After thirty years of collecting movies and music, I sit down in front of a Vista Media Center computer and wonder how to get all that media into the PC in a way it can be quickly cataloged and retrieved. Impossible task? Maybe not. Half the articles I've written at Bright Hub have been about this.
Managing Different Media File Types
In my media collection, I have about 100 CDs, 100 DVDs, a few dozen VCR tapes, a dozen cassette tapes, and a few 8-track tapes. Also in the mix are videos that I’ve downloaded from the Internet in .avi, .mpg, .rm, .wma, and .mov formats, and movies, music, and television episodes that I’ve purchased from iTunes. I’ve also been adding .mp3 music from Amazon and Rhapsody that I play in iTunes.
It’s a constant struggle trying to keep up with all the media that I think (or once thought) I need, much less keep it all backed up and transformed into the formats that we actually use in the 21st century.
Then add in a Vista Ultimate Media Center PC. The thought was to allow this computer to become the core storage device of my entertainment system. Media Center acts as my PVR (personal video recorder) for movies and television episodes from my Dish Network satellite hookup.
The following section is in narrative format. It tells the story behind the articles that I've written. If you want to skip the narrative and go directly to the list of articles, please scroll down and click on the link to the last page.
I have documented here at Bright Hub the various things that I’ve tested and tried along the way. For example, I have previously covered how to use DVDFlick to burn copies of downloaded Div-X and Xvid-encoded videos to DVD so they can be viewed on any conventional DVD player. Div-X and Xvid-encoded videos are already in an efficient format to store on the PC, but sometimes the codecs needed to play them just aren’t present, so I wrote about alternate media players for Vista that can overcome the missing codec problem.
My collection of electronic media is becoming too extensive (and expensive) to risk on just the hard drive of the PC. So, I also wrote about using the Backup Center in the Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate editions of Vista to do entire-drive backups.
When the local classic rock FM station in Atlanta (WKLS) changed their format and became “Project-something” that included rap and some unmelodic modern music, I looked around and realized that most of the music I listen to was published in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. I bought one physical CD in 2007, and that was the Eagles – Long Road Out of Eden. Update: I made it through 2008, and my sister gave me AC/DC's "Black Ice" album as a Christmas gift.
In general, it’s depressing getting old, but I told myself, there has to be something else out there that I’d like. So I went searching for sources of new media, and I wrote about what I found.
I upgraded my DSL earlier this year, and that brought on a spate of downloading. I found it was fast enough to watch online TV, so I wrote about that, too. (And that article was very recently revised.)
After waiting for almost two years, I was excited to download a new version of iTunes. This led me to write an iTunes 8 review. I was delighted to find that Apple had included a way to deactivate ALL computers right in iTunes. (I was up against the limit of five, which was happening for the third time for me.)
During the last six months or so, I also watched Comcast deny that they were blocking peer-to-peer traffic and then admit at the last minute they really had been. I wrote about how they actually performed their “network shaping" and how exactly they planned to become “network-agnostic” in the future.
Although Comcast’s maneuvers were interesting and sometimes amusing, I learned about the secretive and ominous Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) and decided that the squabbles between the content owners and the pipe providers were distracting us from what was really important – ACTA!
I further decided that the entertainment industry’s attempts to weed out casual piracy will ultimately fail, especially in the face of a new generation that expects and demands instant access.
I purchased a wide-screen monitor this year. It has a screen resolution of 1680 x 1050, so I wondered how it would look with high-resolution video. I found that Microsoft had some free hi-def videos that could be downloaded and run in Window Media Player. I wrote about this, too, testing high-definition video on your existing PC or laptop.
A friend's question got me interested in Internet security for public wireless hotspots, such as at Starbucks, so I went looking for a free service to encrypt the data flowing from and to a notebook. This even turned into a media article. I realized that folks overseas could use it to watch Internet videos from the US because it made the connection appear to be coming from the US.
I read about the 24-cents the US Patent Office's Royalty board levied against ringtones, and I wondered if folks buying ringtones from their cell phone providers and iTunes knew how easy it was to make their own ringtones from music they already own, or even streaming music that they could play on their PC. This lead to an article about making your own free ringtones from music already on your PC. Then I found out that the same technique could be extended to creating ringtones for iPhones from iTunes without giving Apple the buck to do it.
Next, I looked at some Vista-specific issues. In Vista, there's no graphical application that shows hard drive fragmentation. We found that a detailed fragmentation report could be obtained by running the defrag application from the command line. After making sure that the hard drive was clean and unfragmented, I looked at how to overcome slow file copying in Vista.