Kiwimeat’s Kitchen

My Linksys DMA2100 was delivered a week ago and I’ve set it up in the master bedroom. It’s primary function will be to remove the need for my dearly beloved to move from the very comfortable bed and fight for a timeslot in the Home Theatre room to watch recored HDTV or DVDs.

Setup was straight-forward and relatively painless. I found that the component connection looked a little soft into the Samsung 32″ LCD in our bedroom. However, changing over to HDMI gave a better picture.
As per the addendum note in the box, I did have to amend the Flow Control setting on the NIC in my Media Centre to RX in order to get sufficient quality for HD TV. I’m using the wired Ethernet option (wired each room with CAT6 when I had the HT built).

Watching Live HDTV, Recorded TV and using the Guide is just like Vista Media Centre. My wife is happy with the functionality.

For watching movies XVid worked and you can get DivX working - go here.
Also I have found that DVD VOB’s do play.
It’s just that you don’t have access to the DVD menu options but if you are like me and used DVDShrink to merge the 1GB (or less) VOB files into a single file using English soundtrack only then you can simply play that. I’ve also added a shortcut in the folder to each movie and this can be used to launch the movie.

Only one downside/bad experience so far. Two day into ownership on the Sunday the DMA2100 hung for a couple of hours and nothing seemed to work to reset it. Even using the rear-reset button, then suddenly it came good. Very frustrating but it has not reoccurred.

A Very Belated Happy New Year.

Meh, I’ve got the flu (before my employer had a chance to organise this year’s flu vacination!) and after 3 days off work I’ve still suffering but at the green flem stage. Ugg.

Well January is done. The good news is that I only worked 9 days of the month – the bad news is that I was only paid for 9 days.

Christmas was good but over too quickly. Fortunately I only had 3 days of work before we went on holiday for two weeks.

We had an excellent time in Thailand. Bangkok is pretty much everyone has ever said and the traffic is legendary for good reason. The temples were fantastic and my wife and daughter enjoyed the shopping. The second week was spent in Krabi at the fantastic Pakasai Resort where we lazed by the pool except for 2 day trips out. I was very reluctant to return….but we did as the start of the school year beckoned.

So what of the High Definition Wars?

Obviously whilst I was away on holiday there were some significant developments in the Hi-Def “War”. The biggest was Warner dropping their format neutral stance and going Blu-Ray only. The news prompted many inside and outside of the industry to declare BDA the winner and HD-DVD dead. But wait…………..HD-DVD isn’t dead…yet.

As a result on the Warner decision, and after a period of shocked insensibility by the HD-DVD Forum and Toshiba, prices were slashed starting in the US and then Europe. Finally here in Australia we got the price cuts too and whilst too early to tell whether it is merely a “dead-cat bounce” HD-DVD players have apparently outsold BD players (including the PS3) 2-to-1 last week here in Oz.

I now have an Toshiba HD-XE1 player and it is indeed a very fine piece of machinery. It has the special region free firmware to enable it to play all regions of SD-DVD’s thanks to the ingenuity of a fellow forum member here in Australia. It has the excellent Silicon Optix/HQV Reon Video Processor which does wonders with SD-DVD processing.

I’ve ordered 20 or so more HD-DVD titles to do my “bit” for the struggle.

Onto February when we all perspire in the final, humid sweatbox that is the tail-end of summer and such lunacy as the start of the Super 14 Rugby Season will be upon us. For some reason the fact that whilst Rugby Union is traditionally a winter sport it is now played in late Summer/Autumn in Australia has yet to penetrate the heads of the manufacturers of rugby attire. So if someone sees me at Suncorp stadium without a rugby top it’s only temporary until it cools down and I can were a rugby top without melting.

Oh….HD-DVD still isn’t dead yet. Perhaps someone could answer me this?

I don’t understand why a lot of the so called “geek” community have decided to endorse the standard that has mandatory region coding (admittedly not an issue for the majority of American’s who struggle with their own geography let alone the rest of the globe), and mandatory DRM with the prospect of even more onerous checks in the future using BD+.