Back in August last year I wondered aloud whether it was time for a remix of Ubuntu aimed at media centres and set top boxes. I was not the only one thinking along these lines it seems! In April 2009 “Element” was founded by Kevin L. Thompson with the aim of producing an operating system specially designed for media centres. They have just released version 1.0 of Element OS, a new Linux distributon based on Ubuntu designed around the concept of the ten foot user interface (a user interface you can see and operate on your TV from across the room). It was time to make myself comfortable on the sofa and see what this new remix is all about.

At long last after some delays I have finally received my new nettop and can now start properly experimenting with a device so quiet it can be used in the living room without the interruptions of noisy fans and overheating hardware. If you haven't heard of nettops then that might all be about to change. These are the desktop equivalent of netbooks. Small, with restricted power but good enough for internet surfing and doing your email. They typically use less electricity than their full size counterparts, and can be quite cheap to purchase if you avoid the Windows versions. The arrival of the Nvidia ION platform to these devices has meant that many new options have become possible such as building media centers or set top boxes.

I've been meaning to write this up for a while but have been very busy enjoying Boxee and the entertainment it offers! It has continued to gather momentum at great pace since the last time I wrote about Boxee, just over a month ago. An article about Boxee has appeared on the New York Times website, the Boxee Twitter account now has about 11,000 followers and thoughts have turned to the possibility of  selling ready-made dedicated Boxee boxes. This is very good going for a software product that is only in alpha, needs a fair degree of computer know-how to get it up and running and is not yet publicly available for Windows. It is worth installing though, the software has that magical quality of feeling like things should have always been done this way, and the act of recommending a video podcast episode to a friend is so easy and yet is such a powerful concept. Boxee makes the most sense connected to your TV rather than being on a laptop. Media centre PCs that are designed to go in your living room are a perfect choice too. When you have a PC connected to your TV it is a different idea from having a laptop, you don't need some of the things that come with standard Ubuntu like an office suite and ease of configuration for things like codecs becomes more important. Fortunately Mythbuntu exists, which is a version of Ubuntu designed for media centre PCs that removes most of the desktop software and adds in support for MythTV. It is also a really good choice for a Boxee installation.

In many houses the TV and broadband line can be found only inches apart and in most cases no connection is yet made. The Internet had the power to bring about a revolution in the choice of programming available, instead of scheduled streams of programming that we have no control over we will be able to pick and chose what we want to watch from thousands of producers. Media centre software such as MythTV is a great option for this, with the capability to deliver a full TV friendly experience, but up to now media centre software has primarily focused on TV tuners and media available locally, such as your collection of videos and MP3s. Now a new entrant onto the media centre scene is offering a different focus, putting web services at the heart of the TV experience, but this goes beyond just consuming web content, they are also adding a social, Web 2.0 dimension by integrating with popular sites such as Twitter, Last.fm and FriendFeed. Boxee is not just software, but also a social networking site where you can form communities and rate content. It makes TV a social activity.

Christmas is upon us once again and inevitably many people will be thinking about what to enjoy on television as they recover from all of that food and drink! So in my last blog post for this year I thought I would experiment with MythStream, a plugin for MythTV which is a multimedia home entertainment system designed for PCs that are connected to your TV and you operate with a remote control rather than the traditional laptop and desktop experience of computing. In my last post the Open University's new podcast website was brought inside Miro, but in this example, information will be extracted from it to integrate it with MythStream and MythTV so you can enjoy the content of the site from your armchair. The OU's podcast site uses a hierarchical navigational structure that made it a bit difficult to import the whole thing into MythStream straight away. Fortunately, MythStream enables you to write your own parsers for external websites, so you can import the same navigational logic, even if it is not supported out of the box.

If you have treated yourself to a High Definition (HD) TV the chances are you aren't using it to its full capability. According to a recent report in The Register, only 1.7% of Western European households have the equipment necessary to receive HD broadcasts, and these consist of only a handful of channels. This situation is set to improve, in the UK we are lucky enough to have Sky HD and Freesat which both carry HD content, but the report goes on to claim that the widespread availability of free-to-air HD channels will not occur until 2015. However, there is no need to despair, luckily there is another interesting source of High Definition content; this time in the form of video podcasts: Miro. The advantage of video podcasts, or vodcasts is that you can subscribe to the content you want, no more being spoon fed by scheduler in a remote TV station! You don't have to watch these vodcasts on your computer either, pretty much every HD television can be hooked into your computer so you can enjoy HD content on your new TV.