Midnight in Paris and XBMC

-

About the movie? I have only one word – WOW! The story is great; the execution is brilliant and the actors are great. Also I waited 2 weeks since I got this movie in my hands so that I wouldn't rush through it and instead saved it for the day when I was feeling like watching such a movie.

I have read the reviews and they were positive but this movie is the kind of film that I love – the story is leisurely told and is acted out brilliantly, you find yourself enjoying the acting, the events and the overall tone of the film. You find yourself getting involved in the film; thinking about it and you find some great thing in it. That's the recipe for a really laid back pleasurable film to watch. And Midnight in Paris is just the film. All I missed was some grapes (I don't know why!) and someone to feed them to me (Ok, just kidding!).

Now the software, and yeah this article was originally about XBMC 11. It was lauded all over the internet as a worthy upgrade to XBMC 10 in terms of both functionality and performance. To my pleasure I found it to be true.

Of course I'm not regular user of XBMC, but I had the opportunity to use XBMC 10 a few months ago and I had to drop it because of pathetic performance. But with this release I find myself turning on XBMC all the while when I am touching my machine for only entertainment.

The interface is smooth to operate – the mouse pointer used to move jerkily and used to lag a fair bit for version 10; but in this version it's almost as good as windows mouse pointer. Also the lags in various places while navigating the menus are gone and navigation in 11 is smooth. Also smooth is the theme used. So this release scores high on usability.

Now I use vlc for everyday videos and stuff but with xbmc's inbuilt video browser (files menu under videos; you add sources here) and the ability to browse and queue up others while watching one is making me use XBMC more and more.

I have powerDVD for Movies but since XBMC provides almost all the options powerDVD has and the fact is I'm still light years away from Blue Ray Disks makes powerDVD's advantages over XBMC (inbuilt blue ray playback; sound enhancements etc) moot for me. As for powerDVD's sound effects; I prefer plain sound rather than the emulated (or digitally created) surround sound.

Well kudos to XBMC Team for giving us something so beautiful and so functional!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Morning Quotes

-
Image
Source: www.brainyquote.com   I may be drunk, Miss, but in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly. Winston Churchill   Prayer is the key of the morning and the bolt of the evening. Mohandas Gandhi   I look upon death to be as necessary to our constitution as sleep. We shall rise refreshed in the morning. Benjamin Franklin  
Read more

QCalendarWidget CSS Stylesheeting

-
Recently I had to implement a calendar for a TouchScreen application. I resorted to css to modify the calendar widget's appearance so that it would be more accessible. Following is the code that enabled me to get a proper calendar. calendar->setStyleSheet("QMenu { font-size:20px; width: 300px; left: 20px; }"     "QToolButton {icon-size: 48px, 48px; font: 20px; height: 70px; width: 100px; }"     "QAbstractItemView {selection-background-color: rgb(255, 174, 0);}"     "QToolButton::menu-indicator{ width: 50px;}"     "QToolButton::menu-indicator:pressed,"     "QToolButton::menu-indicator:open{ top:10px; left: 10px;}"     "QTableView { font: 30px; }"     "QSpinBox { width: 100px; font: 20px;}"     "QSpinBox::up-button { width:40px;}"     "QSpinBox::down-button { width:40px;}");
Read more

Selecting new phone plan

-
I use a Reliance Jio SIM as my one and only cellphone number. I used to have another, but I found little use for that. So I discontinued that other SIM card. It was a Vodafone SIM and I had bought it thinking I would be using it when I visit my hometown. Turns out it's not usable there. So adios. Coming back to Jio, it was working so far so good for a while. And it was quite cheap. Then they increased the fares about 4-5 months ago. And it was costing ~Rs 7 per day. This was for unlimited Jio-Jio calling, ~300minutes free to other telcos, and 1.5GB daily cellular data. Now I got home internet, so I thought to cut costs on this. The current plan goes for INR555 for 84 days. This includes 1.4GB 4G cellular data per day, 300 min calling to other telcos, and jio-jio free. That's Rs 6.6 per day. Now I'm not even using 30minutes calling per day. And due to home internet my cellular usage has gone down. So I decided to go for some other cheaper plan. This one is INR1299 for 336 da...
Read more