I am sure that regular listeners of TWiT already know Wil Harris. He is one of the regular panel members on TWiT, was until recently part of bit-tech.net and also wrote a number of articles for the The Enquirer and The Register. Anyway, as Wil announced on the latest TWiT podcast that he is in the final steps of launching a new UK based Video Podcast network. The launch is scheduled for mid September, and will include a number of different shows covering Games, Music, Technologie, Fashion, etc…

You can find some additional info on a blog post on Wired.com. You can also find updates from time to time on  “Where’s Wil“. Stay tuned for more!

After registering on the BBC website for their new VOD (Video On Demand) service called BBC iPlayer, I have received my account details today.
I new already that I would most likely have issues actually using it, since my machines at home are all running Vista by now (with more or less success, but that is a different story). Anyway, although BBC has announced support for Linux, Vista and MacOX in the future, it is currently limited to Windows XP SP2.
Well, I don’t tend to give up that easily, and searched around a little bit on the Internets and rather quickly found several people reporting that they managed to actually get it to work under Vista.

By the looks of it BBC is only checking the OS/Browser etc.. based on the information provided by by the Browse, in form of the User Agent details. So changing what IE sends as that information is the key to success here.

So here is how to do it:
Open the Registry editor (regedit.exe) and modify/add the following registry entries:

Find HKey Current User\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\5.0\User Agent
You should see one String Value called default, which is empty. Change that one to “Mozilla4/0″ (without the quotes).
Create a new String value with teh name “Compatible” and enter “compatible” as value (without the quotes).
Create another String Value called “Platform” and enter “Windows NT 5.1″ as value (without the quotes).

Restart Internet Explorer and you are ready to go.

So far everything is looking fine, and we will see how it behaves over the coming days after having played around with it a little bit more.

The latest version of Joost Beta has a new feature: Unlimited invites! Although content on Joost, especially if you are located in the UK or in Europe is still limited, it is still interesting to play around with it! It is getting better with every release. Some examples of contenat that can currently be seen on Joost over here in the UK:

- XL Recordings Channel – Plenty of "The Prodigy" videos
– Fifth Gear clips
– GameStar TV
– i-Concerts (London Live Episodes 1-12, Bjork)
– Ministry of Sound TV

And many more… 

Anyway, just drop me a note if you want to test it for yourselves.

I spend some time recently to find out how I could receive BBC HD (High Definition) over Freeview on my Vaio MediaCenter PC. Although the process of getting it to work is not really straightforward, it is certainly worth the effort. I managed to do it using DVBViever, PowerDVD7 H.264 codecs and AC3 filter. Unfortunately it seems that even a Core2 Duo 6300 is not fast enough to stream it without problems. But it is possible to record the stream and play it back without too many problems. I guess I will continue to play around with it , but I guess without a faster CPU, I will be stuck with non perfect quality. Anyway, well worth the time to give it a try. Oh, yes, there is obviously one limitation: You need to live in an Area with very good reception from the Cristal Palace Transmitter, since at the moment, this is the only transmitter which carries the BBC HD channel.

I was recently watching the first two episodes of a new TV Series on Fox (and CTV), and I have to say that I actually was positively surprised. The series is created by Tim Minear. Tim is a well known writer of many episodes of several other popular TV series, like Angel and Firefly. One of the 12 main actors is Nathan Fillion, which a lot  of you might remeber from Firefly. Anyway, certainly worth a to give this new series a try. Find more at the FOX Website