eggchen

For those computer 1337 users out there that couldn’t afford to get a tv and cable service you might want to jump in on this before it really get hot in the industry. News are always talking about IPTV or Internet TV or Broadband TV, here it is, the actually working one. It’s called Joost. It has beta program available for both Windows and Mac users. I tried this out on my Mac last night and it works! The programs they offer at the moment are limited but the quality are good. Go check it out!

http://www.joost.com/

Since I have this tech blog that I can write to and since I never put my idea down in the first place, this will be a great place to start.

1. Get rid of all computers from my desk
2. Get a 15″ Mac Book Pro ($2199)
3. Kingston 1GB 667 DDR2 SDRAM ($130)
3. Mount my 20″ LCD monitor to the wall (so top screen is the 20″, lower screen is the 15″ laptop screen)
4. Buy a copy of Vista Home Premium ($150)
5. Purchase Parallel ($90) to install XP, Vista and Ubuntu on the system
6. Get two external SATA hard drive enclosures (to enclose two of my 250 GB hard drives) (2 x $49)
7. Back to step 1, sell all of my computer equipments (expected return $1000)

Preping lots of cash for this one, omg O_O

Update: scrape the project, there’s not enough finanacial support for this idea, rick is too broke.

So I was bored and thought about doing a research on video/audio streaming on local network. This is what I have on my LAN sharing this 1Gbits switch.
1. XBOX360 (100Mbps)
2. Windows XP Pro (1Gbps)

I came across this little piece of software called TVersity, it’s free. What it does is it allows the system to stream video and audio on any of the system mentioned above. I was more interested in seeing this work on my Xbox360 because I was holding the wireless controller and it’ll be awesome to just use the Xbox as the only media source in my room. The XP Pro system actually hosts my massive collection of TV shows and movies and TVersity will “on the go” converts any video files to wmv format and push to the destination client system, in this case the Xbox 360.

TVersity Version 0.9.9.2 (still beta)
Download

My thoughts: The video quality coming from default setting in TVersity was very unsatisfactory. I enjoy watching my videos close to High-Def quality, can’t really stand blurry video. After some setting change on the program, the video quality finally become acceptable. The following are my settings if you are interested (note: this is done on a local LAN connection, if you wish to stream outside of your home network the result will be unwatchable…)

Under General Settinigs: no changes were made
Under Media Settings: no changes were made
Under Transcoder Settings:
- When to transcode? -> Only when needed
- Optimization -> Quality
- Connection Speed -> Wired (100Mbps)
- Connection Quality -> Excellent
- Compression -> Minimum
- Video Resolution -> 1280×720 (I use the wide screen format)
- Image Resolution -> 1024×768 (standard pc monitor format)
- Decoding Speed -> unchecked

Some things I have noticed:
- During a playback of the movie, the server CPU usage was constantly at 100%. This is normal as all videos are transcoded on the fly thus taking up a lot of resource. The creators of this program recommend Hyperthreading PCs or dual cores, I believe it’s definitely recommended especially for people who streams to more than one clients on the home network.
- Assume if you stop the video half way through the playback of the video, the CPU usage on the server is still consistently running at 100%. This worries me a bit, but again, this software is still on its beta stage.

Things I want TVersity to improve:
- transcode higher quality video at the same time without sacrificing network congestion speed
- a better utilization with CPU usage on the server side
- perhaps a mac version

Some screenshots for your viewing pleasure:

For people that leaves their computer on overnight, or over days, or over weeks, or even longer just to download your favorite music, tv shows or movies. Admit it, everyone of you are guilty. But when you leave your computer idle, sitting there just sucking juice from your electric company, why not put it to some good use? Such as folding proteins.

Here is a jist of it.

What is protein folding and how is folding linked to disease? Proteins are biology’s workhorses — its “nanomachines.” Before proteins can carry out these important functions, they assemble themselves, or “fold.” The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, in many ways remains a mystery.

Moreover, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. “misfold”), there can be serious consequences, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.

You can help by simply running a piece of software. Folding@Home is a distributed computing project — people from through out the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer makes the project closer to our goals.

Folding@Home uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate problems thousands to millions of times more challenging than previously achieved.

This little piece of software is free and it doesn’t hog your processor power when you are using it. To get it you can head to the following link.

Folding@Home

I strongly encourage anyone that use a computer to run this little piece of software in the background. It does you no harm and at least you are doing something good for the humanity once.