binarygamer.com will now remain a Steam fan/info site just the way it has always really been.

What’s new at Ozsource AU?

Printable Home Theater signs and Logo’s

HDMI cables and Versions, buying cheap is fine.

What is ITC Processing: ATI

Logitech Mini diNovo perfect for a HTPC

XBMC HTPC Windows Quick Setup guide

Cheapest online PS3 Slim Australia.

New Features

Automatically Organise Library Files

Songbird can now automatically organise the files that are contained in your library. Once enabled, it will consolidate your media in one location. You can customise the structure of the folder and file names based on metadata contained in every track.

2-way Sync with iTunes
If you’re using iTunes Music Store to purchase content, you can now automatically expose iTunes library tracks and playlists into Songbird. You can also export tracks and playlists added to Songbird back into iTunes, so that they can easily be synced to your iPhone or iPod touch.

Last.fm Radio
Last.fm Radio supports artist, tag, and user stations, mapping station links on the Last.fm website to play internally in Songbird. It includes the Radio Directory allowing you to conveniently browse and explore the tag and artist relationships on Last.fm. Additionally, the Radio directory includes quick links for playing stations based on your Last.fm library, your Songbird library, and friends/neighbours’ libraries.

10-band Equalizer
Now you can tweak the frequency response of the audio playback to match your room’s acoustics or your personal preferences.

Performance Enhancements

• Faster search
• Deleting many tracks at once is faster
• Selecting a large amount of tracks from the library is no longer slow
• Reduced the amount of threads required to be running at all times by 50%
• Fewer Crashes: We’ve worked hard to identify and fix some of the most common crashes in Songbird.

How?

Visit the IE8 $10,000 competition website and follow tengrand_ie8 on Twitter.

But you will never find it using old Firefox. (So get rid of it, or get lost)

1. To enter the competition, the entrant must follow clues released by @Tengrand_IE8 on Twitter and on www.tengrandisburiedhere.com. The clues section on www.tengrandisburiedhere.com is only viewable in Internet Explorer 8. These clues will lead the entrant to the hidden webpage.
2. The hidden webpage can only be viewed in Internet Explorer 8. The entrant must have download Internet Explorer 8 to successfully view the hidden webpage. Upon discovery of the hidden webpage, the entrant must register his/her details, via the hidden webpage ‘Claim’ button.
3. The first successful registration received via the hidden webpage by the Promoter will be adjudged the winner of the competition.

Download boxee 0.9.11.5591 for Intel Mac OS X 10.4+ – http://dl.boxee.tv/boxee-0.9.11.5591.dmg

Last week we released a new test version of the boxee alpha for Mac and Apple TV that included Pandora, RadioTime and a new boxee browser. spending a week fixing issues reported by users taking the plunge running the bleeding edge version, today we are releasing it to the masses.

Next on our agenda are the much anticipated updates to Ubuntu and Windows, bringing them up to par with the Mac version, and releasing Windows publicly.

If you’ve used boxee to access Hulu in the past, with this new version you’ll notice that boxee displays the hulu.com webpage before playing the video. this is thanks to a new boxee browser based on Mozilla (like Firefox).

This new boxee browser lays the groundwork to support any video available on the web. to try out the new browser you can add RSS feeds in the App Box or go to Video > Browse > Add Source and add a URL – boxee will try to display the page and if there is a video on the page play the video.

Pandora – your most requested Internet music service is now on boxee. you can listen to your QuickMix and stations, as well as create new stations. it is a beautiful app built with our new API. make sure to check it out.

Valve Corps Steamworks’ anti-piracy suite combines three approaches to anti-piracy: (1) Custom Executable Generation, (2) Retail Encryption, and (3) Valuable Platform-Dependant Features.

1. Custom Executable Generation

Custom Executable Generation creates a unique build of your game for each user, making it difficult for any one user to share the game with any other user. Each individual copy of a CEG-protected game is only playable by the Steam account authorized to access it. CEG is transparent, and does not impose limits on users. It lets users access their content from any hardware, and allows unlimited hardware configuration changes without the content becoming unplayable. In fact, no changes are made to a user’s computer for CEG to work. Instead, CEG works in tandem with Steam authentication, enabling content access based on user accounts, not arbitrary hardware-based “rights-management” restrictions.

2. Retail Encryption

Protect your day-one release by shipping encrypted media to stores world-wide. No need to worry that your game will leak from a replicator or stock room, Your game stays encrypted until the moment you decide to release it.

Encryption technology also allows you to preload your game to users on Steam. Download encrypted data weeks in advance so that players have access to your game the moment it’s released, increasing player numbers and satisfaction during the critical first days.

3. Valuable Platform-Dependant Features

Customers won’t want to pirate a game that’s connected to 20 million gamers and a feature-rich platform. Features like Steam Achievements, Anti-Cheat, Auto-Updating, and Steam Cloud simply don’t exist outside of Steam.

Using software like TVersity was the closest you could get in turning the Playstation 3 into a functional streaming media device through the method of Transcoding both the video and audio the source material.   This requires the use of a PC or Mac to act as the streaming server.  Whilst this method works well for Standard Definition devices and for streaming to portable devices like a PSP or a mobile Phone,  the loss of quality is considerably noticable on HD TV sets.

Our next Sourced article looks at the latest media streaming software available for the PS3 and it is damn impressive.

PS3 Media Server

PS3 Media Server is a DLNA compliant UPNP Media Server for the PS3, written in Java, with the purpose of streaming or transcoding any kind of media files, with minimum configuration. It’s backed up with the powerful Mplayer/FFmpeg packages.

PS3 Media Server is available for OSX, Windows and Linux and can play natively all PS3 supported videos such as AVI, MP4, TS, M2TS, MPEG and does a fantastic job of transcoding your typical Net formats and containers such as MKV.

Latest Version: PS3 Media Server v1.10.5 for Windows/Linux/OSX

Current features:

• Ready to launch and play. No codec packs to install. No folder configuration and pre-parsing is required. All folders are directly browsed by the PS3, and it also includes an automatic refresh.
• Real-time video transcoding via MEncoder, tsMuxer or Avisynth
• DVD ISOs images / VIDEO_TS Folder transcoder
• OGG/FLAC/MPC/APE audio transcoding
• Thumbnail generation for Videos
• Supports a virtual folder system using the audio/subtitle language on the PS3
• All formats PS3 natively supports: MP3/WMA, JPG/PNG/GIF/TIFF, and all kind of videos (AVI, MP4, TS, M2TS, MPEG) the PS3 will play
• Display camera RAWs thumbnails (Canon / Nikon, etc.)
• ZIP/RAR files as browseable folders for pictures/audio files
• Support for pictures based feeds, such as Flickr and Picasaweb
• Internet TV / Web Radio support with VLC, MEncoder or MPlayer
• Podcasts audio/ Video feeds support

Windows/Linux Only:

• Lossless 5.1 PCM transcoding with DTS movies
• Remux video and remux/reencode all audio tracks to AC3/PCM in real time with tsMuxer
• FLAC 96kHz/24bits/5.1 support

PS3 Media Server Blog Forum Google.Code

What is XBMC?

Originally named Xbox Media Center, XBMC is now a full featured, award winning free and open source software media-player and entertainment hub for all your digital media.  I have been using XBMC since it’s transformation from xbmp (Xbox Media Player) and was the sole reason I purchased the original xbox.  The software turned a standard game machine into a state of the art network media player – better priced and far superior to anything like it on the market at the time.  With the proliferation of High definition content, The original Xbox based XBMC didn’t have enough horsepower and thus began the interest in bring Xbox Media Center to the GNU/Linux Operating System.

Currently XBMC supports the following platforms:

• XBMC for Linux
• XBMC for Mac
• XBMC for Windows
• XBMC for Xbox
• XBMC Live (Bootable iso)

XBMC Advantages

• Multi-Codec support.
• Codec independent.
• Can play media within an archive (rar,zip), even multi-spanning archives.
• Your wife and Girlfriend can use it.
• RSS feed support.
• Localised weather.
• Quicktime Support.
• LastFM Support
• Itunes support.
• Distributed as open source under the GNU General Public License,
• Extensive Python scripting plugin system.
• Fan Art  & Album and Cover Art.
• Fully Skinable and Customisable interface.
• Configurable webserver, control your Media Center via any internet enabled device like a mobile phone.
• Effortless media management.

XBMC Disadvantages

• No native PVR capability.
• No hardware Video acceleration – Hopefully Soon or check XBMC forums for different solutions.

XBMC Forks

All great Open source software has its share of forks and xbmc is no exception:

• Boxee introduces a unique Social Media aspect to HTPC software.
• Plex is a OSX specific Port of XBMC.
• MediaPortal is a Windows only complete Home Theatre PC frontend with full PVR capability.  Loosley based of the old XBOX only XBMC builds.

In our first Sourced article the spotlight is on the incredibly popular Hulu Video service.

What is Hulu?

Simply put, Hulu is a commercially supported online content distribution website for streaming TV shows, movies and trailers at Hulu.com and other online destination sites – all for free anytime.  The Hulu service is only available in the U.S. at this stage though they are looking to expand based on the acceptance of their content providers.  Similar in concept to Youtube,  Hulu allows content to be embedded in other sites as the player is Adobe Flash based.  In terms of quality,  Hulu offers videos in a 1,000 Kbps, 480p stream or a HD 720p format encoded at 2,500Kbps, both using the H.264 codec.

Hulu is a joint venture of NBC Universal and News Corp though offers videos from FOX, MGM, Sony Pictures Television, Warner Bros as well as NBC Universal.

Why?

The thing that intrigues me so much about Hulu, is that it represents acceptance by the big media players in the use of the internet as a viable and commercially relevant media distribution network.  The large number of users torrenting media is not always just a simple case of people wanting to pirate, more often than not it is due to the ease of use of watching what you want, when you want. Hulu represents an alternative to this sort of piracy and has so far been very successful.  In the gaming world,  Steam is a perfect example of how well this model can work.

Issues?

As with anything to do with media,  Content providers can make some bad decisions thinking they are protecting their product. Boxee, a HTPC product based off the excellent opensource XBMC was recently asked by the Hulu team to remove the Hulu feature from Boxee:

Two weeks ago Hulu called and told us their content partners were asking them to remove Hulu from boxee. we tried (many times) to plead the case for keeping Hulu on boxee, but on Friday of this week, in good faith, we will be removing it. you can see their blog post about the issues they are facing.

This decision merely confuses the situation as Boxee represents a superior way to interface with Hulu on the big screen.  It is a big loss for both the provider, the consumer in general.  I guess it is a case of the old guard still not coming to terms about the true nature of online content distribution. Forcing people to watch via a web browser is probably more to do with ad revenue considering it is really only a different interface.

If you don’t know who he is , Gabe is the Founder and Managing Director of Valve software.

The G4TV DICE Feed has all the latest from the Summit including a full roundup of Gabe’s Entertainment as a Service keynote.

Some Highlights:

Through this perspective, Gabe and Valve have observed the following:

• 30-year old songs with a little service (Rock Band, Guitar Hero) generate huge profits
• Pirates are ahead not just on price, but on service
• DRM appears to increase, not decrease piracy
• Privacy and transparency
• Shrinking distance to customer empowers content creators

Gabe thinks that the movie industry would benefit from incremental products. Toy Story 1.1! Just make the graphics better!

The team that’s making the TF2 character videos (which are awesome!) are going to be working on comics.

Price changes in the retail world don’t allow for much freedom. Steam and other services offer flexability. In fact, users apparently respond to pricing discounts within five minutes.

During the Holiday sales:

• 10% sale = 35% increase in sales (real dollars, not units shipped)
• 25% sale = 245% increase in sales
• 50% sale = 320% increase in sales
• 75% sale = 1470% increase in sales

At 75% off, they are making 15% more money than they were at full price.

Steam stats time:

• 20 million people connected
• All major PC publishers on board
• 350+ of the best PC games
• Worldwide in 21 languages
• 100% Year-over-year growth since 2004

Checkout the G4TV Keynote Feed and MTV for more.

Unreal Tournament 3 deathmatch with 4-player Wiimote support. On a serious note, Steamworks support has also been added, those who own a retail copy may now register it with Steam, free of charge.

Why not try your hand at building your very own Portal gun replica with Harrison Krix

Steam

TF2 has a new critical hits system.

Steam now gives you the ability to specify Content Download Region.

Left 4 Dead Critic’s Choice Edition, DLC and SDK Details Revealed

Hardware

AMD Phenom II Overclocked to 6.5GHz With Liquid Helium -220C smashing the world record for with a huge 45,474 3DMarks in the process.

Software

Google Earth takes a dip in the Ocean with Google Earth 5

M-Lab has a Google powered ISP throttling detector.

Industry

THQ is giving the axe to 24 percent of its workforce which translates to about 600 employees.

More Doom and Gloom as EA Posts a Q3 Loss of $641 million and promptly cuts 1,100 Jobs.

Media

Torrent Freak have their latest weekly ratings on TV shows. Probably the most accurate media ratings system around.

Australia

Online rights campaigner Geordie Guy received a threatening phone message last month after publicly disagreeing with an article supporting the Federal Government’s web filtering plan.