The image you see won't be 1080i... More like 480p or less...
Angel
· 3 years ago
I just bought another HDTV on Thanksgiving and currently have my Mac mini hooked up to it via VGA, along with my Xbox 360 via component. I'm enjoying quite a bit of content that was "trapped" on my computers on a 52 inch screen now.
stuart
· 3 years ago
I've heard that the XBox 360 is really noisy though. Is this true? If so, it would be better to get a silent running media center pc.
/pd
· 3 years ago
yeah Mark Cuban made his $$$ and after that, everythings goes cockododdle within that zone !!
..go figure !!
Scott Ferguson
· 3 years ago
Hi Robert, Nice setup! Tell me though, can you use your Media Center Keyboard and remote control from your living room, and if so, how does that work?
Kind regards, Scott Ferguson New Zealand
katie
· 3 years ago
Alternatively, you could use a mac mini, and use frontrow + itunes to stream your HD content from your linux* server in your (mom's) basement. Itunes doesn't mind using folders over a network.
The 360 is a slightly better choice if you get the external HD-dvd drive, since netflix rents those. (They do, don't they?) Plus, you get next gen gaming now, instead of waiting for Sony to get their poop in a group. It is a sightly worse choice, because you are locked into the media center OS. Presumably it will be possible to spoof that later, but later is still later. By the time later arrives, you could replace the mini with Apple's already-shown-but-not-available media extender device. I advocate for the linux server solution because you don't have to do as much maintainance, deal with WGA, nor pay licensing fees/pirate the OS. Even though linux isn't desktop-ready, it's been ready for this kind of server use for a decade.
*Yes you could probably use xp plus samba. At least with regular xp, you can replace it with linux someday. And wired is less finicky than wireless, but its been shown you can use wireless.
Loren Feldman
· 3 years ago
It's all about content, the web will always produce more content. The quality of the digital file is secondary.The future of your TV, meaning the screen is the web.
kevin
· 3 years ago
All you have to do is buy the right computer.
My computer is 3 years old and has the right connections. I have a 17"Mac Powerbook and conect with a built in DVI port. My only problem is the 3 year old graphics card which gets bogged down a bit by HD content.
Robert Scoble
· 3 years ago
Katie: MacMini doesn't work. When I connect it to the HD screen directly it displays within a small screen.
Kevin: there is no DVI connection on my Sony HD screen.
Stuart: I can't hear my Xbox's fan. It's at least as quiet as my wife's MacBookPro.
Scott: I have a Media Center keyboard, but I haven't tried that yet. Won't be able to until I get home from Europe.
Alexander: huh? I'm using Vista as the driver and I'm pretty sure I'm getting 1080i throughput (my screen can only do 1080i, newer screens do 1080p with the Xbox 360 and Vista). I also have a HD-DVD, so I'll do some tests to see how close we can get to that.
Robert Scoble
· 3 years ago
Loren: you haven't gotten an HD screen yet, have you? It's hard to watch non-HD content once you have. Everyone I know who has an HD screen says they watch stupid things like the Discovery Channel.
Hell, I'd even watch your stupid show if you had HD. :-)
Jeremiah Owyang
· 3 years ago
Did you say "that's Poppycock"?
Oh man, I need to send you a hamburger and a pizza slice!
Todd Kitta
· 3 years ago
Robert,
Sorry, I still have to disagree. Mark is right on this one. I think the blogosphere continues to have this misconception that the "normal" people of the world think and act the same way we do. Most people, even the ones who have HDTVs, don't even know what Ethernet is. I would be absolutely floored if I went to someone's house that wasn't a "geek" and they had their PC hooked up to their HDTV. Geeks are still the minority.
Kevin
· 3 years ago
I'm wondering if you think the XBOX setup is easier than the coming iTV (albeit unproven).
With built in wifi iTV already takes our one step...
Robert Scoble
· 3 years ago
>I think the blogosphere continues to have this misconception that the “normal” people of the world think and act the same way we do.
You can't have this both ways. Here in Wales I interviewed several "normal, non geek" people. They DEFINITELY knew what 802.11 and ethernet were. Far smarter than you give them credit for.
And someone is buying those hundreds of thousands of Wifi access points that are now showing up, even in Montana, which is about the last place I'd expect to see them.
But, you are right for now.
Seriously, though, someone is buying these Xbox's. 15,000 are sold every day. That's not just Silicon Valley geeks buying them.
And my Best Buy buds tell me HDTVs are flying off the shelves.
It's only a matter of time before they figure out that they can play movies off of the Internet.
so much for "losing $300 a unit is Just How The Console Industry Works."
Robert Scoble
· 3 years ago
>>I’m wondering if you think the XBOX setup is easier than the coming iTV (albeit unproven).
We'll see what Apple's strategy is to get its logo connected to my HD screen.
Microsoft's is a bit hard to visualize, although once you see it in action you want it, and want it bad (we had "normal people" over our house for Thanksgiving and they wanted it for their own homes) but it isn't hard to hook up, and once it's setup it's easy to operate and use from within Xbox. If you have enough skills to turn on an Xbox game you have enough skills to get Media Center extender to work.
Robert Scoble
· 3 years ago
Warren: yeah, yeah, yeah. Nintendo is more profitable THIS YEAR and probably next. But it was so dominant for so long in this game that it is just cruising off of old success (everyone I talk to who bought a Wii is buying it for their young children who like to play simple games -- these are not folks who are looking to play Gears of War).
Now, you wanna bet how good that strategy will be five years from now when a good chunk of the market has moved to HDTV? I think it'll smell like the London sewer system, that's what.
Sony and Microsoft are losing money for a reason: they know the real prize will come in 2010.
Michael Bailey
· 3 years ago
Well great - it's good to see that my fanless mini-itx machine is going to be the perfect set-top box to put in all of your living rooms - the only noise is a typical DVD sound when playing movies, but heck you can always import the movie to the harddrive and hear nothing.
LayZ
· 3 years ago
So your PC is NOT CONNECTED DIRECTLY to your HDTV. You've proven Cuban's point! He didn't say you couldn't do it via routing it through an XBOX 360, did he? He's also referring to the majority of the population that likely have a PC that's anywhere from 2-5 years old, not geeks, or pseudo-geeks. Did you even read ALL his post, or just the headline?
Robert Scoble
· 3 years ago
LayZ: pedantic. His goal is to display video on his HDTV that's on his PC. My way does just that.
Bob Jones
· 3 years ago
How Windows and Microsoft centric your solution is.
iTV purports to do that much better than an xbox 360 does, and has the added bonus of working on Mac OS X and Windows.
Robert Scoble
· 3 years ago
Bob: it's ironic that now I get to be the one that says "when that ships, give me a call!" Sorry, I had to take that cheap shot, I heard it so often when talking about stuff coming out from Microsoft.
Anyway, we'll see about iTV. I'll probably be first in line to get one of those, too. You didn't miss that we have three Macs in our house, right? I'd love to be able to share stuff from those onto my HD screen.
jeff douglass
· 3 years ago
and you forgot to mention the newly available xbox live service :).... you can now download HD movies and TV shows directly to your xbox 360....who needs the PC???
Robert Scoble
· 3 years ago
Jeff: that's true, but so far I can't use Xbox Live to download ScobleShow or Rocketboom or any of the others.
Brett Nordquist
· 3 years ago
>>But it was so dominant for so long in this game that >>it is just cruising off of old success (everyone I >>talk to who bought a Wii is buying it for their young >>children who like to play simple games — these are >>not folks who are looking to play Gears of War).
Having stood in line at Fred Meyer most of the night to get my hands on a Wii I have to disagree with you. There was a good mix of young and old, men and women in line to get a Wii. Many of those I spoke with in line had a 360 and some even had a PS3. All were very excited about the Wii and not just for their kids. The Zelda games are amazing and the new controllers are a lot of fun. I like the review MSNBC did of all 3 consoles and mentioned by the end of the night, everyone was gathered around the Wii, even the hard core gamers. For some of us, just glitzy graphics don't make a good game. Nintendo understand this and I appreciate the fact they are not trying to take over my living room. If you have young kids, the Wii is a no brainer.
tom
· 3 years ago
My Fujitsu notebook connects perfectly to my Sony HDTV over a VGA cable at 1360x768. Okay it's not digital, but it's direct and I can view HD shows.
Anyway, if the point is that HDTV isn't consumer friendly/ready, I think we've all proven that :)
Lets leave the Wii out of this. Nintendo isn't making home entertainment systems, they are making game systems. Different markets, different strategies. When everyone has EDtv, they'll come out with a new system. When everyone has HDtv, they'll come out with a new system. They didn't use cutting edge components in their box, so they don't need to wait five years for full profitability to refresh and bring out something new. They can do that in two years.
High framerate FPS games are a niche, with a niche size audience. It doesn't look that way, since the majority of the gaming market likes that kind of thing, but the majority of the gaming market is a tiny slice of the general population. I mean, there's nothing wrong with that, but there's a reason why we are still called geeks instead of mainstream.
Stephen
· 3 years ago
Okay, I just bought an XBox and an HDTV, so I'm a major newbie at this. I can view media center content through the XBox on the TV, but media center won't play mov files. The rocketboom hd files all seem to be mov, so how do I see them in high def through the XBox?
mark cuban
· 3 years ago
The point of the post isnt that you cant. Its that most PCs arent out of box capable. Sure Macs have DVI out, but most dont have the processing power. If they did, QT would be the default transport for high def already since it does such a great job with any resolution.
For PCs, its only the last 2 years that PCs have had enough CPU or Graphics power to push HD out a compatible port. Which means even IF those computers are compatible with HDTVs and can play HD content, they are small in number and those without arent going to run out and get HD compatible PCs .
Hooking up an XBOX to remotely stream. Get real. Possible. Yes. Has been for a while. To stream HD, works for some content formats. Certainly doesnt have a chance of becoming ubiquitous and the obvious solution to playing HD content from the net to an HDTV. THe Xbox w HD DVD had a far far better shot of being a ubquitous inhome media server that connected the net to HDTV but MIcroSoft chose to make Online a Walled Garden. A mistake they may never live down.
Works great when you are trying to subsidize your hardware costs, but kicks you in the ass when you are trying to become dominant outside of gaming. Its a back to the 1970s strategy of the mini and mainframe software strategy. Maybe they have hired some former Xerox Parcers ?
THe question I was answering, and maybe I didnt write it as well as some others would of was
"Will HD content from the Net to a consumers HDTV replace traditional distribution methods of content from a satellite or cable plant to a vendor provided box connected to an HDTV ?"
The complexity of alternatives in these comments just proves my point that they wont, and the comments dont consider the bandwidth issues of downloading or streaming content that pretty much has to be encoded at 9mbs or more for 80pct of the most popular content.
thanks for reading and commenting on the blog. Thats what makes blogging fun !
LayZ
· 3 years ago
Thanks, Mark, for reinforcing my point.
Jonathan Tregear
· 3 years ago
As Mr. Cuban points out one of the real problems is how to get HD content to the computer in the first place. He’s made this argument elsewhere and it’s valid to a point. Cable broadband bandwidth even at 6 Mb/s is inadequate for this. To get sufficient broadband bandwidth for HD would require the cable companies to stop walling off most of the bandwidth available on their pipes into the home for their own proprietary use and that’s probably not going to happen. That’s the whole network neutrality thing.
Technically, it’s not that difficult to connect PC’s directly to HDTV's either as suggested here or through a DVI/HDMI or component cable. Likewise, most recent computers certainly have the processing power to decode MPEG4 or VC1.
The real showstopper isn’t technical it’s legal. That XBOX component connection you mention is not a secure video path, so any protected HD content that you were to get on your PC wouldn’t be playable over your component connection. Only HDMI/HDCP connections can do that and the XBOX as of this time can’t do HDMI to my knowledge.
I find Mr. Cuban almost invariably disingenuous when it comes to discussions about HD. The technical issues he raises are generally smokescreens to disguise the public policy issues that are really the roadblocks to any attempt to bypass industry authorized methods of distributing and consuming content.
Kevin Edwards
· 3 years ago
Ya, I love the man, but that was a weird thing for Mark to say. I've had my Mac connected to my HDTVs for years now. I've used several methods to connect including my favorite, eyeHome from ElGato http://www.elgato.com
Lately, I've been going from my Mac to TiVo, and have been putting my media drives (Several TeraBytes of content) into HTPCs such as TVisto, TViX and MviX. (see Amazon)
I definitely look forward to the iTV with FrontRow as while these other Mac friendly options work well, they're not very elegant.
Kevin Edwards
· 3 years ago
*Sigh* I started posting this morning and then finished before those lasts posts were made. I see that the topic is now being clarified to mean "streaming" and there are bandwidth issues regarding this.
I guess I never considered "streaming" as being a requirement, or even desirable. Maybe I've been TiVo-fied (as a user from day one) such that when I sit down, I want to have a local library from which to watch, and the ability to tell a device what type of content I want to be receiving.
To me, the whole live broadcast model is dead for all content that's not time-based sensitive.
Bubba
· 3 years ago
Lot's of people missing Cuban's point, including you Bobby. It's not about buying a computer and hooking it to the TV. Those services will be implemented by the incumbant providers and the relevant CPE. It's not going to be your Windows Media Center that fetches your Rocketboom or You Tube downloads or feeds. Cuban's premise is how many are going to go get the two thousand dollar TV, only to drop a grand on a computer to park by it so they can get Web HD (or any Web) content? Very, very few as evidenced by the sluggish Win Media Center sales (or deployments of Mini's and Front Row). Tivos (and like set top DVRs) already straddle both the sat or cable connection and Internet and it's not going to be too long before that sort of purpose built box becomes the box that is going to get and play your Web content on your big TV.
Bub
Todd Blanchard
· 3 years ago
We'll have to see how Apple's iTV comes out. I suspect that'll be the missing link.
Mr Angry
· 3 years ago
It's funny how we all feel compelled to precede any criticism of Cuban with "I know he's a billionaire but..." Does anyone think the broadcast.com deal was a product of intelligence and not dotcom insanity? Some good work to be sure but truckloads of luck.
Then he says "only idiot would by YouTube" moments before people WAY smarter than him (by any metric you choose including bank balances) buy it. He says a PC won't connect to a HDTV and Scoble elegantly ans simply proves him wrong. He's not smart, he's not even telling the truth. He's just spouting attention grabbing one-liners designed to promote his own business interests, nit the truth.
totoro
· 3 years ago
Robert, your wife's MacBookPro is as noisy as your Xbox360? She seriously needs to take that in for repair-there really should be no comparison fan noise-wise. A properly working MacBookPro is dead silent compared to an Xbox360 (or a PS2 or TiVo box for that matter).
Aaron
· 3 years ago
Cuban is talking about HD content, not watching content on HD TV's. Most of that content is NOT hd. Perhaps some of it is but you can't count on the perfect storm of high speed broadband, wifi, high end PC, media center, media center extender, and HD TV. That is a lot. Robert, I know that we live in a nerd bubble. But it is a bubble. Step outside it and you will see. Is it easy, yes, for us. Is it cheap, no. The average TV price is still way below $1000. Is it coming, yes. Is it coming soon, probably not. Do I like to ask questions and then answer them, yes. ;-)
Alan Patrick
· 3 years ago
Robert, Hi. We met on Friday am in London. Mark is wrong, I have already done this, as it is a common myth (why don't people just *try* things ????) I have blogged about it haere at broadstuff
Josh Bush
· 2 years ago
actually i can hookup my pc to an hdtv, i use hdmi which is better than hdtv.
All Comments
..go figure !!
Nice setup!
Tell me though, can you use your Media Center Keyboard and remote control from your living room, and if so, how does that work?
Kind regards,
Scott Ferguson
New Zealand
The 360 is a slightly better choice if you get the external HD-dvd drive, since netflix rents those. (They do, don't they?) Plus, you get next gen gaming now, instead of waiting for Sony to get their poop in a group. It is a sightly worse choice, because you are locked into the media center OS. Presumably it will be possible to spoof that later, but later is still later. By the time later arrives, you could replace the mini with Apple's already-shown-but-not-available media extender device. I advocate for the linux server solution because you don't have to do as much maintainance, deal with WGA, nor pay licensing fees/pirate the OS. Even though linux isn't desktop-ready, it's been ready for this kind of server use for a decade.
*Yes you could probably use xp plus samba. At least with regular xp, you can replace it with linux someday. And wired is less finicky than wireless, but its been shown you can use wireless.
My computer is 3 years old and has the right connections. I have a 17"Mac Powerbook and conect with a built in DVI port. My only problem is the 3 year old graphics card which gets bogged down a bit by HD content.
Kevin: there is no DVI connection on my Sony HD screen.
Stuart: I can't hear my Xbox's fan. It's at least as quiet as my wife's MacBookPro.
Scott: I have a Media Center keyboard, but I haven't tried that yet. Won't be able to until I get home from Europe.
Alexander: huh? I'm using Vista as the driver and I'm pretty sure I'm getting 1080i throughput (my screen can only do 1080i, newer screens do 1080p with the Xbox 360 and Vista). I also have a HD-DVD, so I'll do some tests to see how close we can get to that.
Hell, I'd even watch your stupid show if you had HD. :-)
Oh man, I need to send you a hamburger and a pizza slice!
Sorry, I still have to disagree. Mark is right on this one. I think the blogosphere continues to have this misconception that the "normal" people of the world think and act the same way we do. Most people, even the ones who have HDTVs, don't even know what Ethernet is. I would be absolutely floored if I went to someone's house that wasn't a "geek" and they had their PC hooked up to their HDTV. Geeks are still the minority.
With built in wifi iTV already takes our one step...
You can't have this both ways. Here in Wales I interviewed several "normal, non geek" people. They DEFINITELY knew what 802.11 and ethernet were. Far smarter than you give them credit for.
And someone is buying those hundreds of thousands of Wifi access points that are now showing up, even in Montana, which is about the last place I'd expect to see them.
But, you are right for now.
Seriously, though, someone is buying these Xbox's. 15,000 are sold every day. That's not just Silicon Valley geeks buying them.
And my Best Buy buds tell me HDTVs are flying off the shelves.
It's only a matter of time before they figure out that they can play movies off of the Internet.
Just watch.
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/...
so much for "losing $300 a unit is Just How The Console Industry Works."
We'll see what Apple's strategy is to get its logo connected to my HD screen.
Microsoft's is a bit hard to visualize, although once you see it in action you want it, and want it bad (we had "normal people" over our house for Thanksgiving and they wanted it for their own homes) but it isn't hard to hook up, and once it's setup it's easy to operate and use from within Xbox. If you have enough skills to turn on an Xbox game you have enough skills to get Media Center extender to work.
Now, you wanna bet how good that strategy will be five years from now when a good chunk of the market has moved to HDTV? I think it'll smell like the London sewer system, that's what.
Sony and Microsoft are losing money for a reason: they know the real prize will come in 2010.
iTV purports to do that much better than an xbox 360 does, and has the added bonus of working on Mac OS X and Windows.
Anyway, we'll see about iTV. I'll probably be first in line to get one of those, too. You didn't miss that we have three Macs in our house, right? I'd love to be able to share stuff from those onto my HD screen.
Having stood in line at Fred Meyer most of the night to get my hands on a Wii I have to disagree with you. There was a good mix of young and old, men and women in line to get a Wii. Many of those I spoke with in line had a 360 and some even had a PS3. All were very excited about the Wii and not just for their kids. The Zelda games are amazing and the new controllers are a lot of fun. I like the review MSNBC did of all 3 consoles and mentioned by the end of the night, everyone was gathered around the Wii, even the hard core gamers. For some of us, just glitzy graphics don't make a good game. Nintendo understand this and I appreciate the fact they are not trying to take over my living room. If you have young kids, the Wii is a no brainer.
these strategies are what separates the Geek God from those Precocious Geek Kids -
http://digg.com/users/worldwideweb/dugg
Let's hope this becomes page one on Digg and take your stats through the roof
No dvi port? Get an adapter.
Anyway, if the point is that HDTV isn't consumer friendly/ready, I think we've all proven that :)
Lets leave the Wii out of this. Nintendo isn't making home entertainment systems, they are making game systems. Different markets, different strategies. When everyone has EDtv, they'll come out with a new system. When everyone has HDtv, they'll come out with a new system. They didn't use cutting edge components in their box, so they don't need to wait five years for full profitability to refresh and bring out something new. They can do that in two years.
High framerate FPS games are a niche, with a niche size audience. It doesn't look that way, since the majority of the gaming market likes that kind of thing, but the majority of the gaming market is a tiny slice of the general population. I mean, there's nothing wrong with that, but there's a reason why we are still called geeks instead of mainstream.
For PCs, its only the last 2 years that PCs have had enough CPU or Graphics power to push HD out a compatible port. Which means even IF those computers are compatible with HDTVs and can play HD content, they are small in number and those without arent going to run out and get HD compatible PCs .
Hooking up an XBOX to remotely stream. Get real. Possible. Yes. Has been for a while. To stream HD, works for some content formats. Certainly doesnt have a chance of becoming ubiquitous and the obvious solution to playing HD content from the net to an HDTV. THe Xbox w HD DVD had a far far better shot of being a ubquitous inhome media server that connected the net to HDTV but MIcroSoft chose to make Online a Walled Garden. A mistake they may never live down.
Works great when you are trying to subsidize your hardware costs, but kicks you in the ass when you are trying to become dominant outside of gaming. Its a back to the 1970s strategy of the mini and mainframe software strategy. Maybe they have hired some former Xerox Parcers ?
THe question I was answering, and maybe I didnt write it as well as some others would of was
"Will HD content from the Net to a consumers HDTV replace traditional distribution methods of content from a satellite or cable plant to a vendor provided box connected to an HDTV ?"
The complexity of alternatives in these comments just proves my point that they wont, and the comments dont consider the bandwidth issues of downloading or streaming content that pretty much has to be encoded at 9mbs or more for 80pct of the most popular content.
thanks for reading and commenting on the blog. Thats what makes blogging fun !
Technically, it’s not that difficult to connect PC’s directly to HDTV's either as suggested here or through a DVI/HDMI or component cable. Likewise, most recent computers certainly have the processing power to decode MPEG4 or VC1.
The real showstopper isn’t technical it’s legal. That XBOX component connection you mention is not a secure video path, so any protected HD content that you were to get on your PC wouldn’t be playable over your component connection. Only HDMI/HDCP connections can do that and the XBOX as of this time can’t do HDMI to my knowledge.
I find Mr. Cuban almost invariably disingenuous when it comes to discussions about HD. The technical issues he raises are generally smokescreens to disguise the public policy issues that are really the roadblocks to any attempt to bypass industry authorized methods of distributing and consuming content.
Lately, I've been going from my Mac to TiVo, and have been putting my media drives (Several TeraBytes of content) into HTPCs such as TVisto, TViX and MviX. (see Amazon)
I definitely look forward to the iTV with FrontRow as while these other Mac friendly options work well, they're not very elegant.
I guess I never considered "streaming" as being a requirement, or even desirable. Maybe I've been TiVo-fied (as a user from day one) such that when I sit down, I want to have a local library from which to watch, and the ability to tell a device what type of content I want to be receiving.
To me, the whole live broadcast model is dead for all content that's not time-based sensitive.
Bub
Then he says "only idiot would by YouTube" moments before people WAY smarter than him (by any metric you choose including bank balances) buy it. He says a PC won't connect to a HDTV and Scoble elegantly ans simply proves him wrong. He's not smart, he's not even telling the truth. He's just spouting attention grabbing one-liners designed to promote his own business interests, nit the truth.