Connect360 - iLife Meets XBox 360
January 10, 2008 | Leave a Comment
I knew you could connect a Windows Media Center PC to your XBox 360 to extend the available content, but my primary machine at home is a Mac running OS X. This means all the fun media (movies, music, and pictures) is all on there. So after a bit of searching I turned up the absolutely amazing Connect360 by Nullriver Software.
So how exactly does it work and what does it do?
The iTunes integration allows you to browse and play your iTunes music by song, artist, album, genre or playlist. As expected, this allows support for listening to your iTunes songs while playing a game. It even updates your iTunes play count and play date for songs played on your Xbox 360.
In addition, Connect360 supports streaming of live Internet radio broadcasts by simply addind any station to a playlist
As for iPhoto, you can view your photo library, browse by photo album or watch a slideshow.
Any movies in your movie folder become available for viewing in full screen.
Connect360 supports the following formats:
MP3, AAC, WAV, AIFF and Apple Lossless for Music. For Photos, Connect360 supports: JPEG, RAW, GIF, PNG, BMP and TIFF. For video streaming, currently only WMV+WMA, AVI (DIVX/XVID), H.264 and MPEG4 files are supported (in MP4 and MOV containers).
On top of all this sweetness, it also does “automagic transcoding”. With this feature, it can do on-the-fly automatic transcoding of many formats so that you can enjoy even more content on you Xbox 360.
As for setup, you drop a new control panel on your Mac and this Connect360 software will automatically detect your Xbox 360 and in turn your 360 will automatically detect your Mac and the media made available to it.
The demo is free, and the full version is merely $20, so if you have this setup, try it out, you won’t be sorry.
Tags: aac, avi, connect360, divx, h.264, iLife, mac, media center, media center pc, media pc, microsoft, mp3, music, osx, pictures, video, xbox, xvid
Canon Rebel XTi
November 25, 2007 | 1 Comment
I finally got the digital SLR I’ve been desiring. In a sweet “black Friday” deal, I purchased the Canon Rebel XTi. This 10.1 megapixel camera came with 18-55mm lens and 75-300mm lenses. I also picked up a 2GB compact flash card to start with.
Now I need to get a ton of sweet accessories for additional fun: a camera bag, an extra battery, a wireless remote, a polarized filter, a separate “speedlite” flash, and more…
Hopefully I’ll have some cool pictures to share soon, though being the holiday season, I’ll primarily be taking family pictures initially.
Tags: battery, camera, canon, canon rebel xti, compact flash, digital camera, lens, picture, pictures, polarized, slr
Displaying My Photos
March 10, 2006 | 6 Comments
One of the largest driving forces for me to create my blog originally was to have a web based gallery to manage and share my pictures with family and friends. Originally, I thought Gallery was the right solution for me. I used it for awhile, but, in the end it felt a bit clunky.
Eventually I played around with Flickr under repeated advice from Casey. It became immediately clear that this interface was much friendlier. I started using it and converted a lot of my old Gallery images. The more I used Flickr the more it became clear how much it rocks.
One problem… I really wanted to be able to present my galleries inside the look and feel of my website. This slowed down my conversion. I was caught now with two ways to manage images, each with great benefits, each with their own chunk of my images.
The solution is using FAlbum by Random Byte. Now I can have the best of both worlds. So click on my new “Photo” tab, and say goodbye to Gallery.
Tags: FAlbum, flickr, gallery, photography, photos, pictures, web20