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Waiting for Avatar 3D to start. This is my first digital 3D movie so something new for me. It’s also been a little time since the last blog entry so figured I’d tap something out while sitting in the theatre. I sure love this iPhone! My iPhone development is coming along nicely too. I’m hoping to have a good app underway for the new year. Happy 2010 everyone!

Being a somewhat long-term yet highly dissapointed fan of the x-files, I watched The X Files: I Want to Believe today.  I can sum it up nicely by saying this movie was a total piece of shit.  Quite seriously, my expectations were low.  Very low and yet somehow I was still dissapointed.  This movie had absolutely nothing to do with the previous movie or TV series at all aside from the fimiliar Mulder & Scully combo.  I’m almost dissapointed that David Duchovny has moved on to such better work post-x files and then he signs on to do this completely useless movie. Terrible, just terrible.

On a more positive note, I FINALLY watched 2001: A Space Odyssey and 2010: The Year We Make Contact.  Much better movies and quite thought provoking – especially the beginning of 2001 and the end of 2010.

With all my talk about setting up Mediaportal and how awesome it is, I don’t think I ever went in to detail about what it actually does. Plus I’ve been a bit lazy with blog postings lately…

What the heck is Mediaportal? It’s a Windows application for managing all of your digital movies, tv shows, music and other forms of digital media.

Oh a Windows program, what’s the big deal then? The big deal is doing something a little out of the ordinary… Hooking the computer’s audio/video output in to my home theater’s input. Now things get interesting…

What about controlling the thing? The Logitech Harmony 880 remote to the rescue! That and a relatively cheap USB Infrared receiver for the computer and all the control is in my hand still using only a single remote for the entire home theater system.

Now the fun part – watching TV! Mediaportal gives a nice menu-driven interface to everything. A button push here and all my movies are ready to watch. Right now, I have about 90 movies online and ready for watching. Mediaportal lets you pick the movie by it’s covert art, title and you can can view the movie outline and rating with another button push. Get the popcorn ready and hit play…

Along with the movies, Mediaportal keeps a nice fancy interface to all the TV shows available. The episodes are broken down in to season categories and series/episode summaries are provided with nice shiny images as well. It even tracks what you’ve already watched.

Music, Internet radio, movies trailers, games, pictures & even more are available too. It’s quite an impressive system and the possibilities continue to grow. As for the cost… I was able to re-use Eva’s old PC – Despite being about 7 years old, it runs MediaPortal perfectly. The only new equipment I had to purchase was the IR receiver for $25 and then only needed a couple of really long audio/video cables – cost: $35. $60 in total – you can’t beat that!