One bourbon, one scotch, and one mav

Recently I’ve been thinking about building another computer. For various reasons, not limited to but including

• boredom
• new/cool fetish
• junk addiction
• XBMC can’t play HD
• XBMC is not a DVR
• xboxes are way, way end of life
• xboxes are frightening expensive given the previous fact

See, I figured that my Athlon 64 4400+ would have enough oomph to at least play back 720p HD content. 1080p still seems a little out of reach but it would be a good start. I wanted to play around with LinuxMCE as it seemed to show some promise (even if it is ass-ugly) and give Media Portal another run.

I mean, I got my xbox almost two years ago, and I was pretty late to the party. Those apps I had tried before had 2 years to improve. It’s gotta be all sunshine and rainbows by now, right?

I spent part of yesterday (don’t ask) and (after getting a working power supply from RD) all of this evening working on it, and you know what I found out?

XBMC is so much better than both of the aforementioned products it’s not even fair to compare. LinuxMCE, Mediaportal, it’s like the Special Olympics of media center software.

You know what? Neither of those fucking pieces of worthless shit was capable of browsing a network. LinuxMCE found every single share on my Linux server, individually, and proceeded to bug me about each of them, individually. Then it put them somewhere on that godawful menu and didn’t tell me where. Media Portal isn’t even capable of browsing a network at all, from what I can tell.

Listen, dammit. All I want is a little menu that shows me the whole fucking workgroup, and lets me navigate through systems and shares some sort of traditional folder structure. I should be able to find a fucking file directly on the network. And get this: when I mash some stupid button, it should play! It should be so simple I can even do it when I’m drunk. This shouldn’t be so fucking hard.

Then again, if you’ve ever tried to access Windows shares under Linux maybe you wouldn’t be so surprised.

So I’m not sure why I am.

What I did find is that these software programs are absolutely jam-packed with stupid shit that at best only tangentially relates to actually playing media.

I couldn’t give a flying rat’s ass if it can control lights, alarms, talk to video capture devices by itself, play games, or show me the fucking weather report. (Hint: If you’re not dead, there’s still weather. The sun didn’t bluescreen between 2 and 3 AM.) Perhaps while we’re on track with all these features that are at best gratuitous and at worst silly and useless we could consider improving actual functionality. Or perhaps we can consider adding the ability to feed a dozen Taco Bell burritos into the fucking optical drive and have the goddamn thing fart the Star-Spangled Banner while drinking a beer, blowing some shit up and donating ten bucks to Ron Paul, because in his Rand-esque free-market utopia four dozen competitors would all have media centers that gloriously interoperate and they’ve packed in so many features that they can’t pack in any more actual useful stuff so the only thing that differentiates each one is the amount of stupid, gratuitous features each one can add in. In this world your media center will do everything including control your toaster and remote-flush your toilet so people basically choose the superior product by the color of the box, and don’t forget every sale includes a one dollar donation to the “Right to Life Fund,” because having abortions would be having too much freedom and we wouldn’t want that.

While I’m on the subject of “too much freedom” we should talk about corporate-funded censorship (the opposite of which is curiously called “Net Neutrality,” because apparently “GET YOUR FUCKING HANDS OFF MY GODDAMN PACKETS, YOU SOULLESS CORPORATE FUCKS, BEFORE I SLAUGHTER YOU EN MASSE AND MOUNT YOUR CORRUPT FUCKING HEADS ON PIKES IN THE TOWN SQUARE SO EVERYBODY CAN SEE WHAT WE DO TO EVIL, MONEYGRUBBING CENSORSHIP-SELLING MOTHERFUCKERS” was too on-point.

Wait, how did this turn into a disjointed political rant?

Regardless, XBMC does all the shit I want and it does it all with a controller on five-year-old hardware, and if I could make the fucker play HD video I’d never have to trade up.

Laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaame.