dennis yang dot com

So.. my new akimbo player arrived yesterday.. The Akimbo is a set top box that downloads video content from the Internet.. whoohoo!

The akimbo looks at home in my stack of gear underneath the tv.. It matches almost perfectly with my dvd player and Sony TiVo (which I got over the philips TiVo way back when because it was prettier). It’s as if all of these set top box designers went to the same sleek silver design school or something. The TiVo remote and the Akimbo remote seemed like they’re related… funny. The Akimbo currently hooks up with S-Video — no component video or HD yet, but that’s coming soon.. It would be awesome to have more HD content right now, since I’m getting sick of watching “Beavers” over and over and over again on INHD. That’s beavers of the animal variety, you pervs.

Upon setup, I did run into a vexing problem with my Netgear router.. For some reason, the router interfered with my access to the akimbo site, and I switch to a different router… Supposedly a firmware upgrade will fix that problem, but it seems strange that it would affect access to the servers at all, when other sites worked fine…

Anyway, once I solved my network problems, setup was a breeze.. I started adding content to the download queue.. whoohoo! Akimbo has a bunch of channels that you’d typically recognize… the History Channel, National Geographic, etc.. as well as a bunch of channels that I’ve never heard of, but look interesting.. Just last week, they’ve signed a deal with MLB to get compressed games, so that’ll be cool when that starts showing up on the Akimbo.. You’re able to add downloads to your queue really easily through their web interface, so that’s pretty cool to be able to control the box that way… I sure do wish there was some way to load my own video content on to the Akimbo though..

So far so good.. I’ll report more as I use the Akimbo more, but so far it looks pretty sweet…

This entry was posted on Friday, August 26th, 2005 at 2:43 pm and is filed under technology, tv. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.