WD TV Video Playlists

I bought the WD TV HD Media Player a few months ago and I’m totally pleased with this little device. It finally brought my TV to its top capabilities showing full HD content so brilliantly.
WD (Western Digital) has a team working on the firmware updates bringing additional features to the hardware owners. One remarkable addition in the latest 1.03 firmware was the video playlist support. Unfortunately, the documentation of this feature seems to me too general. It says in the FAQ section:

How do I find media files and create playlists?

Several media player applications are currently available, such as Winamp and iTunes, that let you play, arrange, and edit media files. These media players also let you create playlists and edit the metadata information for media files. You can search the Internet with your browser to locate where these applications are available for download.

Searching the web I didn’t find anything more specific, so I decided to discover it by try and fail. My first try was Microsoft Windows Media Player that generated the following playlist:

<?wpl version="1.0"?>
<smil>
    <head>
        <author/>
        <title>Playlist Name</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <seq>
            <media src="F:\VIDEO\Video.01.avi"/>
            <media src="F:\VIDEO\Video.02.avi"/>
            <media src="F:\VIDEO\Video.03.avi"/>
            <media src="F:\VIDEO\Video.04.avi"/>
        </seq>
    </body>
</smil>

I also check the playlists (*.m3u and *.pls) provided by WinAmp but the one above looks more robust for me due to SMIL it’s based on. The only problem with it at the first sight was the absolute path to the files defined in the playlist. I searched again for defining a relative path in SMIL and found something related describing the ‘\’ character as the root reference for the relative paths. After the fix my video playlist got its final shape shown below which was tested and works fine on the 1.03 firmware.

<?wpl version="1.0"?>
<smil>
    <head>
        <author/>
        <title>Playlist Name</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <seq>
            <media src="\VIDEO\Video.01.avi"/>
            <media src="\VIDEO\Video.02.avi"/>
            <media src="\VIDEO\Video.03.avi"/>
            <media src="\VIDEO\Video.04.avi"/>
        </seq>
    </body>
</smil>

P. S. Strangely, but it’s impossible to play the whole playlist by hitting the Play button while you see it in the list of other entries. You have to enter first into the list and only then Play will do the job. Is this a bug or a feature?

My blog visits statistic

The below diagram shows the visits of my blog during Yom Kippur 9/28/2009


It’s easy to see some trends in the way people are browsing the web on this day:

• 12 AM – 2 AM – “Well, I’m hungry and can’t fall asleep. Let’s see what’s on Twitter and Facebook.” – 3 unique visitors
• 2 AM – 10 AM – “Finally asleep! No cars, no planes, no trains… kids? Grandma, can you please…” – 0 unique visitors
• 10 AM – 2 PM – “What?! It’s only noon! Maybe something on the web will help me going thru this fast.” – 8 unique visitors
• 4 PM – 6 PM – “These DVDs are crap! Facebook, here I go” – 3 unique visitors
• 7 PM – 8 PM – “We done with the old sins, let’s do some new” – 5 unique visitors

Disclaimer: based on the true data from http://www.onestat.com with a little of my interpretation. Well, actually the numbers are real but the visitors are mostly from out of Israel (US, Canada, Ireland, Portugal, Switzerland, Australia, India and Czech Republic). Taking this into account I can say that either Israelis don’t surf on Yom Kippur or don’t bother to click on links in Twitter or in Facebook status updates.

Amdocs Innovation Camp - Short Clip

I just found on YouTube the clip from Amdocs Innovation Camp 2009. If you'll try really hard, you can even spot me in the footage.

Today, seven month after the event, it still feels exciting. I'm glad I had this opportunity to meet all these interesting people, enjoy doing silly stuff and also discuss serous issues such as opportunities in the global economic downturn.

אחולי שנה טובה

"Tell me a Story"

In memory of Don Hewitt

I'm a huge fun of 60 Minutes – the CBS show that is on air already four decades (from 1968!). It was few years ago when I first noticed the quality and the deepness of the subject examination of an episode shown on the First Channel – the Israeli official broadcasting authority TV channel. I don't remember what exactly it was about, but since then I didn't missed even one episode and few of them I watched even more than once. The excellence and the perfection is in every frame, really, it feels like you can touch it! I love the correspondents, I love the sound, I love the shooting and all this although I'm not 100% agree with what is said on the show. Well, most of the time I do sympathize, what I mean is that the way the stories are presented shows the highest professionalism at every aspect regardless if you agree or not with what is being said.

60 Minutes for me is the flagship of the news television; it is the way I want to receive information. Sadly, the show is unique on the horizon. The closest attempts I know in the Israeli television are the show Fact (עובדה) by Ilana Dayan and the weekend news items on the Channel 2. These are nice to watch but they mostly about the views of a correspondent about the story and less the 'story' itself. Here is the biggest differentiator I realized just lately after watching the August, 2009 episode dedicated to Don Hewitt – the creator of 60 Minutes.

"It is about four words" he said, "Tell me a Story"- this is the key of 60 Minutes success and I wish other producers will learn it. The show itself definitely keeps Hewitt legacy and the only thing I would like is that 60 Minutes will be there forever, working hard as they obviously always do, telling me stories about successes and failures, juniors and seniors, peace and war.