TV Premieres, Finales & Specials This Week 11/07/2010

We’re back for another What’s-on-TV Check-In.  We’re in the thick of November sweeps month which means we should get some of the better episodes of the season, but not many new shows premiering on primetime..

Like every week, GeekTonic covers the TV scene with a complete listing of premieres, finales and specials for the week.

 

Check out the complete list of finales, premieres & specials below.

The GeekTonic Guide to TV Premieres, Finales and Specials this Week – 10/31/2010

NOTE: All Times are Listed for EST – TV schedules subject to change

Click Here if you want a downloadable PDF  version of this “GeekTonic TV This Week Guide.”

Sunday, November 7

Great Migrations (8pm on National Geographic – HD) New series

Worlds Worst Weather (8pm on Travel – HD) Series premiere

Shake it Up! (8:30pm on Disney) Series premiere

Mel B: It’s a Scary World (9pm on Style – HD) – Season finale

Kendra (10pm on E! – HD) Season premiere

Eastbound & Down (10:30pm on HBO – HD) Season 2 finale

Married to Rock (10:30pm on E! – HD) Another reality series premiere

 

Monday, November 8

Strike Force (10pm on National Geographic World) Series premiere

Conan (11pm on TBS – HD) Conan finally returns – now on TBS.  He welcomes guests "First Guest Poll" winner, Seth Rogen and musical guest Jack White

 

Tuesday, November 9

The Bad Girls Club (9pm on Oxygen) Season finale

Auction Hunters (10pm on SpikeTV) A new Reality/Auction series, SpikeTV style

The Fashion Show (10pm on Bravo – HD) Season 2 premiere

 

Friday, November 12

24/7 Pacquiao/Margarito (9:30pm on HBO – HD) Season finale

Wizards of Waverly Place (9:45 on Disney – HD) Season 4 premiere

Real Time with Bill Mahr (10pm on HBO – HD) Season finale

 

Saturday, November 13

The Ride (11pm on MTV2) New sports/reality series

 

Sunday, November 14

Amazing Wedding Cakes (10pm on WE – HD) – Season finale

Bored to Death (10pm on HBO – HD) Season finale

 

Monday, November 15

Weeds (10pm on Showtime – HD) Season 6 finale

The Big C (10:30pm on Showtime – HD) Season finale

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Sage On the Go-Sagetv gets iPad-iPhone-and iPod Touch Streaming

Owners of the iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch have a new option for watching TV on the go – SageTV Mobile Web Interface now has iOS streaming of recorded TV shows.  SageTV is a pretty powerful Home Theater PC program.  It’s multi-OS including all Windows Versions, Windows Home Server, Linux and for version 6 it even does Mac.  Add to that SageTV is the only HTPC solution with an integrated extender that can do pretty much everything a computer can do.  But there are two things that are holding SageTV back from being the perfect HTPC solution.  One is the lack of CableCard – something many SageTV users currently deal with using a Hauppauge HD-PVR to tune all of those encrypted Cable & Satellite channels.  The other thing missing is the lack of mobile placeshifting – until now.

Thanks to the work of third-party SageTV developer, Jason, SageTV users get the beginnings of a mobile placeshifting solution to watch TV on your iOS device.  I’ve had the honor of testing the new version of the 3rd party add-on, SageTV Mobile Web Interface which pushes the web interface to your mobile device and it’s pretty nice.  Sage Mobile Web Interface has been around for a long time.  It’s basically a mobile version of the SageTV Web Interface.  What’s new is very significant to those of us with an Apple mobile device like an iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch.  The latest version of SageTV Mobile adds the ability to stream TV recordings to your iOS device.  I’ve been testing this new feature for Jason - the developer of SageTV Mobile over the past many weeks.  I’m happy to report that streaming TV over WiFi and even 3G works pretty well.  There are some caveats of course, but all-in-all this is a great solution – especially for free!
SageTV Mobile streaming works much like AirVideo for iPhone does.  It takes recordings from your SageTV System and converts (transcodes) those video files to an iPhone/iPad friendly format.  Part of the process includes determining your connection speed between the SageTV server and the mobile device so that the file is small enough to keep up with a slower connection – much like SageTV’s Placeshifter does.  Watching your shows on the iPad is really nice.  I’ve used my iPad to watch shows throughout the house and it really makes a fabulous, carry-with-you “extender” of sorts.  Better yet, the picture quality of the video on the iPad is very good in my exerience – especially on my home Wi-Fi network.  And being able to catch up on a show on your iPhone isn’t too bad either.  I’ve used this on my work Wi-Fi, in the doctors office where other patients and nurses asked me “how’d you do that?”  Obviously video on the iPhone is… well it’s a small screen.  But it works and the picture is pretty good on that small screen.  I wouldn’t watch a ton of TV on my iPhone, but it’s nice to have when you want to – kind of like how I use the Kindle app on my iPhone.

Read on for a Demo Video of Streaming from SageTV to an iPhone & iPad along with lots of screenshots

Deal of the Day – 10% Newegg Hard Drives $81 2TB

Newegg has a special on hard drives today through tomorrow (11/5/2010).  For all hard drives, enter promo code EMCZZYR25 at checkout and you’ll get 10% off ($10 max off).

So one decent deal from this would be the Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB 3.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Hard Drive – the 64MB WD20EARS version which is priced at $89.99 and drops to $80.99 after the 10% off.

There are plenty of other hard drives to choose from so if you’ve been looking for more storage, check out the price with 10% off.

Kodak Pulse 10” Digital Photo Frame Review

Can something as geeky as a digital photo frame work for the technophobe?  Might it actually be possible for mom and dad or even grandma & grandpa to survive with a digital photo frame?  Up until now I would answer no for most of us, but I have in my possession something that just might be the answer – the ideal geeky, yet simple-enough-for-mom-to-use digital photo frame!


I personally have enjoyed the “art” of making do-it-yourself digital photo frames out of old laptops.  Yes, the DIY digital photo frame is a great project that is economical and a downright rewarding project.  But those DIY digital photo frames also require some technical maintenance at times since they still are just computers inside.  Getting photos on and off of the frame, rebooting, Wi-Fi issues etc all can be deal-breakers for the parents and grandparents.  Even geeks like me can appreciate the “it-just-works” kind of gadget.
I first learned of the Kodak Pulse at ZatzNotFunny! when Mari did a hands-on with the smaller, 7-inch version of this frame.  Mari’s verdict of

“If you want the grandparents to be able to plug in a digital frame and forget about it, the Kodak Pulse is a clear winner.”

had me hooked, but the 7” frame was simply too small for my taste.  I was already used to a larger, laptop-sized DIY frame and wasn’t willing to sacrifice that size – especially for the price at the time.  Thankfully they released a newer, larger version of this frame last month and I’ve been trying it out for about a month now.  Read on for my take on the 10” Kodak Pulse which is basically just a larger version of last years 7 inch digital photo frame.  It’s touch-screen, has a nice, bright display that is the same 800x600 resolution as the 7 inch version and it comes packed with Wi-Fi, multiple memory card format support as well as USB.

Read on for the Complete Review

Finding Technical Info about Your Media File with MediaInfo

If you spend much time with media files on a computer – say with Home Theater PCs, creating videos or ripping DVDs there will come a time when you need to dig deeper into that video file to understand more about it.  My favorite tool for this sort of job is the free, MediaInfo.

I’m currently working with the conversion (transcoding) of HD video files and in doing so I need to know what each video file is made of.  Information like the video format, bitrate, codec, subtitle information etc.  MediaInfo can give you this information and more.

MediaInfo provides the following information about a media file:

• General Information: title, author, director, album, track number, date, duration...
• Video: codec, aspect, fps, bitrate...
• Audio: codec, sample rate, channels, language, bitrate...
• Text: language of subtitle
• Chapters: number of chapters, list of chapters

MediaInfo supports a large number of media formats including:

• Video:
  • Formats: MKV, OGM, MP4, AVI, MPG, VOB, MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4, DVD, WMV, ASF, DivX, XviD, MOV (Quicktime), SWF(Flash), FLV, FLI, RM/RMVB
  • Codecs: DivX, XviD, MSMPEG4, ASP, H.264, AVC
• Audio: OGG, MP3, WAV, RA, AC3, DTS, AAC, M4A, AU, AIFF, WMA
• Subtitles: SRT, SSA, ASS, SAMI...

 

How To Use MediaInfo

When you first open up MediaInfo, you’ll see the very basic User Interface like below:

Select the file-open icon and browse to the media file or folder.  Next you’ll see the basic info screen like below.  This gives you the most used data about a media file like the container, file type, framerate, audio information etc.  For many, this will be all you need.

If you want more information though you can select the “view” icon and switch to one of the many viewing formats to give you all of the detailed media information this program has available.

I often choose text or HTML so I can copy that information and past it into documentation or an e-mail depending on the task at hand.  As you can see below, there is a LOT of technical information MediaInfo gives you. 

MediaInfo is free (donations welcomed) and my personal favorite for this task.  I used to use the free, GSpot program for this task, but it hasn’t been updated for quite some time and I find MediaInfo is better.

To download and read more about MediaInfo head to it’s Sourceforge page