17 replies to this topic

[mamoulian]

Since Logitech reduced the Revue to $99, and there's an official beta of 3.1 out, I decided to take a punt and order it. Amazon will ship for £95 inclusive of VAT and delivery.

I paid a bit extra for faster shipping, it's now on its way so should be with me on Thursday!

I'm not sure what to expect... I've downloaded the Harmony app to my DHD - seems to work and scan WiFi for Logitech devices.
Dunno if the IR-sender thing will be much use with Sky+, probably not as it won't know what I've got recorded. Would be nice if it could search the listings, dunno if it accepts them in a standard format so it could be pointed (or proxied to) a UK feed.
I think the picture-in-picture should be fine though, it supports HDMI 1.3a which is plenty for SkyHD.

Supposedly it has a go at playing .mkvs, might be a better experience than my current PS3/mediaserver transcode method.

People are 'sideloading' apps by installing them via the browser, reports of success with mainstream ones like Facebook, Google+, Amazon Appstore, Dropbox, Pulse...

[jamoiholland]

Oops, I just bought one for 95 quid too! I also had heard about the price drop, and saw Paul's got one in hand as well so maybe there will be goodies to come also.
Fingers crossed it's not a disappointment...

[rgomesf]

Hi.

I Got one too, not UK, Portugal .

Have you tested 3.1 beta?

[k0zmic]

Mamoulian & Jamoiholland please do keep us posted on how it goes and whether you manage to get Sky+ to integrate with it.

I'm tempted by the price and since Paul has one things could get a bit more interesting for it!

Cheers.

[BenPool]

Got one too (sweden, not UK)
Was so satisfied, for that price, so I ordered a second one

HC would be nice, and market

It's a perfect box for Netflix

Edited by BenPool, 14 August 2011 - 01:53 PM.

[mamoulian]

It's good!

Played with it 'out of the box' for a couple of days, then installed the 3.1 beta that's floating about.
TV wise hasn't made much difference, 3.1 has more features but is a bit buggy.

It controls the SkyHD box fine via the IR blaster, the keyboard keys do what you'd expect - you can bring up the Planner, navigate around and hit 'record', number keys do channel number entry etc. You can probably also do this with the Harmony app on the phone too.
But as expected it has no UK TV listings feed so the 'now and next' type thing is useless and programmes don't show up in search like they would.

Is there a free UK feed that covers Sky channels? Is it in some RSS format that GoogleTV will accept? How can I make it read it? I see no configurable URL, it asks you for a zip code then lists TV networks available to that zip. Setting up a proxy is an option if you can work out what it's doing...

I see no way that it could find out what programmes are recorded on the box to include in search or start playback, nor how it could flag a future recording to be recorded (once it has listings).
I guess the dirtiest solution to this would be a 'screen scraper' type app that pages through the Planner overnight and OCRs the text, but I don't know if the box has a HDMI framegrabber or an API to use it.
No idea if Sky have an open API to interact with the box via USB or Ethernet... as it's Sky I suspect not.

For a laugh I sideloaded the Sky+ app from the Market, that works just fine and will do remote record. Unfortunately the app doesn't act as a search provider for the QuickSearchBox... if it did we'd be some way there.
Reverse-engineering the Sky+ app via some packet sniffer could be an option but I suspect Sky Legal would have something to say about that, probably not an avenue Logitech/Google would want to go down as their official solution.


At its most basic level it's an excellent Flash-player-on-TV. YouTube/iPlayer/4OD/SeeSaw are fine. High action Flash games stress it a bit, I guess it's got custom hardware accelleration for video playback as 1080p YouTube is fine. There's a 'Chrome2TV' variant of Chrome2Phone for shifting a URL on a laptop to the TV, and 'Youtube remote' app works well.
The 'Google Chrome' browser is nice, better than the stock Honeycomb one on my EeePad, certainly more responsive, the keyboard is spot on.

Google Music works and syncs down music if you're in the beta.

Apparently Logitech Harmony remotes work fine in 2.1 but is one of the things that's broken in the 3.1 beta.

Apparently adb works although I haven't tried it, I've been emailling myself .apks to sideload.



A request please:
Could a US person install Google's 'Google TV remote control' app from the Market, extract the .apk and post it somewhere please? We can't see it on the Market here in the UK.

[k0zmic]

Thank you for the write up.

If I do buy it I'll probably just wait for the official 3.1 release. Glad Sky works via the IR blaster as well.

I doubt Sky would have an API for their box, unfortunately.

Good to hear it's fine for streaming video from those services, also I didn't know there was a Chrome2TV thing.

Google Music working is a nice plus since I am in the beta.

If you have an Android phone then you can use 'Market Access' to spoof the US Market, then download the Remote app you want. You might also be able to do this on the box itself, but I'm not too sure.

Personally, I (just) purchased a PS3 for web video e.g. iPlayer, ITV Player & 4OD which are mainly what I wanted. That said, Google TV still sounds like an interesting proposition, especially if some quality apps are created.

I may just wait until Ice Cream Sandwich as it seems as though it's supposed to unify phone, tablet and TV AFAIK, I suspect the timing of one of the price drops of the Revue were in response to the ICS announcement. I believe ICS is meant to be released sometime in Q4, probably before the holiday season.

If ICS doesn't include TV then I guess I will just buy the Revue, hopefully it'l be £40 by then !

Edited by k0zmic, 15 August 2011 - 07:17 PM.

[simonckenyon]

mamoulian, on 15 August 2011 - 04:09 PM, said:

Is there a free UK feed that covers Sky channels? Is it in some RSS format that GoogleTV will accept? How can I make it read it? I see no configurable URL, it asks you for a zip code then lists TV networks available to that zip. Setting up a proxy is an option if you can work out what it's doing...

there are a couple of ways to get the Sky EPG:

one way is to read it from the data stream that sky broadcast. for that see tv_grab_epg_plus on sourceforge. i could never work out how the channel numbers were encoded; but apart from that it spits out xmltv format and should be relatively easy enough to produce the format that googletv expects

the alternative is to just use xmltv and tv_grab_uk_rt. this has quite a lot of the sky channels. again it would involve writing an xmltv to rss convertor.

[k0zmic]

This is a bit interesting:

http://thisismynext....unch-announced/

No mention of Sky support though.

[mamoulian]

simonckenyon, on 17 August 2011 - 12:16 PM, said:

there are a couple of ways to get the Sky EPG:

Thanks... Unfortunately I can't use tv_grab_dvb_plus as I don't have a PC/DVB card setup. I expect the _rt one might be a goer with some channel number mappings... but... I assumed GoogleTV would accept TV listings in XMLTV or some similar XML format, I've been unable to find any info on this :-(
Maybe noone has bothered looking into it as Google seem to provide enough US listings.

k0zmic, on 26 August 2011 - 08:49 PM, said:

http://thisismynext....unch-announced/

No mention of Sky support though.

Yeah, that is interesting... that'll sort out the listings problem.
Although proper integration with recordings on the Sky DVR depends on Sky providing an interface, sadly I think that's unlikely as we'd never use the Sky UI any more and Sky would lose their precious control.
Same for Virgin I should think, especially given their shiny new TiVo box investment.

I would have thought Google would look for a partner to release a connectable dual-tuner Freeview DVR, no reason someone like Humax or Logitech wouldn't be into that.

When that happens I'll have to evaluate my Sky subscription's worth...

[AshtonBRSC]

mamoulian, on 15 August 2011 - 04:09 PM, said:

A request please:
Could a US person install Google's 'Google TV remote control' app from the Market, extract the .apk and post it somewhere please? We can't see it on the Market here in the UK.

I've uploaded a copy to my Dropbox so you should be able to download it from http://dl.dropbox.co...ps.tvremote.apk

If you have a rooted phone, you can use MarketEnabler to temporarily make the Market think you are in the US to download it: https://market.andro...etenabler&hl=en

This should allow you to get updates.

Note the remote app has been open sourced by Google:

http://code.google.c...ogle-tv-remote/

Edited by AshtonBRSC, 07 September 2011 - 09:45 PM.

[mamoulian]

My Revue updated itself at some point over the weekend, it was on the first 3.1 leak and connected to TalkTalk UK broadband so no problems with those.

It's a bit messed up, Market won't load properly and there's no 'Chrome' browser shown in All Apps. Comments on forums suggest this can be fixed by a wipe, which I should expect if I'm going to mess with leaks...

On the plus side my cheap Harmony remote now works, I had a little play with the Logitech Media Player, still doesn't like DTS but it played some other MKVs alright and let me skip about, hopefully it won't just quit playing at some point like the leaked one did.

Trackpad-tap still doesn't do a 'click', but two-finger-scrolling is back. Home background is still too opaque, you can barely see the TV image through the black whereas on 2.1 you could see it clearly.

Still no news on UK listings :-/

Reckon we need someone like Humax to make a dual-tuner FreeviewHD PVR...

[jamoiholland]

Yeah mine finally updated a couple of days ago too, all working fine, though I wan't on the leaked beta, I was on the old stock firmware. Market is nice but there's not a whole lot on there yet, and TV listings will presumably depend on this UK launch next year... Seems much better at streaming from my home server though, and the GUI is definitely a lot better, even the Mrs is getting along with it now!

[roodyhoo]

mamoulian, on 15 August 2011 - 04:09 PM, said:

It controls the SkyHD box fine via the IR blaster, the keyboard keys do what you'd expect - you can bring up the Planner, navigate around and hit 'record', number keys do channel number entry etc. You can probably also do this with the Harmony app on the phone too.
But as expected it has no UK TV listings feed so the 'now and next' type thing is useless and programmes don't show up in search like they would.

Hi,

Just bought a revue but am really struggling to get the STB functions to control by sky HD box. Don't want to do anything fancy, just turn it on/off, change channels etc.  Have sucessfully configured my TV and AMP but the STB setup seems to be limited to boxes identified via zip code in the US.  I'm in the UK so not much use to me.  Do you know how to use\access the harmony functions on the revue so I can use the keyboard to control by Sky HD box?  Any help really appreciated...

[mamoulian]

roodyhoo, on 06 February 2012 - 01:21 PM, said:

  Have sucessfully configured my TV and AMP but the STB setup seems to be limited to boxes identified via zip code in the US.  I'm in the UK so not much use to me.  Do you know how to use\access the harmony functions on the revue so I can use the keyboard to control by Sky HD box?  Any help really appreciated..

Sounds like you're most of the way there...
When asked for a zip code I think I entered 00000, it then brought up a list of providers, I think one of either Sky, Sky Digital or Sky Angel (?) were in that list so I chose one of them, next it offered a list of models and I think that had Sky HD in it.
It's worked fine for me twice now and I think I chose different variations both times so give it a play and see how you get on. If you can't get it to work then reply and I'll go have a look at exactly which ones I chose.
I said 'no' to the 'premium channels' question, we've got no listings anyway so I don't think that would make any difference.

When it works you can press 'TV' on the top of the keyboard then 'Guide', the arrow keys, back, number keys etc. all operate the Sky box.

[roodyhoo]

mamoulian, on 06 February 2012 - 02:30 PM, said:

Sounds like you're most of the way there...
When asked for a zip code I think I entered 00000, it then brought up a list of providers, I think one of either Sky, Sky Digital or Sky Angel (?) were in that list so I chose one of them, next it offered a list of models and I think that had Sky HD in it.
It's worked fine for me twice now and I think I chose different variations both times so give it a play and see how you get on. If you can't get it to work then reply and I'll go have a look at exactly which ones I chose.
I said 'no' to the 'premium channels' question, we've got no listings anyway so I don't think that would make any difference.

When it works you can press 'TV' on the top of the keyboard then 'Guide', the arrow keys, back, number keys etc. all operate the Sky box.

Good work fella that's got it working! Thanks very much it was driving me mad!

[McSpoon]

k0zmic, on 26 August 2011 - 08:49 PM, said:

This is a bit interesting:
http://thisismynext....unch-announced/
No mention of Sky support though.

It's been almost been 6 months since Eric Schmidt made that announcement.  Surely a UK-specific Google TV device must be imminent now.  I hope so because it seems a bit pointless to import an old Logitech Revue nowadays considering it isn't supported anymore.  It's a fine device but I'm hoping something new is coming, with full Google backing, ICS, and UK content.   Mobile World Congress is in 2 weeks time so that would be the perfect time to launch it.  Come on Google.

[mamoulian]

Has anyone had any progress with Revue in UK?
I was hoping that when the Sony box came out over here the UK TV providers would appear, but it still forces you to enter a ZIP code and only US providers are in the list.

I'm enjoying Plex which now has remote control, and Able Remote but Able's voice channel control uses the channel list from the Revue, so it's not as useful as it could be.

Edited by mamoulian, 08 November 2012 - 11:17 PM.