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By now you’ve probably heard about the DTV switch-over: after 2/19/2009, TVs receiving rabbit-ears antenna analog signals will no longer pick up a TV picture. You may have seen the commercials where the scary announcer makes it sounds like your TV is going to eat you unless you buy loads of expensive equipment.

What’s an old-schooler to do? Get a $40 coupon from the government good towards a converter box, which makes the new fangled DTV signals appear on old fashioned analog TV sets. A few weeks after you order, a special whore-red credit card shows up in the mail. You can use the coupon anywhere, but be careful: a lot of major retailers are charging insane amounts for converter boxes ($100 and up!), so how much the coupon helps definitely depends on where you shop. Today I found a pretty great deal: a converter box for $40.01. So you pay a penny and shipping and get to enjoy High Definition, FREE over-the-air TV, scaled down to your antique tube. I’m not usually one to shill, but this counts as a pretty hot deal. Not that I know anyone who watches analog over-the-air broadcasts–but still, you should tell your parents. They’ll appreciate it.

There’s a certain brand of humor that’s both painful and hilarious at the same time—comedy of the awkward realism of life, where a mirror is held up to the most vulnerable situations you’ve ever been in, and you want to run as much as laugh. Curb Your Enthusiasm is like that sometimes, when you know Larry’s being a jackass, but you secretly relate. It’s a humor based on calling out its audience: this is funny because it’s a bad idea, it says, but even funnier because we know you’ve been there.

The movie Young People Fucking takes this a step further, approaching six different relationship archetypes and depicting them painfully realistically in a comedy of errors, patched together from moments of relationships you won’t care to admit you recognize. The Couple; the Exes; the Roommates; the First Date; the Best Friends. We get snapshots of each relationship as seen through the lens of sex, watching each pair define themselves through desire, insecurities, lies, mishaps, and gluttony. The couple dealing with sexuality becoming routine, the best friends swearing they can be casual about sex; they’re the awkward and difficult parts of love that we don’t even talk about, much less make movies about. So we laugh, but it’s a laughter of shared embarrassment, of recognizing bad decisions or shallow moments.

And it works from beginning to end. While seemingly thin on plot, the point of Young People Fucking is more about forcing the audience to a certain level of openness about sex and intimacy. We watch as some of the cast comes to realizations that seem basic, but take even the best years to learn—lessons about the importance of being completely honest about what you want with a partner, and honest about one’s own intentions—and because each scene is captured so honestly, and played so painfully realistically, the humor is all in the self-recognition. You may not recognize every situation, but you will recognize more than one; it’s an embarrassment like hearing yourself on someone else’s voicemail.

While definitely over-the-top at times, YPF is surprisingly mature, and never strays into vulgar or cliched territory. The movie could easily have been overly male—in which case, the jokes would have been about fluids and impotence, and it could have been overly female—in which case, everything would tie up neatly and the men would all come to emotional epiphanies at the end. Instead, it does neither, laying out all the messiness, joy, and impermanence of real relationships, and that’s both refreshing and off-putting.

Watch Young People Fucking alone, and oh yeah—be careful when you Google the title.

Big week this week in the geek world! Holy cow!

• First, the AppleTV was hacked to run XBMC and Boxee. This means that my long-standing complaint about lack of format support goes out the window, and the AppleTV takes a big step towards usefulness. A few minor steps with a USB stick and your AppleTV might actually let you do more than spend money! Huzzah!
• Next, the Dell Inspiron Mini was hacked to run Apple’s OS X Leopard. Wow!
• And my biggest complaint about NetFlix’s streaming service has been addressed — now they offer actual mainstream content. (Oh, and it looks like some NetFlix love for Mac is coming, too.)

The future hasn’t totally gotten here yet, but we’re getting there.

I’ve railed quite a bit against the AppleTV, because I’ve always wondered what the point is of having a media center extender that can’t play all formats and won’t stream live TV. I’m a big fan of video-on-demand–which is why I had such high hopes for the NetFlix box–and the user interface and menu design of the AppleTV sets the standard for most other applications. Nonetheless, the device has too many “it can’t do that either” statements attached to it.

Arguably, the AppleTV is made far more useful when hacked. The plug-ins and additional programs made available by the folks at AppleTVHacks.net (I can’t tell if the URL describes the content or the authors) fill in many of the gaps left behind by Apple (like format support, access to alternative movie rental sites, and FTP access), and include instructions on all the warranty-breaking fun, to boot. For those with pockets deep enough to buy an EyeTV license as well, some hacks even integrate EyeTV (mac’s only PVR application of note) with the AppleTV interface.

This is all well and good, provided that you have the money to blow. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the current media center extender champ, the STX-HD100 is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux, has no format restrictions, and requires no hacks–so I’m left wondering why anyone would bother paying more money for less functionality?

I’m guessing/hoping that Apple’s realized this, and that on September 30th of this year we’ll finally see the long-awaited hybrid between the Mac Mini and the AppleTV. Let’s take a few shots in the dark and say… solid state hard drive, slimmer form factor, HDMI output, running a full version of Leopard? Depending on the price point and how much the machine is usable as an everyday workstation (and given the success of the Mini, I’d say this is a given), this could be what a lot of home theater nuts have been waiting for. With a real operating system on board, accessible by the user, that means that additional format support and functionality becomes a LOT easier. I’m not sure I’ll be ditching SageTV anytime soon, but it’s the right direction nonetheless, and I like the idea that Apple is implicitly acknowledging that the Mini was perfect for the living room from the get-go.

What would you pay for this new super hybrid? $300? $400? Leave thoughts in the comments, or just bitch and moan like me. It helps.

I’m a sucker for gadgets as much as the next guy, but I can’t stand hype. It drives me a little nuts, particularly in the world of tech toys, because based on marketing copy it’s easy to make any toy sound great. Thankfully, every time a new one comes that doesn’t live up to its claims, there’s usually an underpraised alternative waiting in the wings. Here’s a list of three such examples: devices that were “it”…until people got their hands on one.

1. The Sony UMPC. Remember when Sony was trying to tout their Ultraportable Media PCs? They took a good idea and gave it the Sony treatment: starting with a laptop so small it can be toted just about anywhere, they then added bloatware (often to the tune of Vista), unnecessarily powerful components, and a price tag starting at more than a grand.The alternative: Netbooks. The Asus corporation was the first on the block to offer a 7″ laptop with basic Internet functionality and a sub-$300 price tag, but now they’re everywhere.
2. The Popcorn Hour A100. People review this device as though it were crafted by a deity, and I have yet to understand why. Sure, the A100 is great for accessing media files from a remote server and playing them back on TV, and yes, it plays lots of formats… but it doesn’t connect to any Live TV functionality (ala SageTV, Windows Media Center, or BeyondTV), and traps the user into using their proprietary interface. If someone can explain to me how this is any better than a $50 XBOX running XBMC, I’m all ears. The alternative: SageTV’s ST-HD100. Everything the Popcorn Hour can do plus LiveTV and countless add-ins, and a better financial value.
3. Chumby. OK, I’m particularly bitter about this one, because I waited years for this to come out after its initial announcement. The concept is simple: a small device with a 3″ screen and enough hardware on board to run widgets, or small applications dedicated to one functionality. All the software was written in Flash, and users could make their own Chumby widgets as needed. I was jumping up and down at the thought of a Chumby perched on my nightstand, acting as an alarm clock, digital picture frame, and streaming radio player at my whim.Yeah, turns out no. The software on Chumby was so buggy and froze so frequently, after an RMA exchange I gave up entirely. Aside from having a screen that was barely sensitive, Chumby was so generally unresponsive I ended up feeling like more of a Chumpy.The alternative: the iPhone. Instead of widgets, the iPhone’s applications do all of the same things the Chumby does, with the key difference that on the iPhone, everything just works. I’ve tried for years to resist the temptation to become an Apple snob, but it’s failures like the Chumby that keep making that difficult!

Did I leave out any honorable mentions? Is it really worth mentioning that I perhaps bought a Zune when they first came out? Leave thoughts or rants in the comments.

The NetFlix box, the device that streams movies from NetFlix to the TV, is an amazing little piece of hardware, and an emblematic one at that. Designed to be part of the next big step for NetFlix, the concept and implementation are both deliciously simple: instead of bothering with DVDs, and waiting for the mail, play a flat monthly fee for streaming online access to an entire catalog of movies. I’ve been waiting for this for a long time, because I’m too cheap for cable TV, and I have a limited amount of hard drive space, so storing my own DVD rips isn’t really an ideal solution.

Here’s the rub: While the hardware is pretty close to perfect (with a connectivity suite to be envied, and a surprisingly compact form factor), licensing limitations and poor interface design make the device near useless.

First, on licensing: the movies available in NetFlix’s streaming “watch it now” service aren’t exactly the A-List. It’s clear that someone at NBC likes them, because a healthy host of their shows are available (OK, granted, it is pretty cool to watch any episode of The Office at any time), but beyond that, users are more likely to find themselves settling for a flick they’ve never heard of more often than not. To be fair, this isn’t NetFlix’s fault; it’s the industry model, where every content distributor wants fair compensation for online distribution according to their own definitions. Still though, as a vocal NetFlix supporter, I’d like to have the same experience with this device as I first did with their service: overwhelmed by the choice, thrilled to have access to so many things I’ve been meaning to see. After a few hours with this box, you’ll be scrounging to find anything with a recognizable actor.

On interface: Surprisingly, with the NetFlix box, users can’t browse the catalog of available titles using the included remote. Instead, users must manage a separate movie queue on the NetFlix website, and every title listed in the special queue becomes accessible from the hardware. This cripples the experience, as any time I want to see a new movie I have to find a laptop and manage the queue.

If anyone were to hack this device, it could very well be as useful if not more so than the SageTV STX-HD100–meaning, a low-footprint fanless media center front-end. If and when that happens, maybe then I’ll regret selling it.

So after a crazy summer, and more than a few breaks from all my home theater madness, I got back in the HTPC saddle this week and have started to resume work on building my ultimate Media Center using SageTV.

A quick recap on my current requirements, beyond the DVR and media playback basics:

• Must be able to search for TV episode metadata for my archived TV video files, and save it
• Must be able to search for Movie metadata and cover art, and save it
• Must be able to scan new TV recordings for commercials, and then auto-skip them during playback
• (Bonus:) Must be able to transcode from HDTV to XviD *.avi, cutting commercials, all from the couch

When I first tried solving the problem, I was convinced that the answer lay in one of the most popular SageTV customizations, SageMC. The SageMC “STV” (which is a fancy acronym for “theme that enhances functionality”) actually seemed like it could meet all of my requirements with little to no poking, but in the end, it became too cumbersome, and SageTV suffered a noticeable slow-down when the SageMC STV was in use. So I returned to the default theme/STV, frustrated for a bit.

Then, after doing some looking, I found that I would have better success by trying to address my requirements individually rather than trying to find the one STV that could do it all. My end result: I’m now using an STV that mimics the AppleTV interface, with all of my core requirements (plus the bonus!) met through a few choice add-ins.

Here’s how I did it. Note: This is by no means the most efficient way to do this. I’m sure there are easier, faster ways to accomplish this–and if you know of them, add them to the comments, please!–but for now, this is the best way I know how. The first few steps are repeated from the original post, and everything else is new!

For getting SageTV to look like an AppleTV:

1. Install the iSage STV. No rocket science to this one, but the iSage STV does a great job of paring down the SageTV UI while borrowing a little bit of Apple’s class (minus the black turtleneck).

For existing TV video files:

1. Get your TV video file directories and naming conventions in order. Make sure that your folder structure and naming convention of your video files are consistent and accurate. If this means having to rename a lot of files, I recommend using a utility like Ant Renamer. My final structure and naming convention was <Show Name>/<Season #>/s##e##.extension.
2. Generate *.my files using Roxy99’s TV.com scraper for Sage. This is fairly straightforward: install this small application and point it at your video directory. For each video it identifies individually, it generates a .my file in the same directory containing all of the episode’s metadata.
3. Use Roxy99’s .my to .properties converter. SageTV will look to a .properties file to define the metadata for a video file of the same title, so this application will take the .my files from the previous step and generate corresponding .properties files.
4. Repeat as needed, or set up a scheduled task in Windows to repeat this process on a regular basis.

For existing movies files:

1. Download and install the IMDb search STVi (an STVi is another fancy acronym meaning “small functionality or tweak that can be added to an STV”).
2. Restart SageTV.
3. Test adding metadata to a movie file. Browse to a movie file, then right-click (or hit Options on the remote). Choose IMDb search, and save the correct results.

For setting up ComSkip:

1. Download and install the ComSkip Monitor tool. The ComSkip Monitor is a small application designed to run the ComSkip application in the background, creating cutlists listing commercial timestamps after each new TV recording. It comes with everything you need, including ComSkip itself.
2. Run through the ComSkip web-based configuration, setting preferences as desired.
3. Install the ComSkip playback STVi. Now that Sage is going to know where the commercials are, this plug-in will allow it to skip over commercials during playback of TV.

For transcoding from HDTV to *.avi:

1. Install Auto-C It all starts with this STVi, Auto-Compress. Admittedly, I’m still working on this part, but hey, it’s there.

There ya have it! If all went well, your SageTV installation now plays back HDTV without commercials, your video file archives contain metadata, and the entire experience looks as good as an AppleTV without the price tag or pretension. I’ll post screenshots and more of a detailed walkthrough later, but feel free to add your comments below.