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Awesome new Mercedes-Benz commercial with Nico Rosberg, Michael Schumacher and a pregnant woman.

I did a fresh install of Live 10.1 yesterday and ran into some differences between my configuration steps as detailed for 9.11. Again, this information is well documented in the forums but not collected in a single place. I. Install XBMC Live to Revo HDD Download XBMC Live. Download unetbootin. The Mac version didn't work for me so I had to run it under a Windows VM. Plug in your USB drive and format it FAT32. Launch unetbootin, select the XMBC Live iso and select the drive letter of your USB key and then let unetbootin do it's thing. Plug the USB key into your Revo, turn it on and hit F12 for the boot menu and select your USB key. [Note: the guide has you create a file for permanent storage. This is only necessary if you want to run XBMC Live directly from the USB key. If you're installing to HDD then it's pointless.] At the XBMC Live boot menu select the Install to HDD option. You'll then see the normal ubuntu command line installer and it'll walk you through partitioning the drive, etc. Remove the USB key, reboot per the installer and make sure XMBC loads. II. Audio over HDMI [Note: this is very dependent ...

This is a repost of the article, How to Synchronize Your XBMC Media Center Between Every Room in the House, at Lifehacker. The functionality is dead simple, I just wasn't aware that it existed. The advantages of keeping a central library for all of the xbmc boxes in your home should seem obvious; however take a moment to think about the design implications. So, obviously, for this to work you have to have a central server box in your home network that will be on 24/7. On that box, you'll need to install MySQL. I'm not going to replicate any of the details of that from the post because I know that I know how to do that. And since I'm my audience ... Next create a new db for xbmc and create/assign a user. CREATE USER 'xbmc' IDENTIFIED BY 'xbmc'; CREATE database xbmc_video; CREATE database xbmc_music; GRANT ALL ON 'xbmc_%'.* TO 'xbmc'; The Lifehacker author assumes that you only have MySQL running for this purpose and tells you to use grant all on * to xbmc. Not the best choice if you also have MySQL for other things. MySQL has additional security options if you're so ...

There will be spoilers. I'll start off by stating I think the game is fairly good. Great? No. Worth $60 (plus tax)? Err ... possibly. Game of the year? If EA and Bioware pony up more toys to game reviewers than Microsoft does when Halo: Reach comes out, probably. (GT5 would get 'game of the year' by default for finally releasing ... but it won't ... so, no worries there.) The bulk of my frustration is that I can see where this, could've been a truly great game instead of a mediocre game cloaked in a shroud of game reviewer hype declaring it a great game. It's the same frustration I've had with Bioware games since KOTOR (although I have fond memories of KOTOR that would likely be dashed if I played it now); they focus too much on the voice acting and leave the quest and level design to rot. I have to say though, for the NPC specific missions they did some work on level design. But once you're in it, just the same one-track corridor with random crates / barriers to hide behind. It feels, and is, forced. ...

[ Information in this post is completely outdated. The best thing to do is install Dharma from source or wait for next release. ] Update 2-12 See bottom of post for instructions on how to enabled gpu acceleration of thumbnails as well as fanart. Replication of this tutorial for having the gpu render fanart images on xmbc live/ubuntu just in case it goes away. This is experimental at the moment and has some drawbacks for every day use, but will show an improvement in scroll speed in the gui as its handing off loading fanart images to the gpu; very handy for low power atom/ion computers. To enable dds fanart in xbmc, create an advancedsettings.xml file in your userdata directory. If using XBMC Live, this will be ~/.xbmc/userdata. Edit advancedsettings.xml and add: <advancedsettings> <useddsfanart>true</useddsfanart> </advancedsettings> I believe you'll need to reboot/restart xbmc for this to take effect. Cons: The .dds images are much larger than the jpg compressed tbn files, e.g. 10MB vs 1.4MB a bit larger than the jpg. I went back and looked and most were only about 1/3 bigger than the original. So obviously this isn't going to work so hot Might be a deal breaker if you're running Live on a small-ish ...

This post is outdated after the Dharma release, I will copy relevant info from this post to the newer post. [Note: There's currently a bug that has been fixed in svn (changeset) that causes Aeon to crash. I compiled and installed from svn and confirm that the bug is fixed; will create an idoits guide to installing from svn soon. Again, like most things XBMC, it wasn't hard but nobody wanted to give up concise, correct instructions.] Notes I'm filling in a lot of blanks from this guide on the XBMC.org forums here, or the Lifehacker guide here. Unfortunately a lot of this info is scattered around forum posts and these guides will only get you most of the way there. For instance, don't mess with adding the nvidia drivers to the iso ... I mean you could if you wanted to but why not just do them after install? Purpose I need to catalogue all of the changes I had to make so that, in the event I ever need to do it all over again, I don't spend the six - seven hours it took me the first time digging through random forum posts. For my purposes, I want to install ...

Sony KDL-40XBR Review Bought a new TV. Another one. Cause our house got straight up robbed. And all they stole was our beloved 37xbr6. No Christmas presents, no jewelry, nothin'. They rifled through everything, and at first I thought they stole our camcorder (with tape that hadn't been transferred yet) and an old sentimental watch. Later it turned out they just moved them while digging through our crap. Sad that all we own worth stealing is our TV. Walked right by my iMac in the kitchen, didn't touch it. They even moved the Christams ornaments that were sitting in front of the TV and set those aside so as to not break them. Thoughtful criminals. Funny story: Logan was so upset that they'd stolen his shows until we explained that his shows were on the TiVo and it was still there. Which means, in about two-three years the natural evolution is that DVR will be built into the TV. His mind was absolutely blown that anybody would enter our house without our permission. He's still kind of stressed about that. Anyway, back to the new TV. It's not as good as our old ...

The PS3MS default icon bah-lows. I tried using all manner of exe resource editors to change the internally embedded icons but after the program wouldn't run. Finally I came across this post on the PS3MS forums. If PS3 Media Server is running, shut it down. In %program files%\PS3 Media Server\ find pms.jar. Rename pms.jar (make a copy just in case) to pms.zip and open with Windows Explorer. Find \resources\images\ Replace Play1Hot_256 (and probably Play1Hot_32 and Play1Hot_16 too). Close and let Windows Explorer recompress. Change name back to pms.jar and restart PS3 Media Server. The only thing I'd add is that the instructions only have you change out Play1Hot_256 but there are also resources for 16 and 32 that I changed out. I didn't leave those as default to see what happened, so if you still have the default small icons that'd be why. Also, the main XMB icon under Video doesn't preserve alpha. I'm currently using this icon I found on deviantart. black green purple yellow So far, I have to admit, I'm only using PS3 Media Server to stream .mkv (usually muxed with mkv2vob first. Sometimes .mkv transcodes can have audio sync issues. But next up I'll look into internet radio, the itunes library integration and web ...

Part 2 in my PS3 Media Server series, icons for movies and folders. This is should be covered extensively in the FAQ, and it may or may not be, I'm not going to bother checking. Primarily this a resource on where to find movie art and icon templates. The naming convention for assigning icons is %filename% (including extension).cover.png(or .jpg). E.g. Man On Fire 1080p BluRay DTS.m2ts.cover.png. Folders: create your folder and drop in a folder.png(or .jpg). Image dimensions are 320x240. [ Finding Artwork ] themoviedb.org Site is mainly for XBMC / Plex style media center apps but it's a good resource for good quality artwork. Look in the lower right corner for the movie poster. GetVideoArtwork (Beta) New one I just found a couple of weeks ago, geared toward iTunes artwork and sometimes slim pickings but really high quality. [ Creating Icons ] PSD Templates: I did not create these templates, I found them in a forum thread about PS3MS thumbnails. I believe it was this thread on avsforum. Click on the image to download the PSD. FullHD Template 1080p text, blue case and disc with blu-ray logo. I turn off the blue glow layer. Create a new layer in the ...