Some time ago (at least a year or so) Sky launched Sky Player. Similar to iPlayer, it allows Sky subscribers to watch Sky content online. As of October 27th Sky Player will be available to UK Xbox 360 owners.

This seems only slightly useful at best. If you already have a Sky subscription (and an Xbox Live Gold account) then Sky Player will be free. With it you’ll be able to view some of what is available on your Sky subscription with live as Video-on-Demand. Except for the possibility of getting Sky in another room, I don’t really see the point.

If you don’t have a Sky subscription, things seem a little more worthwhile. Until you see the price*. The cheapest is £15 a month for a basic entertainment package. Adding Movies and Sports will set up back £41 a month. At those prices you might as well get a normal Sky subscription. The only other difference is at least you only have a month-to-month contract.

There are some screenshots from Colin Jenson.

*The pricing hasn’t been confirmed. The prices I’ve quoted is for the web based service. I can’t imagine the Xbox price being much different but I’d guess Microsoft might negotiate something a little less…

October 2nd sees the launch of the third Stargate series, Stargate Universe.

The basic premise is very similar to Star Trek Voyager. A crew find a nine chevron gate address which takes them not to a planet, but instead to the Ancient ship Destiny in another galaxy. And then they can’t get back.

It will apparently be darker and edgier than previous Stargate series (which makes the casting of Robert Carlyle - most famous for Trainspotting and The Full Monty) seem a little more sensible.

One final interesting bit is that Amanda Tapping, Michael Shanks and Richard Dean Anderson all guest start in the first episode.

After talking about for quite a bit, I finally have a computer setup running MythTV.

I decided to go for MythDora. It has the advantage of being straight forward to use and still leaves me with a fully functional desktop computer (which KnoppMyth doesn’t really do. It did leave me one slight headache - I didn’t have a spare DVD drive (MythDora is 1.2GB) so I had to borrow the one from Windows desktop). The hardware I have is pretty moderate (well, really low end for most applications - a Sempron 3200 and on board GeForce 6100 with a Hauppauge HVR 1300) but it runs as a combined backend/frontend without any problems, even when recording, transcoding and viewing TV (an “advantage” of living in a country where HDTV is still not a thing).

On the subject of transcoding, there was one stumbling point - specifically it just didn’t work at first (I got the illuminating error message “Failed with error code 0”). After posting the output to the MythTV-Users mailing list someone pointed out it was a MythDora packaging problem - libmp3lame hadn’t been installed.

The only thing that isn’t working now is the MCE IR blaster for controlling my Sky box (I’m just using Freeview though the DVB tuner on HVR 1300). lirc seems to be setup right since when I run irw and press buttons on my remotes (either the MCE remote that came with the HVR or the Sky remote) it detects them properly. Running irsend doesn’t do anything though (there’s not even an error). But at the moment I’m recording more than I can watch with just Freeview anyway.

Next time, less rambling.

In case you didn’t know, Stargate SG-1 has been “cancelled”.

To be specific the Sci-Fi channel in America has decided not to pay for another series after series 10. But all is not lost. According to Wikipedia they will be making two straight-to-DVD movies by the end of the year (filming in April and June). The first will wrap up the Ori storyline and the other will be unrelated (check Wikipedia for some spoilers).

Also another completely separate Stargate series is planned to start in 2008/

I finally (technically) installed KnoppMyth (a Debian based Linux distribution designed just to run MythTV) today. I say technically since I installed it somewhere where I couldn’t connect any sort of TV signal up to it. So, although it works fine, I haven’t actually managed to test any of the important features. The only part of the installation that was a problem was that the hard drive KnoppMyth uses must be the master device on the primary IDE channel.

I had it on the secondary and it was not happy.

Apparently the BBC will begin offering programmes for download though Zudeo, a movie sharing service similar to YouTube, owned by Azureus, the developer of a popular BitTorrent client.

Although the downloads will contain DRM, the very fact that the reputation of BitTorrent for illegal downloads hasn’t put the BBC off partnering with a company that relies on it says a lot about them.

Apparently Craig Charles was filmed smocking crack in a taxi. The most annoying aspect is the tabloids used headlines referring to him as a Coronation Street star.

Surely some clever Red Dwarf pun wouldn’t have been that difficult to come up with.

We are long time Sky customers and recently ordered Sky Multiroom so I could connect Sky up to my new Media Center PC. On Thursday they sent us two new viewing cards. I knew we’d need a new one but I didn’t expect two - I just figured that the change in our subscription meant the old one needed changing. Except on Friday they sent us another one. So now we have four, our old one and the three new ones.

This could lead to an interesting possibility since we actually have a spare Sky box. So we’ll have three Sky boxes (two normal and one Sky+) and three new cards. That’s a total of four signals required - exactly the amount that a single minidish can handle. Unfortunately after looking around the Sky site I found out that you need a separate multiroom subscription for each additional box. So why did they send us three new cards?

I’ve started a new page listing some of the story arcs from Stargate.

That is, it lists all the relevant episodes for the story arcs (useful if like me you own most of them and want tory and make sense of them without other stuff in between).

I now own most of Stargate SG-1 on DVD (everything up to series 7 so far). One of the reasons I wanted to buy it was to fill in the gaps on some of the episodes I missed. SG-1 features many multi-episode story arcs and missing one in the middle can be confusing. So just for reference for anyone who might be interested, here are some lists of episodes for some of the more important story arcs.

Some of the episodes are only debatably part of the story arc. For example “The Torment of Tantalus” is the first reference to the great alliance of which the Asgard were a part even though it has no mention of the Asgard themselves.

Asgard

Series	Episode	Title
SG-1	1x09	Thor’s Hammer
SG-1	1x10	The Torment of Tantalus
SG-1	2x06	Thor’s Chariot
SG-1	2x15	The Fifth Race
SG-1	3x03	Fair Game
SG-1	3x22	Nemesis
SG-1	4x01	Small Victories
SG-1	5x05	Red Sky
SG-1	5x22	Revelations
SG-1	6x17	Disclosure
SG-1	6x11	Prometheus
SG-1	6x12	Unnatural Selection
SG-1	7x03	Fragile Balance

Tok’ra

Series	Episode	Title
SG-1	2x02	In the Line of Duty
SG-1	2x11	The Tok’ra (Part 1)
SG-1	2x12	The Tok’ra (Part 2)
SG-1	3x12	Jolinar’s Memories (Part 1)
SG-1	3x13	Jolinar’s Memories (Part 2)
SG-1	4x03	Upgrades
SG-1	4x05	Divide and Conquer
SG-1	4x12	Tangent
SG-1	4x22	Exodus
SG-1	5x01	Enemies
SG-1	5x02	Threshold
SG-1	5x15	Summit
SG-1	5x16	Last Stand
SG-1	6x09	Allegiance

Apophis and Klorel

Series	Episode	Title
SG-1	1x01	Children of the Gods
SG-1	1x07	The Nox
SG-1	1x15	Cor-ai
SG-1	1x21	Politics
SG-1	2x01	Within the Serpent’s Grasp
SG-1	2x02	The Serpent’s Lair
SG-1	2x08	Family
SG-1	2x09	Secrets
SG-1	3x09	Rules of Engagement
SG-1	3x15	Pretense
SG-1	4x14	The Serpent’s Venom
SG-1	4x22	Exodus
SG-1	5x01	Enemies
SG-1	5x02	Threshold

Tollan

Series	Episode	Title
SG-1	1x07	The Nox
SG-1	1x16	Enigma
SG-1	3x15	Pretense
SG-1	3x18	Shades of Grey