In my latest podcast, I interview developers Eugene Sandulenko, Arnaud Boutonné and Johannes Schickel from the open source software ScummVM. ScummVM allows you to enjoy point and click adventure games on a variety of platforms including computers, consoles and portable devices.

We discuss a variety of subjects regarding the software, including how it began, how it has evolved and what we can look forward to in the future.

ScummVM is a program which allows you to run certain classic graphical point-and-click adventure games, provided you already have their data files. The clever part about this: ScummVM just replaces the executables shipped with the games, allowing you to play them on systems for which they were never designed!

ScummVM supports many adventure games, including LucasArts SCUMM games (such as Monkey Island 1-3, Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max, …), many of Sierra’s AGI and SCI games (such as King’s Quest 1-6, Space Quest 1-5, …), Discworld 1 and 2, Simon the Sorcerer 1 and 2, Beneath A Steel Sky, Lure of the Temptress, Broken Sword 1 and 2, Flight of the Amazon Queen, Gobliiins 1-3, The Legend of Kyrandia 1-3, many of Humongous Entertainment’s children’s SCUMM games (including Freddi Fish and Putt Putt games) and many more.

Enjoy…

Original post link: Podcast #32 – ScummVM – Point and Click Adventure Game Software, created by James Woodcock.

Original post link: Podcast #32 – ScummVM – Point and Click Adventure Game Software, created by James Woodcock.

I interview Wil Stephens who is the Vice President of International Business Development for Boxee. Here he tells us all about their Boxee Box, which is a device you hook up to your HDMI compatible television to expand the content – with access to on-line films, television shows and music, all on demand.

You can also view your own captured or created content including music, photographs and home movies all on your television.

Below is a transcription with some of the highlights from the podcast, however in the audio version you can enjoy the full interview covering additional topics.

James: So before we begin to chat about Boxee, please tell us a little bit about yourself?

I am Wil Stephens, I am heading up Boxee’s international operations from London. I joined Boxee at the beginning of this year, before we officially launched in the UK in June. I’m heading up Boxee’s European operations to begin with, starting from London.

James: So who are Boxee and where did the name come from?

Boxee is a company which is headquarted in New York. The name came from our founder and CEO, whose had a Boxer dog – so the Boxer became Boxee.

Boxee is now a four year old start-up. R&D offices based in Tel Aviv, Israel. We are a pretty global company by now, we have around 30-40 employees and growing very rapidly.

James: Your main product is the Boxee Box, which claims to be the ‘One box your TV needs’. So what can you tell us about this product and how does it enhance our televisions?

A lot of people’s favourite stuff is already available on the Internet. Boxee is the best possible way to get all those movies, TV shows and clips from the web and on to the best screen in your house – which is the television. We catalogue over ten thousand shows, five thousand movies and we also have over 200 apps available on the Boxee Box – so you can browse for new video clips, movies and TV shows – in any format, any language or any territory you wish – all through your TV.

James: Boxee Box has a wide range of content providers, many we will recognise including BBC iPlayer – which allows us to watch many of their programmes that we may have missed. What can you tell us about BBC iPlayer on Boxee Box and many of the other services available?

We are thrilled to have the BBC iPlayer on the Boxee Box. It is probably the most recognised and appreciated service here in the UK. We are actually in partnership with the BBC developing the new version of iPlayer for the Boxee Box, which will be available very shortly. The benefits of the new version will be far better integration with our content library, which makes the TV shows available on the iPlayer searchable and more discoverable through Boxee’s well known and familiar interface.

We are building out other services, working with all the major broadcasters as you’d expect in the UK. We have already made announcements on film service ‘blinkbox’, which will be on the Boxee Box shortly. We are also building out with major European partners – from France, Germany, Sweden, Spain and everywhere else to make Boxee relevant and available to as most people as possible.

James: We have TV shows, movies and we have streaming music as well I believe?

Yes we do have streaming music. We actually have a number of music streaming services available on the Boxee Box already. We will be making further announcements and new services in the coming weeks.

James: So the Boxee Box unit itself, what sort of connections does it have to connect to a television?

Basically, we want Boxee to be a HDMI 1 on every television. We want it to be the first HDMI device you plug into your television and the only HDMI device your television needs. We also have audio outs to go into your audio Hi-Fi system to give you the best quality sound. We also feature USB inputs at the back, so you can also attach external storage.

James: It’s got built-in wireless and its also got a LAN port if you want to plug in with a wired Ethernet connection, but if you’ve got a Network-Attached Storage drive (NAS), which is basically just a hard drive you can plug into your router – you can connect to any media you have on there to stream directly to your Boxee Box and through your television.

It supports right up to 1080p, 24 frames per second and a whole host of audio playback features as well – so I think you’ve pretty much covered the vast majority of content requirements you may have?

I think the Boxee Box is probably the most versatile box out there in terms of content formats it can support and I think that’s probably the biggest benefit for people who have lots of local files and movies in various formats – they can all just play on the Boxee Box easily.

James: Boxee’s far more than just the hardware Boxee Box you provide, you also have various software options available as well for Windows, Mac and Linux – so what can you tell us about this area?

Boxee obviously started life with downloadable software on various platforms and we continue to support them. We have recently announced that we will be releasing a major update for our downloadable software in the next few weeks and we are very excited to bring our software up to speed with the recent developments on the Boxee Box.

James: So how does Boxee on the Apple iPad work?

It allows you to stream videos between the iPad and the Boxee TV, so it’s a way of curating content, flicking through your libraries, seeing what people are recommending to you and added to the Featured Lists from Boxee’s own editorial team. It’s also there as a way to stream content between your PC, so we have what we call Boxee Media Manager – which is a way of streaming all of the local files you may have that are not playable on an iPad for example flash video. We transcode those videos on the fly, so you can just watch them in real time without doing any extra steps on your part, so it’s a great way to watch any of your local files as well as all the web files in one place.

James: So how can we find more about Boxee and Boxee Box and all the other software iterations?

Log-on to boxee.tv and also follow us on Twitter @Boxee.

Original post link: Boxee Box Podcast – Movies, TV Shows, Music, Photos and Videos on your Television, created by James Woodcock.

Original post link: Boxee Box Podcast – Movies, TV Shows, Music, Photos and Videos on your Television, created by James Woodcock.

I host the latest Monster Cast for gaming website Console Monster, with guests Marty Greenwell and Ricky Lee Staines to discuss the three presentations by Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo.

Console Monster is an Xbox 360 and Sony PlayStation3 specific website with news, reviews, previews, forum, achievements and trophies database. They even have a very sleak iPhone app, which is downloadable on the Apple iTunes Store.

Topics include:

Original post link: Monster Cast #11 – E3 2011 Special Edition Discussing Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo, created by James Woodcock.

Original post link: Monster Cast #11 – E3 2011 Special Edition Discussing Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo, created by James Woodcock.

This is the second Tech Depot Blog UK Podcast, hosted by James Woodcock. On this occasion, Andrew Breen joins me to tell us all about one of their primary products, BoostSpeed which is currently in its 5th version. BoostSpeed claims to be your one-stop computer maintenance and optimisation tool, providing you with everything you may need to keep your PC running fast. The program will clean up, speed up and repair your system, tweak Windows settings to your liking and protect your privacy.

Below is a transcription with some of the highlights from the podcast, however in the audio version you can enjoy the full interview covering additional topics located at the bottom of the article.

James: Please tell us a little about yourself?

Andrew: I am from Canada. I have always worked in online marketing, worked accross Canada and then moved into Australia which is how I hooked up with the team at Auslogics. As people can tell from the name ‘Aus’ stands for Australia, which is where most of the team is.

Most of my work is focused online because that is where a lot of our customers are. Right now I am working on promoting our latest product which is BoostSpeed 5.

James: So how did Auslogics begin?

Andrew: They started in 2008, in Sydney Australia. Like a lot of advanced PC users, they saw that Windows wasn’t doing a great job when it came to helping users maintain their systems – especially system management tools. They are either too complicated or too hard to find or they just weren’t there.

Take Windows Disk Defragmentator for example. To start it is super slow, I have been using Vista and it’s taken up to a full day just to ‘defrag’ one hard drive – plus they thought that the built-in defragmentor wasn’t doing a great job. Another example is the registry repair, it is long proven that Windows is built in a way that the registry does need cleaning from time to time and yet there is no built-in way to do that with Microsoft, so Auslogics thought that they could create a software package that was faster than Microsoft’s tools, had more features and was more user friendly.

James: What is BoostSpeed?

Andrew: You can make the analogy that computers are like cars, without the proper care they start slowing down, experiencing problems and breaking down. BoostSpeed 5 is like taking your car to the garage – we can help you tune up your computer and diagnose and fix problems before they become really big issues. Let’s face it, most Windows computers are built in a way that they do need maintenance and we provide the necessary tools and functionality to do that.

James: What kind of problems could we expect without software such as Auslogics BoostSpeed?

Andrew: Slowness is really one of the main issues we try and address and that really comes from the registry. Basically, the registry is the core database of any Windows operating system and it stores and manages all the settings for pretty much everything on the computer – all of the hardware, all of the operating system software, all of the applications and user settings. New registry entries are made every day when you are using a computer, especially when you are trying out new software. I am sure you find, after you un-install software – your computer is never quite as quick as it was before and that is a problem with the registry. Ideally, configuration settings should be deleted from the registry automatically when you remove an application or device but often that doesn’t happen. To put it simply, registry errors slows down your computer and that is why registry clean-up is so important.

The register cleaner deletes redundant entries from your registry, but there are bits of free space all over the registry and that’s where Registry Defragmentors come in. Registry defragmentation slows down your computer sometimes more than the errors and that is why we put both Registry cleaner and a defragmentor within BoostSpeed 5.

James: What is Disk Defragmentation?

Andrew: Microsoft provides the tools sometimes, but they are never perfect and that is a classic case with the Disk Defragmentor. It is painfully slow and it doesn’t do anything more than defragment the files, but really that’s not quite enough. The free space also needs to be ‘defragged’ so the new files aren’t split into dozens of fragments and file placement needs to be optimised for faster access.

Basically our software fights all the fragmentation and file placement problems. We are actually quite proud that it’s the fastest defragmentor available on the market today. We get fantastic reviews.

Original post link: Auslogics BoostSpeed Podcast with Andrew Breen – Cleans, Speeds Up and Repairs Windows, created by James Woodcock.

Original post link: Auslogics BoostSpeed Podcast with Andrew Breen – Cleans, Speeds Up and Repairs Windows, created by James Woodcock.