Month: October 2008

Posted on

JoikuSpotting

I really do like the iPod touch, the interface, the browsing experience, the video playback, the different applications now available.

Of course to get full functionality you need to be in the vicinity of a wireless hotspot. You can’t (for obvious reasons) use a 3G dongle and without bluetooth or the ability to connect a cable you can’t use a tethered mobile phone.

Now I know what you’re saying, get a 3G iPhone, well yes, that is all well and good, but three things are stopping me, one I already have a Nokia N95 which does what I need (well the typing is nowhere as near as nice as on the iPod touch), secondly I am well into a long contract too with T-Mobile. Thirdly, I quite fancy upgrading to the Google G1 phone.

So I was quite interested in trying out JoikuSpot. What JoikuSpot does is basically turn your 3G wifi mobile phone into a wireless hotspot.

So the Nokia N95 connects to the internet via the 3G network and then allows wifi clients connect to it via the 802.11 wifi.

It works very well and is in my opinion very clever.

The free version is limited and doesn’t allow you to do e-mail which is a pity, so I will probably upgrade to the pro version.

Posted on

EyeHome stopped

I really do like my EyeHome media streamer and it look like it has stopped working (again). It’s at time like these why I remember why I blog, when it didn’t work before I was advised by Elgato to leave it off for a long time, so at the moment it is unplugged and (probably) cooling down.

The EyeHome is now four years old (which is a long time in consumer electronics) and starting to show its age.

Sadly Elgato no longer make the EyeHome device, so I will need to look for a possible replacement. The key issue will be, can it play the raw MPEG2 recordings from Elgato?

In the interim I am using MediaServer from Twonky and streaming to a Sony PS3, but this doesn’t work with MPEG2 files, works fine with the MP4 iPod versions which the EyeTV creates, but these take a long time to export.

So if I can’t find a media streamer which works with MPEG2, I may just invest in one of the Elgato turbo.264 USB devices to speed up the encoding.

Posted on

BBC iPlayer on your Nokia N95 updated

A couple of days ago I mentioned that BBC iPlayer was now available on certain Nokia S60 phones including the Nokia N95.

BBC iPlayer on your Nokia N95

I did have a go and well let’s just say it wasn’t a great success.

So this morning, with what is being Sunday morning and all, decided to try the service again, wasn’t holding out much hope.

Interestingly when I started the BBC iPlayer application there was a message saying an updates was available. Usually when I see that and my application is working fine and there are no new features I ignore them, in this case though, obviously having problems, I did go ahead and download and install the update.

First major difference was that it was now possible to download programmes from BBC iPlayer, something which wasn’t possible before this update and before has only been an available service on the Windows platform.

Screenshot

So selecting something, I clicked download…

Screenshot

 4%…

 56%…

 98%… 

Error!

Hmmm.

Phone must be registered with BBC Content Provider. Register phone now?

I guess so…

Unable to download… 

Okay

Tried again.

Unable to play content

Okay let’s try the streaming once more.

Screenshot

Oh that still doesn’t work.

Well that’s fifteen minutes of my life I am not going to get back!

Posted on

Sad news indeed…

Very saddened to read the following on the Techspansion website.

…After much soul-searching (it’s not you, it’s me), for personal reasons, Techspansion is closing its virtual doors.

Techspansion are the people behind VisualHub and AudialHub.

VisualHub is probably one of my favourite applications of all time.

Posted on

BBC iPlayer on your Nokia N95

I was quite interested in reading this article on the BBC iPlayer for the S60 series of phones.

It seems that the BBC’s version of iPlayer for S60 has gone live, download it here. It has been implemented as a web runtime widget that kicks off streaming in RealPlayer. And it’s also, naturally, a bit fussy about which devices it installs on. It seems happy with the N78, N95 and N96.

Well having enjoyed using BBC iPlayer on the iPod touch, was quite interested to see it working on my Nokia N95.

Well as you can see from this video capture, I did not have a huge amount of success.

I was using wifi and I had configured RealPlayer to use wifi, but still no joy. The video would start, but then it would just start to buffer and eventually the connection would fail.

Hopefully I can get it working soon.