Thoughts and Ramblings

In my previous post I outlined the issues with using the GoogleTV for playback and I promised to outline my new client.

The Hardware

Since a list makes this easier, I’ll present the hardware that way:

• First the computer: I bought an Intel NUC (D54250WYKH) as the base machine. If you wish to get the same, be sure you get a version with the power cord as it is not a standard PC power cord.
• 4G, DDR3 1600 1.35V, Crucial stick (the 1.35V is very important)
• Intel 7260 +Bluetooth card (WiFi and Bluetooth)
• Kingston Digital 30GB SSDNow mS200 mSATA
• mini HDMI male to HDMI female adapter (the NUC has a mini HDMI port). I bought this from Monoprice along with other cables.
• Bluetooth keyboard/trackpad combo. I find this useful when I need a keyboard or mouse from across the room.
• A USB keyboard for the initial setup

Not mentioned above is the requirement of an HDMI receiver between the TV and NUC. The NUC can be configured to use analog audio output or passing audio directly to a TV over the HDMI, but a receiver provides the best audio experience.

Since my last post on the topic, my client and server software have changed. In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I now work part time for Plex, though all of my decisions outlined in this post were made before that time.

Necessity for the change

I started to get frustrated with some of the limitations of the GoogleTV:

• The platform seemed to become stagnate (and the pending AndroidTV hadn’t been announced yet). It became clear that some of the limitations were never going to be resolved.
• The device is supposed to passthrough DTS, but it will occasionally fail for a second during playback. It does this both on optical and HDMI. I tended to resolved this by transcoding the DTS to AC3 with the more problematic movies.
• The device is supposed to play VC-1, but it would stutter during playback if the content was in an MKV file. It did not if the content was in a MPEG-TS. This problem does not exist during disk playback. I resorted to transcoding VC-1 content to AVC.
• The device is supposed to passthrough HD-audio such as DTS-HD and TrueHD. It does this with playback of a disk, but not from MKV files nor MPEG-TS.

Clearly the best solution is a computer since it has no problem with all of these.

I’ve been using the mac long enough that I’ve gone through several of the package management systems for installing additional open source tools. I started off with Fink which I really liked since it was based on dpkg. Then it became clear that the community had switched to using Mac Ports (formerly Darwin Ports). I was a bit disappointed with this because the package management wasn’t as good as it was with Fink, but it kept pace with the newer OSs better than Fink. Now the community has shifted again, this time to Homebrew. Homebrew seems to have learned a lot of lessons from the previous. The most notable is that most of the Formulas are in binaries and they use git for the formula list rather than rsync for the port list. Also anyone wanting to make a formula would fork the repo on github, commit their formula, and initiate a pull request. Given this adds simplicity on the developers, hopefully homebrew will last longer than the others.

So, for those developers living under a rock for the past 2 weeks, Apple introduced their new programming language Swift. They stated that the language has been in development for 4 years, so it is safe to assume that the language’s definition is fairly stable. Since I wrote several posts on what Objective C can learn from java, such as this most recent one, along with what it has learned, I should at least look at Swift. I have not yet actually programmed anything yet in Swift, but I have read through it’s documentation. If I got anything wrong in this post, call me on it.