The other day I finally broke down and ordered a CrystalHD decoder chip. The CrystalHD is a hardware decoder than can decode h.264/AVC, VC1 and Mpeg2 in hardware. It plugs into a PCI-Express 1x slot. You can install it on an older mac mini or an apple tv. I have to say the results were fantastic. With some higher bitrate shows my mini would skip. But no longer with this magnificent little chip. I would recommend it for anyone who is on older hardware and doesn’t want to pay to upgrade their cpu or system in general.

One thing to note is that in order to get it to work with the latest version of osx I had to compile it from source. You can download the source here. If you are installing in osx skip the “install instructions (kext driver)” section and just enter the following into the terminal. this will let the kext load after each reboot.

sudo cp -r BroadcomCrystalHD.kext /System/Library/Extensions/
sudo -S chmod -R 755 /System/Library/Extensions/BroadcomCrystalHD.kext
sudo -S chown -R root:wheel /System/Library/Extensions/BroadcomCrystalHD.kext

One thing I would like to see if it would ever be possible to use this with FFMPEG. Imagine having the CrystalHD decode the frames and have ffmpeg encode them in another format. This would increase transcoding times significantly since most of the computer resources would be freed. I wonder if any one has tried it out.

In my opinion Plex, XBMC and others based off of XBMC have gotten out of control when it comes to media management. If you have one device running any of the mentioned software its fine to an extent. But as soon as you start adding multiple devices with media spanning all of those different devices it starts getting a bit out of control.

So this is my stab at what I think should be done about the different problems that I have with the current Plex / XBMC setup. Don’t get me wrong. I think they are both great pieces of software. I just believe it could be better.

Problems:

• using a remote to add a media destination is bad. User experience is poor and error prone.
• maintaining separate configurations for each player is tedious.
• No asset management across multiple devices.
• No ability to acquire new media.

In my opinion non of these items should exist with inside Plex or XBMC. In fact the only thing they should do is just render the UI and Video / Audio/ Pictures / Launch Games and very basic settings.

Let me explain the diagram…

Nodes

So lets talk about what a node is. A node is just a computer attached to your LAN running the media node software. All nodes are equal. Although one node could have access to more inputs. Such as a capture device or maybe an optical drive where as others don’t. All these nodes appear as one aggregated node to the media player or software accessing the media node. For example plex would see it as one node with available media. If you wanted you could install software on a computer that would expose the node as a  UPnP, DLNA or Web Server.

The node is in charge of scraping its content for thumbnails / descriptions / etc. the node is network aware and will dynamically buffer / cache as needed. So for example, if I am on a computer running plex and it discovers that there is a piece of 1080p content on a laptop connected via Wireless G. It’ll know how long it has to buffer to accommodate for network packet drops. etc. If the computer that has plex is also a part of the node. Then the local node could download and save the media file to the local computer if space permitting and store it there for  a time before removing it from its node or reassigning the content to that node depending on configurations.

A node can be disconnected from the nodes and the nodes will show the content as unavailable. If the node is remote and can be connected via web then it’ll be able to share content using streaming if speeds permit.

Node Manager

The node manager would see all the nodes as separate nodes. Here you would be able to configure what type of node each node is and what it can do. For example if you want a node to migrate all its content or a specific type of content to a main node over time you can specify that. Or to treat a node as more of a cache where it keeps a copy of most used items which would be good for a laptop that might be coming and going from a node cluster. How much storage can be used on that node. If the node has a dedicated storage volume or just a % of available space. Node client manager would also be able to configure other resources that the nodes might have access to. such as a tuner, iptv or an online streaming sources. The node manager would be able to mange how long content is around for and how and where to store new content

Node Client

Clients would see the nodes as one massive node. Any client will be able to access any of the allowed content from these nodes such as Video, Audio, Pictures, Roms, Saved Games as if it were to be coming from one machine. The node client would know how to connect directly to each node to retrieve content.

Scenarios

1. I want to watch “The Office” Season 3 Episode 2. I launch my preferred client. Navigate to tv shows. It shows “The Office” Seasons 1 – 6. I only have a copy of season 2 on one of the nodes. The last 5 episodes of season 6 are on Hulu. Seasons 1-2 are available to watch instantly on Netflix. all 6 seasons are available for purchase on Amazon and iTunes. I can also add season 3 to my Netflix Queue or I can watch this episode next week at 6pm on a given channel or schedule it to record and add a reminder when it’s done.

   So my options are. Schedule a recording, buy now or add to Netflix queue. If I don’t have any external service configured. Such as TV, Amazon, Netflix or iTunes. then I’m only presented with what is available to watch in my list. in this case all I would be able to see is “The Office” Season 2.

2. If I start watching a piece of content on one player. I will be able to pause it, go to a different player, then click play and resume from where I left off.

So this month marks one year my wife and I have gone without a standard video service such as cable or satellite. I have to tell you it feels good to be unplugged and to be able to still watch good quality content online on our TV or Computer. I have to say at times it has been a challenge but overall the transition has been easy. The goal of disconnecting was being able to watch the shows we want to watch with out having to pay for anything. This causes some difficulties with some things such as sports. But if you can go with out or are able to find another alternative then you are set to go.

Here is my list of free online services I use most:

The only difficult part about watching shows online is getting the content to your TV. Some applications work better than others and so on. My favorite application to do this is PLEX. How ever if that doesn’t work for you then you may want to check out Boxee or XBMC. They both allow you to watch a lot of the online content from several sites using plugins that extend the functionality of the application. They also work great for any personal content you may use.

So you have a mac and you have a Blu-Ray drive. But you can’t figure out how to get them to work with each other. Well unfortunately for us sad folks Apple has not been very supportive of the Blu-Ray platform for what ever reason. Fortunately for us though we have people out there in the open source and hacking community that are really smart and have made it possible. Unfortunately it’s not as easy as inserting your disc and pressing play. But it can be done and it isn’t all that hard.

You will need two pieces of software in order to make this work. MakeMKV and Plex (I personally prefer Plex over XBMC. But they should both work nicely).

The first application you will have to use is MakeMKV. It is rather straight forward. First you need to set up the infomation it needs to decrypt a Blu-Ray drive. Go to you preferences and click on the BD+ tab. You will see two areas. One asking for a SVQ file and another asking for a location to save your BD+ debug dumps.

The SVQ file is a special file you have to download from MakeMKV that has all the special codes to decrypt your disc. If by chance they don’t have the code for your disc yet. You can email your BD+ dump file to svq@makemkv.com and with in a few days you can download the SVQ and rip your disc.

After you have all that setup you can open your disc in MakeMKV and it’ll scan the structure of the disc and allow you to export different video, audio and subtitle tracks to an MKV you can play in plex. The only bad part to this solution is you have to rip it to your hard drive. It would be nice if you could just play it from the disc saving time and space.

I prefer to play it in plex because it seems the playback is a lot smoother than VLC and MPlayer. Although I haven’t tested the new builds of MPlayer lately.

let me know if you run into any problems trying to get this to work. Like I said before this works great when you want to watch a show on your mac in 1080p.

So as an alternative i started looking into how XMBC and PLEX both organize and manage their thumbnails and have decided to try and make a simple application in Adobe Air to do this. Right now I’m still in the planning stages. So i’ll post more details back here as i make progress.