The Mac Media Center Project

Melbourne Australia, Dec. 1, 2005 -- www.Geniecommands.com, Delivering a complete Programmable Media Center Solution. Software company Geniecommands today introduced an exciting new Macintosh software program designed to give consumers more control and fun over their digital entertainment experiences in their lounge room. GenieCommands is a unique programmable software application that allows you to control all your applications and media via simple menus, in a theatre or lounge room environment. The Media Center is a computer like the Mac Mini combined with the Geniecommands software that provides an all-in-one entertainment system for your entire family. While attached to your television screen it allows you to enjoy your favorite entertainment such as; watch DVDs, record TV or pause TV, listen to music, share your digital photos, access the internet and more We have provided a complete set of demo menus to get you started, with links on where to download additional software. These menus can then be edited to suit your lifestyle or create a new one. GenieCommands provides a kiosk push button environment where users can get easier access to the best of what the industry has to offer in software. This is achieved through simple user defined graphic menus, to access all the scripts and to control almost any application. www.Geniecommands.com

Actually Elgato's products do NOT add any DRM; you can have the eyeTVs record to quicktime formats, MPEG elementary streams (for DVD studio pro) or (some other format) for use w/ Toast. Otherwise it saves to bog-standard MPEG2 or 4. Really, Elgato should be sufficient for anyone's needs. They've even added H.264 encoding! Once again, EyeTVs will save to literally any format you could want, and add NO DRM in the doing. -RS

I think the big push towards Open Source on PVR/DVR software is the natural reaction towards the RIAA/MPAA'sw stifling drive to place Digital Rights Management on every damned thing out there. I'm sure ElGato does great work. But if we've learned anything from the Napster debacle, it's that if you release any digital software that allows for the copying or ease of circumventing copyrighted material, the lawyers will jump all over you. Making a PVR/DVR solution that is Open Source allows people to have software that behaves the way it should. Also, many Open Source UNIX projects allow users on multiple platforms to use many devices that are not explicitly supported on their machine with their machine. I know there's Open Source software that allows the use of some versions of WinTV cards on Macs and Linux boxes. I'll gladly buy the hardware sans the "Mac tax" and support the cool coders who develope Open Source drivers. Heck, on Macs thanks to the great work the folks who put together PatchBurn have done, many of us have been able to use "non-Apple supported" drives on our machine.

Hmmm...I don't understand why it's such a big deal to have "open source" software for this. You'll have to buy some sort of tuner or input device anyway and they come with software already. How many of us are going to actually poke around in the source? We just want something that works. Is the software that comes with these things that bad? I have the older USB EyE TV units and it's fine other than the MPEG-1 encoding. I certainly don't care if people do this, I just fail to see the point.