Fun Things in Life

While Toshiba pull out of HD DVD and everyone expect HD DVD to die off…. LG issue this statement:

“LG believes that at this present moment in time, it is necessary to provide a player which supports both formats and therefore create simplicity and convenience for the existing HD DVD consumer.”

quote from UK Sky News.

Problem: I have been searching everywhere to look for something to record my TV shows off the SlingBox.

Solutions: The simples solution is to get At-Large Recorder (ALR) from Applian Technologie.  The good thing about ALR is that it works well, record in good quality, can present time and channels, etc.  I really have nothing against ALR.  However, if you want to save $49.95 and willing to suffer poorer quality recording as well as half working solution… read on…

1. First of all some Warnings…  This solution only do 320 x 240 or 640 x 240 (Yes, you cannot do 640 x 480!)  and change channel does not work for me, some claim that it works.
2. Now, if you are still interested, head over to SlingBox SDK on SourceForge and download the SlingBox VLC (I have not tried the Recorder, yeah I know I am lazy).
3. I assume that you have VLC installed.  If not, get the VLC Media Player and install it.  Extract the SlingBox VLC and copy libaccess_slingbox_plugin.dll into “C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\plugins”.
4. Start VLC and Open preferences panel (Settings–>Preferences).
5. Navigate to “Input/Codecs”–>”Access Module”–>”Slingbox”.
6. Check “Advanced options” (lower right corner of Preferences panel).
7. Enter the address, port (default is 5001) and password of your slingbox and click on “Save” to save the settings.
8. In menu select File–>Open Network stream.
9. In “Advance options”, check “Stream/Save” and click on “Settings…”.
10. In the “Outputs”, select “Play locally” and “File” then click on the “Browse…” button to give a filename.
11. You can play around with the various Encapsulation methods and Transcoding options to find “the best”.
12. Click on “Ok” then “Ok” again and enjoy your recording.

The general election of Malaysia is coming up, do you know where to vote?  There is a Website for you to check, and yes you need your NRIC number.

For those who are interested in the Internet and Broadband usage statistic in 2007: