Blog

March 2009

Viewing posts from March , 2009

30 Mar 2009

the astro monopoly

By Rudy

Astro signal went gonecase Saturday afternoon. No channels whatsoever on both decoders. Thought it could be related to Earth Hour, so it was only Sunday morning that we reported it to Astro Customer Service. While the service rep was friendly and all….

RM50 for a visit from a technician!!!!

And that doesn’t include parts. I surely hope my problem is just misalignment.

What’s a consumer to do. It’s not like I can say “No, forget it! I’ll just switch to another network!”. We need our dose of tele, and only Astro can provide our fix of F1 and whatnot. At one point there was miTV, but it had so few channels you tend to wonder whether Astro grabbed exclusive broadcasting rights. Exclusive of course equals premium fees, and who else pays these fees but the customers?

Technology-wise, miTV had the right direction. Making use of DVB Terrestrial instead of DVB Satellite, its signals could withstand our usual rainy weather patterns.

Oh well, hopefully things’ll change in the future. Give me ATSC any time~!

19 Mar 2009

littlebigplanet lag

By Rudy

Picked up second hand LBP via Fish. Turned out that it’s a Chinese version. ^_^; At least the gameplay is all still in English. Merv helped pick up a second controller from Low Yat as well.

Fai and I just lurrve the game. The SackPeople are just sooo cute! We played quite a bit last night and Andy & Alysa joined us online. 🙂 They didn’t stay long though due to some terrible lag on their side. Only after the game did I realize that our torrents were running at full blast. Sorry guys.

Besides that, I’m also worried about slight in-game freezes just before in-level tutorial vids show up, or during a full costume change. Wonder if it has something to do with the disc region or its condition (which looks flawless). Doesn’t seem to be a first-class bootleg either (if that even exists). Not to doubt Fish’s friend or anything; just worried that there’s something bigger afoot, like the optical lens dying.

19 Mar 2009

azjol-nerub

By Rudy

Forgot to blog about this a week ago. We were clearing out quests in Dragonblight and towards the end managed to get a group for normal Azjol-Nerub. All of us were first timers except the rogue, so of course we turned to ‘her’ for any tips. Still, ‘she’ didn’t even say ANYTHING to help before the first boss fight, and after 2-3 wipes ‘she’ said she couldn’t handle it and left.

Really now, is it just so hard to bloody type out some assistance? You had a stake in the group too! I’m sure you’ve been a noob before, so please don’t be an ass just because you’re ‘experienced’. Bah. I bet you think you’re so cool just because you know how to ‘play your class’, i.e., don’t read party chat and just pewpew omg aggro vanish. I know rogues so much better than you and they’re not as stuck up as you are (Hi Fuzzie :)).

16 Mar 2009

messing around with DLNA

By Rudy

W00t! I think we’ve finally figured out our DLNA setup.

Picked up a pair of Aztech HL108 HomePlugs from Low Yat which totally fixed the Wifi bottleneck problem. 1080 HD content streamed flawlessly from the media server.

The only remaining issues were stream compatibility on the PS3 and codecs. CCCP and TVersity combination did not seem to work for certain AVI-packaged HD content (Harry Potter 6 trailer). Playback of this video on Windows Media Player (WMP) had the video lagging behind audio by a few seconds.

PS3 Media Server (PMS), however, managed to play every single thing we threw at it, except for CDG karaoke files (which TVersity can’t seem to play either). Only caveat is that the media layout on the XMB doesn’t look as clean. There will be files that PMS can’t play the first time, but you’ll have an option to go into a #TRANSCODE# folder for that file and manually choose a transcoding option. You can even change PMS settings from the XMB, but I’ve yet the need to touch anything.

By all means, this doesn’t mean we’re done testing. Both TVersity and PMS are still enabled on the media server. I still want TVersity to work for everything because we may have more DLNA devices in the future (say, another home theater setup in the bedroom :D). I’m also still wondering how the quality of PMS’ transcoding compare against other products on the market, e.g. TVix (RM 1800~ but looks great) or the WD HD Player. We’ll want to make CDG work as well, as Fai and I are both karaoke freaks. 🙂

11 Mar 2009

normal nexus

By Rudy

Fai and I ran Nexus last Monday with an awesome group. One-shotted the whole thing easily, except for me dying on Keristrasza because I wasn’t moving around enough. Can’t wait to see the other dungeons in Northrend; next one will most likely be Azjol-Nerub.

11 Mar 2009

messing around with tversity

By Rudy

Yesterday Fai & I messed around a bit with TVersity streaming to the PS3. We followed a particularly long thread on TVersity’s support forums on the proper installation sequence of ffdshow and other relavant codecs.

Playback of the usual divx videos, like the TV series we usually download, worked well without any problems at all. Only problems we had were selecting audio tracks on VOB files, some clipping when playing a particular packaged AVI (FF7 AC with stereo/5.1 tracks), and stuttering when streaming that particular 5.1 track.

For the stuttering part, the bitrate display on the PS3 went up to about 6-8MB/s (can’t recall if it was bits or bytes). I’m guessing the wireless 11g network is the bottleneck, and my crappy Linksys router isn’t helping either. Tonight, we’ll continue testing using wired Ethernet for confirmation, and I even downloaded a full HD trailer of Watchmen for this purpose. 😀 If there are no hiccups, then it’s confirmed to be a wireless issue, and maybe that’ll push me to pick up an 11n router (or I could go back and grab the 3com router from my mom’s home).

Worst case scenario, short of breaking down the walls to lay cable, is to buy two 11n routers and WDS them together.

PS: Another alternative to TVersity is the PS3 Media Server, which is especially made for the PS3. Might give it a go as well.