PS3Fanboy has a post up about PlayOn, software that you run on a Windows XP or Vista machine (no Mac OS X or Linux support, at least for now) that allows you to stream Hulu content to your PS3 or XBox360. The software is in beta and PS3F reports some clunkiness, but that’s what betas are for, right?

Netflix support is planned for later on down the road, which is probably of more interest to PS3 owners, since the 360 will be getting Netflix integration on the dashboard this fall. Me, I’ll stick to my Roku box for Netflix, which rocks.

Sign up and download the PlayOn software, and let me know how it works for you!

The Industry Standard brings us an article about QTV:

QTV by BroadQ uses a $30 piece of software to repurpose a PS2 as a digital media set-top for a TV or home theater. All users have to do is pop the DVD into their PS2, turn it on, and they are ready to either stream local network content or Internet shows like Revision3’s Digg Reel without leaving their sofas.

Brilliant idea. I’m going to be on the lookout for a copy of this software, and in the meanwhile I’ll dig out and dust off my old PS2.

I can’t in all honesty say that Eureka (Tuesday nights, Sci-Fi Channel) is a great show. But it’s just silly and geeky enough that I really enjoy it.

Running up to last Tuesday’s season opener, there was a campaign sponsored by Degree For Men, promoting Eureka via a bunch of crazy “new inventions” that might have been created by the denizens of the show. They were actually pretty amusing and had strong branding from both show and deodorant.

Now, in the past I’ve griped loudly about product placements in television shows. Smallville, for instance, is notorious for this, with some really cringe-worthy placements over the years. But a lot of shows do it. So when I was watching the first new Eureka of the new season, and the crew was walking through a room filled with boxes with “Degree for Men” labels plastered on the outside, I was drawing breath for a total, full-on rant about how horrible it was. And at that moment, main character Sheriff Carter pointed at the boxes and said “What’s all this?” and the new head of the research lab said brightly “Oh! It’s our first sponsor. It’s very exciting!!” and all the rant went out of me and I found myself laughing out loud. I mean, if you’re going to do a product placement, that seemed like the way to do it. It was funny, and broke the ‘4th wall’ enough to offer viewers a wink and a nod. Yeah, they know we hate this stuff, but they gotta pay the bills.

One other neat Eureka note. They had a banner advertising the Twitter account: http://www.twitter.com/_S_A_R_A_H_. What’s fun is that whomever is monitoring that account is answering in the personal of the show’s “Smart House” SARAH. Pretty funny stuff, and another nice nod to us geeks who enjoy the show.

Sorry to keep going on about this show, but its so good I’d hate for any of my readers to miss it.

http://www.drhorrible.com

The third and final part is now posted, and the whole shebang is only up until sometime Sunday (tomorrow).

Joss Whedon fans, don’t miss it!

So Dr. Horrible’s Sing-A-Long Blog has launched at http://www.drhorrible.com/

Thus far, 2 out of 3 parts are posted, with the third going live Saturday the 19th. They’ll only be online for free until the 20th, after which you’ll be able to buy them from iTunes or order a DVD (details to be released at Comiccon).

So far, absolutely hysterical. I’ll definitely be getting the DVD version.

The New York Times has a piece on Amazon’s new TV & movie streaming service (to replace Amazon Unbox): Amazon Plans an Online Store for Movies and TV Shows.

Of note is this quote: It has struck a deal with Sony Electronics to place its Internet video store on the Sony Bravia line of high-definition TVs..

So two days after Sony announces their TV & Movie download service for the Playstation 3, Amazon announces a partnership of sorts with Sony Consumer Electronics for a competing service.

Granted the audience for Bravia TVs is much broader than that of the PS3, but you can access the PSN store from a computer. Why not stream that content to a Bravia TV?

It just seems like Sony is working against itself yet again.

Quick post for now, since I’m at work, but the first trailer for Joss Whedon’s new web-show, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is up:

Teaser from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on Vimeo.

Netflix users, just in case it got caught in a spam filter or something, Netflix sent out an email saying that it would be eliminating the “Profile” feature. This feature allowed you to have several queues per account. So if you have kids, you might have 1 queue with kid’s movies and another with stuff for the parents. Each queue worked individually, and you’d assign a number of disks to each queue. In my case, I had a “Series” queue where I put all the TV shows I rent, in sequence, and then a Movie queue for movies. I tend to watch movies only on weekends, but watch TV on DVD every day.

Anyway, it was a great organizational tool, and now its going away. Netflix isn’t saying why. Maybe they’re just trying to convince us to re-evaluate our memberships?

Here’s the email in full:

Important News Regarding Netflix Profiles

Dear Peter,

We wanted to let you know we will be eliminating Profiles, the feature that allowed you to set up separate DVD Queues under one account, effective September 1, 2008.

Each additional Profile Queue will be unavailable after September 1, 2008. Before then, we recommend you consolidate any of your Profile Queues to your main account Queue or print them out.

While it may be disappointing to see Profiles go away, this change will help us continue to improve the Netflix website for all our customers.

If you have any questions, please go to http://www.netflix.com/Help?p_faqid=3962 or call us anytime at 1 (888) 638-3549. We apologize for any inconvenience.

- The Netflix Team

I was reading Paul Stamatiou’s site for TechDispenser yesterday and he posted a review of the Vudu online movie rental service. Something about this gadget has gotten under my skin and I’m on a quest to slay it…enough so that I went back today and posted comments with my concerns.

This isn’t the first time I’ve commented about the unit. I posted this at Jaded’s Pub earlier this month:

——
Following up on the discussion we were having in the hi-def movie thread, there’s a new product called Vudu hitting the market soon. It’s a $400 box that has 5000 ‘movie stubs’ pre-loaded onto it. You hook it to the net and and pay per movie to watch. The ’stub’ will start playing immediately with the rest of the movie downloading in the background, hopefully faster than you’re watching.

The movies aren’t high def, but the unit is supposed to upscale if you have an HDTV. It is capable of high def movies but they’re still negotiating the rights. You need a cable modem or better to use it. DSL isn’t fast enough, they say.

NY Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/06/technology/circuits/06pogue.html

You *can* buy the movie for “$15-$20″ or rent it from $2-$4 (after which you have 24 hours to watch it).

The rig uses peer-to-peer with other Vudu users. NY Times seems to consider this to be a “cool feature” but to me it’s a drawback. I don’t need my ISP barking at me because I’m uploading huge files to random strangers. And I know when I use bittorrent (at least) it sucks down every byte of bandwidth. Heaven forbid the (internet) phone should ring because I can’t use Vonage and do a P2P bittorrent transfer at the same time.

NY Times seems really bullish on this product. Me, I’m not seeing it. $400 to pay full price for movies that I could play on any of my existing DVD players?
—–
[source]

I still don’t get it. People think shelling out $400 to buy a piece of hardware that lets you buy more things from the people you bought the hardware from is a good deal? I mean, I get the whole ‘razors and razorblades’ thing, but $400 doesn’t feel like a bargain price for this piece of hardware. They aren’t subsidizing the cost of the thing to get it into your living room. And they’re using the bandwidth you pay for in order to service their other customers!

I really hope this gadget/service flames out, because it sets all sorts of bad precedents.

There’s a new product called Vudu hitting the market soon. It’s a $400 box that has 5000 ‘movie stubs’ pre-loaded onto it. You hook it to the net (a wired connection is suggested) and, pick your movie and either rent ($2-$4) or buy ($15-20) it. The ’stub’ will start playing immediately with the rest of the movie downloading in the background, hopefully faster than you’re watching. If you choose the rental option you have 24 hours to watch your film after you’ve paid.

The movies aren’t high def, but the unit is supposed to upscale if you have an HDTV. It is capable of high def movies but they’re still negotiating the rights and expect to ‘turn on’ this feature in the near future. However, the unit has a puny 250 gig hard drive. How many high def movies are going to fit on that? There’s a USB port that’ll eventually let you add an external drive, but that’s going to add to the cost of ownership.

You need a cable modem or better to use it. DSL isn’t fast enough, they say. And remember, they suggest a wired connection, so get ready to run ethernet to the living room…

NY Times article with all the details

The rig uses peer-to-peer with other Vudu users. NY Times seems to consider this to be a “cool feature” but to me it’s a drawback. I don’t need my ISP barking at me because I’m uploading huge files to random strangers. And I know when I use bittorrent (at least) it sucks down every byte of bandwidth. Heaven forbid the (internet) phone should ring because I can’t use Vonage and do a P2P bittorrent transfer at the same time.

NY Times seems really bullish on this product. Me, I’m not seeing it. $400 to pay full price for movies that I could play on any of my existing DVD players? Granted you don’t have to go to the store…but that’s not enough of a boon to offset the drawbacks, at least to me.

How about for you?

When I saw the first episode of The Guild I was tickled but wary… it was very, very funny and I’m scared to say I could relate to it almost too well. But was it a flash in the pan? Well Episode 2 is out, and it’s just as funny.

You can go to YouTube to watch them but I’m going to tempt you here and now…

Episode 1

Episode 2

I don’t often mention movies in this blog because I’m just not very good at critiquing them. For me, movies are most often an escape. Usually, I’ll watch a movie, like it or not like it, then move on without giving much thought to either the movie or why I felt the way I did about it. There are about a million bloggers better at covering movies than I am, so why bother?

But last night I watched Good Night, and Good Luck, a docudrama directed by George Clooney and starring David Strathairn, George Clooney, and Joseph McCarthy. Strathaim and Clooney played Edward R Murrow and Fred Friendly, respectively, and McCarthy plays himself. The whole film is in black and white; I watched it on blu-ray and it was amazing to watch. It’s weird for me to be saying that about a black and white movie, but seriously it was stunning.

Now most of the people reading blogs weren’t around during the ‘Red Scare’ and I’m no exception, but we’ve heard about the ‘McCarthy Witch Hunts’ and the black lists. We’ve seen the Twilight Zone episodes that were inspired by the paranoia of the day, and we’ve heard how everyone was afraid to speak out for fear of being accused of being a Communist.

We’ve heard about it, but seeing it was a whole ‘nother ballgame. Clooney didn’t cast anyone in the role of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Rather, he used actual footage from the hearings and from McCarthy’s television appearances. Joe McCarthy was brilliant in his role. According to the Good Night, and Good Luck page at IMDB, Clooney said that test audiences complained “that the McCarthy character was overacting a bit, not realizing that it was the actual McCarthy through archive footage”. Now I wouldn’t believe everything you read on IMDB, but it’s a believable bit of trivia.

It’s easy to look back in this era and think “That could never happen today.” but of course it could and does, on both grand and micro scales. Well, I’ll hold back on the proselytizing.

But this was a damned fine film, and I urge you to give it a try.

So tonight, Flash Gordon returns to TV (on the SciFi Channel). The chances of it sucking are reasonably high, but I still have to see for myself. The fact that it seems to be using the old Queen ‘anthem’ alone makes its prospects quite grim.

But SciFi does have a knack of making mediocre tv shows that I still enjoy watching. I’m thinking of Eureka and Stargate:Atlantis. I can’t call either of them great TV, but I still get a kick out of them, and in both cases I think its about casting and the ‘family of character’ aspects.

And of course, SciFi has Battlestar. I was *extremely* dubious about BSG before it started to air, and look how amazing that turned out.

So we’ll see.

Maybe this is old news, but I just became aware of a new reality show. This show, and I’m not going to give it free publicity by mentioning either the name or the network, sets two teams of ‘normal’ people against each other in a competition to solve a murder case. The twist is that these are real murders. Each show comes “complete with a gruesome recreated crime scene and real crime footage” taken from the closed case files of homicide departments across the U.S.

Oh boy! So if you’ve lost a loved one to a brutal crime, you can at least take some consolation from the fact that the person’s murder will provide entertainment for millions of twisted TV viewers. (Note sarcasm.)

Really, it’s just one step closer to snuff films, isn’t it? But heaven forbid our children catch a glimpse of an exposed breast on TV. Now *that* is cause for great alarm.

A bronze statue of a runner, excavated from the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum. (Photo by Mark Philbrick, Brigham Young University, courtesy Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples, Italy)

Been a while since I covered anything on television, but I caught Out of the Ashes: Recovering the Lost Library of Herculaneum on PBS this afternoon. Fascinating stuff.

Now mind you, I’m no scholar. I thought Herculaneum must be some type of glowing mineral that makes Hercules weak or something. Instead, it’s a city on the Bay of Naples that was covered up along with Pompeii when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D.

Along the shoreline of Herculaneum was a huge villa, and when it was partially excavated in 1752, 1,800 preserved papyrus scrolls were found. The show is about the attempts that have been made to unroll them. Sadly, many were destroyed before anyone started having real success. In fact, the first few that were found were burned as firewood, as their discoverers thought they were charcoal!

	A carbonized scroll from Herculaneum; many scrolls were so badly burned and crushed that they have yet to be unrolled or read. (Photo by Mark Philbrick, Brigham Young University, courtesy Biblioteca Nazionale, Naples, Italy)

You can catch the show on PBS, if you’re lucky, or buy it online.

The Washington Post ran an article on using imaging technology to read ancient scrolls (this isn’t specifically about the Herculaneum scrolls, but it’s the same technique being used).

Wired has a story about the scrolls and the group working to restore them: Tales from the Crypt: How a handful of Mormons with an infrared camera unlocked the secrets buried beneath Vesuvius.

And last, the Philodemus Project Home Page has some partial translations of the scrolls. (Philodemus being one of the philsophers who authored some of the scrolls that’ve been translated.)

Seriously…how cool is it that we can read the thoughts of these scribblers of 79 A.D.?