I've now spent a few days looking at the alternatives to appleTV now. Well, I say alternatives... I mean MythTV, as the idea of buying into the Windows ecosystem via WIndows Media Centre didn't even come close to crossing my mind.

But I've looked at quite a few possible configurations for a MythTV system, and I'm beginning to see the rationale for appleTV. The appleTV system is essentially:

Backend Media Server

Intended to be the house's main Mac with the big hard drive. This is the one that hosts the account that buys content from the iTunes Store, holds ripped music etc.

Frontend Client, with a local cache

This is the appleTV device. It's chiefly there to provide a UI to the backend server. But because the default use case of WiFi networking isn't deemed to be robust enough to simply stream from the backend server (particularly for HD content), it needs a local hard drive. And drives are so cheap these days, might as well make it big enough for a few items so you have some local choice without hanging around fot it.

And all this integrates with not only iTunes for music and (iTMS-sourced) video, but also iPhoto. If you stop thinking of it as the only digital media component, but just the front end to what you've already got on your Mac, it makes sense, and it'll pull people into the iApps ecosystem, which is the idea.

But to make it actually effective, it needs to be able to access video content not derived from the iTunes store. It needs to be able to show:

1. Home Movies (you think iMovie's going to get left out..?)
2. Digitally recorded TV content
3. Content ripped from legitimately bought DVDs

Now elgato have already managed to get eyeTV as a content source under Apple's Mac-based media client - Front Row by exporting to iTunes in iPod-friendly format, so they must be able to do the same to the appleTV. In fact, a little searching on their site shows that elgato are confident that eyeTV recordings will be usable by appleTV.

If indeed all that's needed to add a new source to the appleTV's backend server is output in H.264 or MPEG-4 and a wee bit of API smarts, then it can only be a matter of time until someone produces a DVD-ripper and transcoder that'll slot in nicely. The basics are already done:

So the basis of a pretty reasonable backend setup is starting to come together, looking like a Mac Mini, with large-ish external storage and an eyeTV Hybrid as PVR capture. Adding this up, it's probably comparable to the price of a similarly specc'd MythTV homebrew, but with much less setup required.

MythTV alternatives

The Full Myth

Meaty MythTV linux server for the backend. Low-end mythTV Linux machine for the front end. If I can't build one cheaper and quieter, then the front end machine will be the beautifully quiet and affordable Mac Mini, with OSX cleared off and replaced with Ubuntu.

The Half Myth

Watching the Keynote, the appleTV can suck content from up to 5 Macs on the LAN. Now, I'm sure someone very smart is going to find a way to get a MythTV server to appear in the list... In which case, the appleTV at £200 looks very attractive indeed as the silent front end server...

Sigh. It doesn't feel right, damning Apple with faint praise for both of their major announcements within 24 hours of their launch, but here I go anyway.

First off, let's talk about device convergence. I'm sorry, but I don't want a bundle of second rate camera/second rate music player/second rate phone. If excellence in each means keeping multiple devices, then my shirt pocket is going to have to cope. So to even get on the ballpark, Apple is going to have to convince me of the following:

That the phone actually works.

Reliably. As reliably as the non-whizzy Nokias I've known, used and loved for years now. This is the foundation competence. I used to own a Treo, having got bored transferring numbers via my brain. But the damned thing crashed with dependably high frequency, so I went back to my Nokia.

The data service is reliable and affordable and coverage is good

No idea which network carrier Apple are going to partner with in Europe. But unless it's O2, I'm not going be able to use it at all, as that's who my work phone is contracted to. And that's before I persuade my employers that data services are worth paying for.

The camera is a reasonable quality

By which I mean, the lens is semi-decent optically and the CCD has enough sensitivity and colour fidelity. Never mind pixel numbers which are largely meaningless, it's quality I want. I'm assuming here by the way that the location awareness of the device records appropriate geocoded metadata into the image file's Exif tags. Which could be very fun for moblogging to flickr.

As for the music player — yes, it's an iPod, and therefore de facto of quality. But it's an iPod nano in capacity terms, and I have 30+GB of music, and don't want to have to choose what to take with me.

But what I'm more concerned about is the interface. TheSteve made much of the lack of physical keyboard in the announcement, claiming that a similar problem had been solved in desktop computing by the bitmapped screen and mouse combo. I've news for you Steve — for any text-related function (like the email you showed off), you need a keyboard as well.

One of the most popular Palm accessories has been the wee fold-out keyboard add-on, because text entry by on-screen keyboard is truly hard. People like the physical feedback of key travel. It does wonders for speed and accuracy of entry. And small on-screen keyboards are particularly difficult, as self-confessed fat fingered friends opined yesterday; it's the devil's own job to press only one onscreen key. Unless this Multi-touch stuff is a step-change beyond what we're used to, we'll be back to stylii pretty quickly.

So, the long awaited iappleTV is properly announced and demoed. While in itself, it's all very nifty, I can't help but think that it could have been so much more.

Yes, being able to stream your iTunes video content to big screen TV is A Good Thing, although obviously better if you live in a country where Apple deign to sell you such content. But we have a reasonably large DVD collection whose physical media I'd rather put out of the reach of small children and into storage like our CDs. And when we have broadcast/Freeview TV again, I'd probably like to be able to record it digitally and recall old stuff from a large database living on hefty attached storage.

While eyeTV would probably take care of the Television end of things, for DVD rippage and storage, we're probably talking about mythTV on one of these mothers as the solution of choice for the time being.

Somebody somewhere convince me that there's a better way round this...

Ahhhhhhh I'm back, with a working server once more.

What had happened is that my old Motherboard had gone 'phut', so needed replacing. Could have been much worse - could have been the hard drive, with associated data loss.

Here's the culprit:

Still, not so easy to replace at short notice when I'm mostly in Newcastle at the moment, and the time I have at home has other priorities. And once the Mobo was replaced, I discovered that it took a different kind of RAM to the old (now discontinued) one, so that was another trip to PC World for the sake of speed.

So now I have a nice EPIA M motherboard (and new stick of RAM) in my home server, and I'm back on the air. A huge thanks to Kevin at indigospring for diagnosing the problem. He also fixed my previously dead iPod which had resisted all the solutions Apple had provided, other than splash out on a new one. Cheers Kevin!

Carnivore Pumpkin, originally uploaded by Martin Burns.

At night...

Spent the morning pumpkin carving with Ruaridh. This was my pumpkin, showing what happens to naughty turnips...

Here are Ruaridh's and Morgan's:

The trouble with TomTom is that — from time to time — it can lead you into all kinds of interesting situations. Here's a case in point. We'd been out for the day castle spotting in Northumberland, and were heading from Etal to Warkworth. Now as we came through Alnwick (full marks to TomTom so far by the way), we weren't able to go along the High Street, so we diverted via Denwick, rather than heading down to the A1068. Now, you see that minor road leading down from Denwick to the 1068? That's where TomTom told us to go. So we went.

It started off fine — narrow, I'll grant you, but fine. But as we got down to the bottom of the road, the last mile or so looked like this:

200 m to the junction, originally uploaded by Martin Burns.

Let me offer you a close-up...

But, it's not icy, we have reasonable ground clearance in the Touran, and it's a long way reversing back to somewhere we can turn around. And at this point, it's only 200m from the junction. So we keep going.

But when we get back onto a real road, the car's struggling, and we hear an odd noise, so stop, and take a look-see. And look and see:

Which lead to an interesting wait in the middle of nowhere (actually, in the car-park of these guys, who kindly let us use their phone, their loo etc), while waiting for Green Flag to pick us up. And take us next day to Kwik Fit who charged us nigh on £200 for 2 new tyres.

So, thanks for asking, I had a bit of a Curate's Egg of a birthday.

So I'm sure you remember the big kerfuffle about foreign ex-prisoners not being deported from a month or three ago. And how Big Hard Dr John was going to personally track them down and sling them out of the country. All (approx) 1,000 of them, but 43 of the most serious ones in particular.

This was so high a priority task that a special taskforce was set up to set up networks of informers, knock on doors in the middle of the night, bundle people off on unregistered flights to unacknowledged prisons in regimes with a laissez-faire attitude to death squads and so on.

You might therefore think that — given this was such a high priority of public safety — we could rest assured that a newly vitalised Home Office would complete the job. Ah but no. No, no no. It turns out that the Snatch Squad has been disbanded already, having failed to deport perhaps half of the 1,000 total, and to find 1 in 6 of the most serious offenders.

Which raises an interesting question — now that the Eye of Sauron (aka the editorials of Murdoch owned newspapers) has moved on, can we infer that the taskforce was never more than political window-dressing?

(Hat-tip: lebwog)