I really hate it when a show I’ve been watching finally comes to an end. Without fail, I find I’m always asking myself; what am I supposed to watch now? For now the answer comes in the form of Human Target.

The series follows the life of character Christopher Chance. A unique private contractor who was once an assassin, now turned bodyguard/security expert. He is hired by his clients to protect their lives, but doesn’t do it in a regular way – he integrates himself into their lives and becomes a part of it until the threat is over. Each episode focuses on a different case/client, but one thing that doesn’t change is him kicking the bad guys asses – I guess that’s one of the things that make this show, along with the witty humour.

The supporting characters aren’t too bad either. You have Laverne Winston who is Chance’s Business Partner/Agency Manager. He’s the more serious guy of the three. You also have the token computer nerd/hacker guy, Guerrero. An interesting detail comes about on Guerrero later on in the first season, Which I didn’t quite expect to be honest.

At times the show does feel a bit corny, but none the less it’s an enjoyable watch every week if you’re not too skeptical, enjoy reasonable plots with lots of action. Watch the trailer →

I purchased the WDTV HD Media Player unit probably two weeks ago now and it is proving to be a good investment. Primarily because I got tired of exporting mkv files through Quicktime so that the PS3 could read them, and the fact the PS3 doesn’t read my HFS+ formatted HDD.

Even then, if it did manage to read the HDD, it probably wouldn’t play half the files. Adding to this, I really didn’t want to run 8 metres of Optical Audio cable and HDMI across my lounge room floor, so the WDTV was the ideal solution.

The WDTV itself is pretty much the “middle man” between your TV and a HDD. You simply plug the unit into your TV using HDMI or the older Composite A/V cabling, plug your HDD into the unit and huzzah, you can now view your photos, music and videos on the TV with a few simple clicks.

What mostly made me buy the WDTV is the specifications. It uses HDMI, Optical Audio output, has support for various HDD formats including NFS+, NTFS, FAT, has a decent looking, yet functional user interface and plays a broad range of file formats:

Music mp3, wma, ogg, wav/pcm/lpcm, aac, flac, dolby digital, aif/aiff, mka
Photos jpeg, gif, tif/tiff, bmp, png
Video mpeg1/2/4, wmv9, avi (mpeg4, xvid, avc), h.264, mkv, mov (mpeg4, h.264), mts, tp, ts
Playlist pls, m3u, wpl
Subtitles srt (utf-8), smi, sub, ass, ssa

As I do watch a fair bit of Japanese anime and the fact most releases are in mkv format, the support for this format was important. With the 1.01 firmware update WD added further functionality and improvement to the playback of mkv files, perhaps dozens of anime crazed fans emailed them.

The general playback of video is smooth, most of the video files I’m playing are either avi, large mp4′s or 720p mkv, but I notice no jittery or lagged processing. The fast forward and rewind functions work to a decent speed, nothing extremely fast but it’s good. The WDTV also supports resuming of playback, so you don’t have to start all over when powering the device off.

Overall, the WDTV is a great little unit, but it does have a few minor annoyances: The UI while looking good, is a bit laggy.. probably only by a few milliseconds, but it’s noticeable. Sometimes the HDD can take a minute or two to initialise, (significantly decreased from 1.02.10 firmware). I’ve found on occasion I’ve had to power the device on and off for it to be recognised. There could be a few more options for audio setup as well. I use Optical Audio on the device, yet I need to mute the TV as the WDTV plays the audio through both HDMI and the Optical Audio – you should be able to select only one method of output in my opinion. Additionally, while it is not an annoyance I’d like to be able to turn off the music and photo menu options as I’d never use these two.

Notes on Modifications and Other Observations

Reference Frame fail.
Well, it appears the unit suffers to play H.264 encoded 1080p content that is greater than 5rf, resulting in artifacts all over the screen. I’ve learnt this after trying to watch a Gundam 00 episode in 1080p, which uses 9rf (ridiculously high?)

OSD mod: Simple and Unadorned.
Tired of the standard WDTV OSD? Well thanks to the hacking scene, people have been able to design custom OSD’s. Over the weekend I installed one designed by Lilibabe from the WDTV Forums which I thought looked pretty sweet. Check it out here →. The good thing about this mod is that you can use the standard WDTV firmware. Simply download the the 1.02.10 firmware and use the wdtv.ver file from it along with the wdtv.bin from Lilibabe. If you’re already on 1.02.10, you’ll need to open the wdtv.ver file and adjust the version to say 1.02.11 so that it’ll read as a new firmware update when you plug it into the unit.

OSD Mod: Picto.
In November of 2009 Lilibabe released another high quality OSD Mod, this time titled Picto and I have to say it’s my favourite so far. Check it out here →

Notes on Firmware releases

1.02.10 firmware.
The only really noticeable thing with with this firmware is the time taken to detect your HDD. On older firmware versions, it took 30 seconds to 1 minute, sometimes longer. After updating to 1.02.10, it’s approximately 2-3 seconds!

1.02.08 firmware.
Great success! After doing some googling I found a prerelease of the 1.02.08 firmware which adds support for vorbis audio. Now some of my anime titles have audio.

1.02.07 firmware.
So I upgraded my firmware to the latest that was available on the WD website. Was rather excited as a included update was more audio formats for the mkv container. I was hopeful that this would sort out the lack of audio from some anime titles I have, but no joy.. still the Japanese 1 (unsupported) text.

1.03.01 firmware.
Haven’t noticed any real changes in this firmware, but I always update to the latest whenever it comes out.

Channel 10 finally launched its new 24 hour sports channel last night, One HD. I think it is a good move, to be honest I wouldn’t pay for cable TV these days when it has just the same amount of advertisements and half of the shows are repeats. Moving back on topic, the sports line up for One HD is mainly a mixture of Australian and American sports.

Some of the sports that will be/are airing on One HD will be: AFL, Swimming, Netball, Cricket, F1, MotoGP, Nascar, Golf, Major League Baseball, NBA, NCAA, NFL, ARC (Australian Rally Championship) and many more. So, as you can see it is a reasonable variety, which I can only assume will expand in the near future.

My only real gripe currently is how the programming is laid out. For example, today from 12pm to 7:30pm is the F1. Ok, now.. I may be a fan of the F1 and don’t mind watching it, but 7 hours worth? Then, you have a repeat of the programming on Sunday. Not the best way to start the weekend considering a new launch of the channel in my opinion, unless this was the plan as the launch time and F1 in Melbourne do coincide and the F1 does have a large fan base.

The only thing really missing in the line up, which I think would be good additions are the EPL → and the WRC →, hopefully One can gain licensing to show both. I’d also like to see that the NBA Playoffs and Finals get some decent air time.

The latest episode of South Park (season 13, episode 2) entitled “The Coon” is probably one of the best and funniest to date in my opinion. The episode is pretty much a parody styled around the recent comic book movies, The Dark Knight, Watchmen and a touch of Spiderman 3.

Eric Cartman plays as The Coon, a vigilante superhero in South Park who is paid no attention. He soon finds out there is another superhero in town called Mysterion and attempts to rid of this masked person so he can remain the sole superhero in town.

Butters also makes an appearance in his Professor Chaos persona, which I found to be the funniest parts of the episode.

For the full plot, movies references, have a read here →

Another year, another NBA All-Star Weekend. This years was pretty good once again, I think a bit better than last years. The dunk competition was pretty good with Dwight Howard and Nate Robinson going against each other in the final round. Dwight pulled off an amazing dunk on a 12 foot rim, in turn Nate dunked over Dwight in his green kryptonite game uniform, shoes and ball.

The game itself was a good watch too, plenty of action with the East taking an early lead in the 1st quarter. The West pulled back in the 2nd quarter right through to the 4th and eventually won 146-119. Shaq pulled off some awesome plays and Kobe showed his stuff as well. Both received a joint MVP award.

Looking forward to next years All-Star Weekend, especially if Lebron James indeed does enter the dunk comp as he stated when asked about it.

Indeed it is. In the 20th season of The Simpsons, tonight’s episode was finally shown in HD!

I’d say every Simpsons fan rejoiced at the same time and the show airing in 720p certainly helps on a 42″ LCD TV. While the scripts may have gone sideways over the last few seasons with the humour a bit hit and miss, I’ll still watch every Simpsons episode until the day they decide to call it quits. In saying that, tonight’s episode was pretty good.

Check out the new opening sequence.

From what I have read, the sports mainly aired will be ones out of the US, which I don’t really mind watching as I’ve played quite a few of them. I think it’s a good move as I really can’t be bothered paying for cable tv which now has the same amount of advertisements as free-to-air. If only they’d get a licence to air the English Premier League, my life would be complete. You can view the schedule for Australia at the NBA website.