.
Overall I really like where Google is taking the browser experience, especially with the search feature built right into the address bar (Opera will search Google if you type in g and then the search terms). I acknowledge that Chrome is still in beta and being developed, but I can really see this going places. Is Chrome going to be my default browser, no. Will I use it and keep an eye on updates, yes.

You can download Google Chrome at Google.com/chrome

E3 Update

Well, we got back from Charleston Saturday. Had a blast, while we were there we went to see The Dark Night, which was awesome. The movie was so awesome that we are going to see it again, and I usually don't watch movies a second time in the theater.
Now down to the real stuff, E3 has come and gone and some really big announcements were made. Xbox 360 Dashboard will get a complete makeover in this fall's update you can read more about it on Gizmodo. The new dashboard looks so much better than the old one. Microsoft has also contracted a deal with Netflix so that you can use your Xbox 360 like a Roku box to stream movies to your TV. To use this serviceThe update will also include what looks like the Nintendo Miis where you create your own 3D avatar.
Speaking of the Wii, the major announcement for me from Nintendo was Wii Sports Resort (seen in the video above) which is almost like a sequal to the most loved Wii game Wii Sports wich came packaged with your Wii. At E3 three of the activities in Wii Sports Resort were shown: Frisbee, Jet Ski, and Sword Fighting. Wii Sports Resort will also include a new Accessory for the Wiimote called the Wii MotionPlus that will increase accelerometer controls for the new game. Hopefully this new accessory will be utilized in future games for better control with the Wiimote and more realistic gameplay.
Some other things I am excited about are Fable 2, Lego Batman, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, and a new edition of Tecmo Bowl on DS.


















Click the image for more screenshots

TVersity

I downloaded TVersity saturday. I saw it featured in a Tekzilla episode. TVersity is a media server that can play your videos, music, and stream pictures. It also serves up your media to a variety of devices including the iPhone/iTouch, Xbox 360, PS3, other Computers, and the internet. Not only will it stream media from your PC, but it will stream media off the web. If you're not familiar with Revision3 it is a website that hosts shows that would be equivilent to a small broadcast television station. All the shows on Revision3 have feeds that will update you when new shows are out, like podcasts. You can subscribe to these feeds in TVersity and stream the media off the internet if you don't feel like waiting to download the whole High Definition video to your hardrive.
Right off the bat I thought it was going to be super easy to stream media to my Xbox 360. Not so, I did have to spend some time setting up my Xbox to notice the TVersity server as a media server. I googled my problem and found an answer from After Dawn Guides. After reading the entire After Dawn guide and setting up my Xbox 360 wireless connection again. I messed with my router to make sure all the ports were open, they were. After banging my head against the wall for about an hour I decided to turn off Windows Firewall. DING!!! Why didn't I think of that first. Windows Firewall is always the answer. After a few minutes the TVersity server was streaming media straight to my Xbox. You do have to mess with the settings to get the video to look better, the default resolution makes the videos kind of grainy. I double the resolution and the picture looked acceptable. I still need to play with the settings for a while, but I was tired of messing with it after all that.
TVersity does so much more than what I've discussed here. It can stream images from a flickr feed or your computer, and it can stream to a Wii or over the internet. If you get TVersity up and running in any way let me know in the comments and maybe add some screens shots or pictures of what you've done with it.

StrokeIt

Currently, my favorite web browser is Opera. One of my favorite features is Mouse Gestures. I've gotten so used to using mouse gestures in Opera I often find myself trying to do the same things in IE and Windows Explorer. This was getting on my nerves so bad, because I would right click drag left and a context menu would popup. And I would remember that I wasn't in Opera, cry for a minute, then resume working by moving my hand and clicking on the back button. Today I was watching a Tekzilla episode on mouse gestures and saw a program called StrokeIt. Stroke it works similar to mouse gestures, but it works for everything else. It comes preprogrammed with some basic mouse gestures like Opera, but you can customize it with your own gestures. One really great thing is that when you right click and drag it starts to draw on the screen to show you your gesture. If the gesture is unrecognized in the software, then it asks you if you want to add functionality for that gesture. It's a free download so try it out and become even more productive than before.

Digsby

Recently a friend referred me to Digsby. Digsby is essentially an instant messaging interface. Above that Digsby is a social networking interface. Digsby handles my Windows Live messenger account, my Facebook and Facebook Chat accounts, and my Twitter account. If you're not familiar with any of these things check out the links. Digsby is very powerful because it can do so much more. You could add your AIM and/or Yahoo! account(s) and it would aggregate all of your contacts so you could completely not care who is on what interface, but could talk to them all with one simple interface. If you use instant message (AIM, MSN, Yahoo!, Google Talk, ICQ, Jabber, and Facebook Chat) and/or Social Networks (Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter) you should definitely check out Digsby.