hey mike,

i did some sleuthing and during the initial beta test period they had a £100 price for the unit. that was back in 2004, but in todays money it's $175. so already pricier than the dennison or iON solutions.

i agree that the UI is too busy.

 

Hi dashiel,

Great! Thanks for the info.

Haven't seen the iON yet. I'll have to take a look at that one as well.

I'm finding it really hard to beat the display menus of the Roxio Music DVD. I like the uncluttered menus and I love the album art display (not to mention that you can get near 100 hours of music on a dual layer DVD). The only real downfall is the time it takes to create one of the discs and the fact that there's no random/repeat feature.

-- MIKE

 

The office mavhen,

Great screen shots,
makes me want NAV,

do you have function while moving or just when stopped?

-alpinamike

 

The nav works while the car is moving - great when you have a passenger searching and inputting stuff

 

Hi Mike,

I'm not sure if eVal got it quite right or not... I think you were actually talking about video-in-motion on my aux video input set up. Yes? If so, then yes, my setup has full video-in-motion capabilities. Not that I do, but I can watch a movie, play a video game, and control the Music DVD menus (shown in the screen shots I posted here) all while the car is in motion (and at any speed).

In the comments senction of the Motoringfile article where I did the write-up on my aux video input set up (the link was provided in the third reply to this thread), I talk about how I connected it up to get full video-in-motion (using the OEM reverse camera). I even gave a hand-drawn wiring diagram as well.

It's a very cool set up, but in all honesty, I never really used it until now. I've had it installed in my MINI for near a year and I've only ever turned it on a couple of times. However, with the new "Music DVD" capabilities I recently discovered in the Roxio app, I now find myself using it all of the time. I've now built a really cool "MINI Theme" template that I use to create Music DVDs with. It shows pictures of my MINI in the background of each of the menus.

The only bad thing about the set up is that you get the ID tag display (via the aux video input source) or the nav map display, but you can't have them both display at the same time. You can however still hear the music while the nav map display is on, but you can't see the ID tag menu if you want to look at the nav map.

Other than that... It's an awesome set up so far!

 

Hi Mike.

Right, I see what you are saying. Yes, the IVII generates menus similar to the other I-Bus devices on the bus, such as the Radio Tuner. Therefore the menus, positioning, number of characters per line, characters supported, etc are all per the BMW spec. The fact that IVII works like another I-Bus device means that its fully compatible with other capabilities in the NAV system, such as using the Telephone, Television, Sirius Satellite Radio or the Navigation map/system. So for instance in Split screen mode, on the left part of the screen you can display the Now Playing ID3 tag info, and on the Right hand side would be either your current location, or the Navigation direction prompts. The entire navigation/selection process throughout the IVII menu structure is done through the BMW right jog wheel - as well as some short cuts through the "1,2,3,4,5,6, and Clock" and buttons :-)

Its not possible to generate album art like in your example. For a couple of reasons ... first the Alpine KCA-420i cannot pull the album art out the Mp3 file (and I'm not even sure if the Apple APIs even allow it), and second the BMW menu system couldn't support album art unfortunately.

As far as price, beta testing and overall availability I would shoot a email of to Simon at Intravention for some info if you are interested. I know new beta testers are getting signed up all the time, and as I said earlier, it would be great if we had some Mini folks testing as well.

 

well that stinks,
i like the split screen, Nav/stereo.

when will they update?

-alpinamike

 

Yeah, I'm absolutely amazed that Simon can figure all of this stuff out. It's very cool. Another (minor) bummer is having the song, album, and artist names trunkated to the BMW spec number of characters. I had a Bluetooth telephone setup running through my nav system (which also used the BMW spec screens), and it was a pain since I couldn't see more than 12 characters for my contact names. It's awesome that the IVII still allows you to interact with the nav while playing MP3's though.

That is indeed a bummer, but sometimes we can't have everything now can we.

I've now e-mailed Simon and so we'll see what he has to say.

Thanks again!

-- MIKE

 

It's a limitation to my custom set up (i.e. the aux video input). Thus, it will never work like that I'm afraid.

BTW, I don't think that the OEM TV stuff works that way either (the OEM TV module adds a "Television" enty to the nav's main menu). I believe that once you select the "Television" item from the main nav menu, the video input source takes over the entire screen (i.e. there's no split screen view with the TV on one side and something else, such as nav guidance, on the other). That's just the way BMW built it I'm afraid.

 

Rufus Wainwright and Ben Folds, excellent!

 

Yep ... Simon is super smart, and I know of no other integration that uses the NAV screen to this level of detail. Also, in BMW's infinite wisdom, you actually get less characters per line in full screen than split screen in the index area of the screen. They use proportional fonts, meaning that depending on what characters the string consists of, you get slightly different number of characters on each line. That said, in split screen, in some fields you can get around 23 characters on each line, which isn't too bad.

Cheers, Adrian