I want more content

Every time I watch video content on my computer it reminds me of how I wish my Vunow had more content. Today I was watching the NCAA tournament and kept thinking how nice it would have been to have these on my TV through my "Internet Video Box." I also keep getting upset that Verismo will not put out publicly any intent on what they intend to do with this box. I have had it for 2 months now and the content really hasn't gone anywhere. One big addition of Crackle.com. I at least want to know they are looking to do hulu and tv.com and whatever else they are working on. And as I have read in a few places I would like to know what the hold up is. Is it a technically issue? Is it a political issue? Are you even looking into it? I want to know what to expect. I would love to have whatever game I want on my TV from the NCAA tournament.

Vunow Upgrade

Two days ago my Vunow Box updated itself. It took probably ten minutes. During these ten minutes I had high hopes. That something would be updated. I would finally get my hulu.com access. After it was all done I could see no changes. Hugely disappointing. This is the second update my box has received that I have noticed and both times after it was done I saw no differences. I would very much like it is Verismo Networks would put out what the updates are for the each upgrade somewhere on their website. I would very much like to know what is being made better and what else I could possibly be able to do with my box.
I did not notice, but a fellow Vunow owner in the AVS Forum site, noted that on the popular websites some of the web sites now have a date of March 10th for availability. Possibly this is just a setup for a big upgrade in features on March 10th. We shall see.

Orb Server and Vunow

Bouncing around the Internet I found lists of UPNP servers. Somehow I found one that claimed to be able to stream live TV to any UPNP device. The program I found was called Orb this can be found at orb.com. This program is currently freeware, so after I found it and read a little about the server I downloaded and installed it. As I tried it out the first thing I found after seeing that it worked is that you can pause the video stream. Oh how great this feature is after having Media Center and not being able to stop the video to do anything. The huge negative that I noticed was that the fast forward and rewind do not work well at all. The video freezes and most of the time stops the video. The interface for the Vunow Box is decent. It is pretty easy to navigate, but the organization takes a little getting used to. In order to get live TV you have to have a TV tuner card. The only computer I currently have is an HP Laptop. I got a Pinnacle 801e SE USB tuner. The usb tuner uses the on board processor of the computer to encode the signals that come in through the tuner. Typically TV tuner cards that are placed into a desktop box have the correct pieces on the card to encode the signals and keep that processing off your main processor. The TV tuner itself took around 50% of the capacity of my laptop processor. I have an AMD Turion Dual Core Processor with a 1.9 GHz rating per core. When I first got the tuner Orb was having difficulty with the TV listings and it took about a week before they had a fix that corrected the digital over the air listings in my area. Once I got the fix and set up my tuner I tried to stream the digital TV from my laptop to the Vunow Box. I got a few channels to stream to the box, but most of the channels pinned my computer processors at 100% and apparently failed orb from streaming the media to the Vunow Box. When it failed it said that the box could not recognized the format. The few channels I got to stream did look good and seemed to work nicely. There were some times of some video skipping and I'm pretty sure it was because my computer could not process all the data fast enough. Orb does have a personal video recording option on it and it should work well to set your recordings and after they are done recording you should then be able to successfully stream them to the Vunow Box. I have not been doing this because I have an over the air digital video recorder that I use in the living room. Please leave any comments if you have questions about certain orb features and how they work on the Vunow Box.

Vunow External Hard Drive

After using the vunow back and trying a few different things the only really good way to play your videos was to put them on a portable drive and walk them back to the Vunow Box. After running out of space on my USB flash drive I decided to buy an external hard drive. I bought a 1 TB usb hard drive from a discount place near were I work. It has been the best thing by far I have done for my Vunow. All the features work flawlessly when you play off of the hard drive. The pause, fast forward, rewind, and no skipping. I would highly recommend the use of an external hard drive with this box. The one feature I wish the Vunow had the most is a way that when the external hard drive is hooked up to the Vunow that you would be able to show the drive as a shared drive on the network. I would like to be able to leave the drive hooked up to the box right by the TV and be able to dump and access everything on the external hard drive. Now I have to physically move the drive to my computer and copy the files over and bring it back to the TV. It is quite a pain. I keep looking for a good option to be able to access the drive from the TV, but nothing really fits the bill. The best so far is an adapter that makes and usb drive a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device, but I would have to still plug the hard drive back and forth into the adapter and Vunow. Verismo if you are reading that please add that the external hard drive can be linked into the network for easy access for adding video files to be played on the Vunow.

Streaming From Media Center

After exhausting the Internet features of the box I decided to look into the meat of this system, playing video files. I first started by using a small capacity thumb drive. This works perfectly the only problem I really encountered is that I ran out of space. Video files are large. I began to try to stream video over the UPNP server. The basic one they support is Media Center. The steps to set up the server are easy. You need to add the video files you want to share to the correct folder and go through the settings to allow media center to act as a server. The feed of the video is good quality. The problems I ran into with this setup is that you cannot pause the video feed using the box. There is no way to stop the video. This became annoying to the point I had to stop using this situation. Media Center Streaming works, but is not very practical.

Vunow Wireless Connection

I originally order my Vunow Box with the wireless adapter thinking that would be perfect for my back bedroom that has no way to get my network back there. I quickly learned that with the large amounts of data the wireless G system was not going to work in my back room. I would load video and it would break up every 3 seconds in my back room and stop to buffer quite often, so to investigate I put the box i my living room. When I had the box set-up wirelessly and set the box 6" from the wireless router I go enough data transfer to play the videos without buffering or skipping problems. The next thing I did was a data transfer check. In my back bedroom roughly 25' and 2 walls from the router, I got about 1 to 1.5 MB/sec transfer raters. When I used the wireless and was 6 inches away, I got 2.5 MB/sec transfer rate. When I used the wired connection I got the 4.5 MB/sec that is said to be my max for my DSL. I don't know if it was pure distance of if there was a lot of interference from other wireless sources because I do live in a condo. I can get about 8 other wireless connections in my apartment, so between that and other sources of interference my guess would be that was my problem. To fix my problem I invested in a set of Powerline Ethernet adapters. These pieces plug into outlets and transfer data through the electrical wires in your home at a higher frequency then the power supply and communicate with each other. I got high end 200 MPS units. These have worked flawlessly with the Vunow Box to produce perfect video signals in my back bedroom. The big negative is that $130 price tag for the set. Keep in mind if you are looking to run this wirelessly there is a reason they advise you to use a wired connection. Also keep in mind that they say that the wireless dongle they provide is the only one that will work with the Vunow, so if you are thinking you would want to upgrade to N wireless you are most likely going to have to add a bridge like they sell for gaming systems that have an ethernet port to attach the system port to.

Live Internet TV Channels

All everyone wants to know on the Internet is what TV channels there are, so someone from the avs forums on-line has decided to keep an updated list. Here is the Link (Vunow Live Internet TV lineup). The next question is the quality. In the interst of full disclosure I only have the standard definition pod. The typical channel does not compete with the quality of a digital TV picture at all. The Hip TV 1 and 2 which at one point was called the vunow demo channel do start to have picture quality that comes close to digital TV clarity. The reality is that most of the channels are news, religious, or shopping channels. They are feed to Internet at a low rate because watching a guy behind a desk talk doesn't require great video. On the ABC new channel on the pod when i was watching it was video of a person making a radio show, so the video was something that no one needed at that time. I have found that audio is typically not a problem and follows along with the video. Occasionally I have found that it has gotten delayed. The capability is there to provide a great feed to the vunow box from the Internet, but the issue right now is that there is nothing out there feeding video to the Internet at a high rate. If I could get the Hip TV stations quality on channels I would order channels from this box for my TV watching. Someday if they get someone to agree to provide valuable content at a great quality I would be willing to pay. I believe that is box could be the perfect platform to launch a system of paying per channel you would like access too. For a few dollars each a month getting to pick a selection of stations would be perfect for me get the "cable stations" that I want without getting a ton of channels I will never use.

Vunow Blog First Post

I bought a Vunow by Verismo Networks about a month ago and have found that it is difficult to find information on what can and can't be done with it, so I figured I would start a blog to explain the things I have learned through trial and error. Hopefully I will also be able to attract some other users of the product to share some of their experiences with that rest of us as well. With the digital transition just around the corner a month ago (it has been moved back now) I wanted to find a source of video for the TV I have in the bedroom. I live in a condo and have for the last five years lived with only over the air television. Around five years ago I bought a digital video recorder with an internal hard drive and a TV guide interface from Best buy. I learned that if I recorded what I wanted over the air that there was enough free content to keep me content. My problem in this condo is that there is only one antenna outlet in the house and it is in the living room and with a cable converted box I get literally one station in the bedroom with the rabbit ears. I just wanted video content in my back room in some way, so I began to investigate the options for internet video in set top boxes. After some investigation it turns out that there are many options for set top boxes that stream media saved on another computer over a network. I don't have much video content, so I was looking for something that displayed internet video. I found some boxes that were set to display You Tube and other select video sites, but they all seemed very limited. The real reason I picked this box was because it had streaming TV channels and that sounded perfect for my bedroom. When I got the box it had about 8 channels under the North America section of the live TV. This was disappointing. Now there are around 20 to 30 channels under the same section, so the box i definitely expanding. The more I have used the box the more happy I have been with it. I will continue to post my experiments and results here as the days go by.