Smart Home Blog

Zotac recently launched a new nettop Zbox HD with Blu-ray drive. You may choose between barebone model HD-ID33 and full-functional one ID-34 with 2Gb RAM and 250Gb HDD. Both models use Intel Atom D525 processor and nVidia Ion2 graphic.

The new Zbox cannot bitstream DTS-HD MA or Dolby TrueHD. So, the big fans of HD sound won’t be happy with that fact. However, two USB 3.0 ports, slim and stylish design and very reasonable price – $399 for HD-ID33 and $400 for HD-ID34 can still make those nettops one of the best options for the noiseless and compact HTPC with Full HD support. Sure comparing with AsRock HTPC they leak IR receiver. But from another had ZBox doesn’t have any fans. And personally I like it form-factor more than AsRock one.

[via Engadget]

Well, the Boxee team together with D-Link is going to launch the Boxee Box on November 10th. It’ll ship with Boxee 1.0 which will be available for Linux, Mac and Windows later on. The Boxee already scheduled the party to celebrate that event. So, if you’ll be in New York in that time don’t miss it!

As you may know Boxee Box is already available for pre-order on Amazon at $199.99 and it should start appearing in stores on Nov 17th.

The Release Candidate 1 of MythTV 0.24 was released yesterday. It includes following major features:

• support for 24 bit audio and HD audio formats,
• initial Blu-ray disc support,
• experimental support for CrystalHD hardware accelerated video decoding,
• completely rewritten and themeable OSD (On Screen Display).

You can download the MythTV 0.24 Release Candidate 1 here.

Today the yaVDR 0.3 was released. yaVDR is an Ubuntu based distribution which joins popular DVB software VDR and popular HTPC software XBMC in one. This version is based on Ubuntu 10.04 and includes development version of VDR 1.7.16.

The most important new feature in the version 0.3 is pre-configuration of PVR settings of XBMC-VNSI during installation from ISO. Also the yaVDR 0.3 offers a new mechanism of waiting when all DVB devices will be ready before VDR starts, wakeup by USB remote control, a new Openbox based minimal desktop environment with Slide-In-Launcher menu on left side of the screen, a new VDR OSD default skin Anthra. Additionally more ready-to-install yavdr-addons were added the applications submen was redesigned.

To install yaVDR 0.3 download its ISO. To upgrade existing installation of yaVDR 0.2 just use apt-get:
sudo apt-get update
and
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Recently home server Amahi based on Fedora Linux added two new applications to its repository – Videos5 and Gallery 3.

Videos5 allows you to stream video to the iPhone, iPad and iPod, Android devices and many others which support HTML5. Additionally it offers possibility to transcode streamed media. But that feature isn’t implemented yet in Videos5 application.

Gallery 2 was one of the most popular Amahi application. It gives an easy and intuitive way to organize photos on the web site or local network. The Gallery 3 is the next version of that popular tool. So, Amahi team hopes it’ll be also popular.