Floppyhead – Digital Media and Streaming

About a week ago I started using Dropbox to sync files between multiple computers at work and at home.

DropBox is a great way to manage multiple media centers.  For someone like me, who runs Windows Media Center on 3 computers, making sure the latest files for Media Browser etc are running on all three computers is a pain.

DropBox does function alot like a shared drive on a server. The program becomes even more useful if you do not have a home server or network drive.  It is your own personal file repository.  You would just download any file you need for your media centers to your Dropbox and then access those files from every computer on your network.

The first 2 GB are free when using Dropbox.  That size should easily handle all of your potential media center related files like Media Browser, Shark Codecs, or an remote control app you want running in the background.

I was upgrading AnyDVD HD to the latest version and saw the following message from Slysoft:

As of January 1^st 2011, SlySoft will discontinue the ‘lifetime’ licensing option. This is being announced well in advance to give everybody a final opportunity to acquire SlySoft products with lifetime free updates or change his limited subscription to lifetime.

To make your decision even easier, you’ll get a 20% discount on top, applicable to all products, including upgrades from AnyDVD to AnyDVD HD and subscription renewals for all SlySoft products.

This promotion is only valid until Friday, December 31 2010, so if you are entertaining the thought of purchasing one or more of our products, now is the right time to act…

While I am not sure this is the right move for Slysoft, I would recommend getting the lifetime subscription for AnyDVD HD before it runs out.  For all of you that do not know what AnyDVD HD does, it allows you to rip Blu-ray movies to a hard drive.  It is a great way to convert your blu-ray movies to an iPad or iPod.   I use AnyDVD all the time, ripping my movies to my Windows Home Server to be played on my media center computers.

HTPCs are full of surprises, like the annoying EDID issue if you connect to a TV through a receiver.  According to Wikipedia:

Extended display identification data (EDID) is a data structure provided by a computer display to describe its capabilities to a graphics card. It is what enables a modern PC to know what kind of monitor is connected. EDID is defined by a standard published by the Video Electronics Standards Association.

The issue rears its head when you switch your AV Receiver away from your HTPC (or boot-up without your AV Receiver/ TV on and selected to your HTPC) you Video Card loses the signal and thinks that there is no longer any Monitor or Audio device “attached” to your HDMI port.  EDID override was possible using a registry hack provided at AVSforum.com (thanks Tulli!).  However, the hack was device specific and was complicated to implement.

ATI finally decided to address the EDID issue with the release of Catalyst 10.4 drivers for their video cards.  Apparently the fix only works on Windows 7 machines.

Making HTPCs more like a normal consumer electronic device is almost like hitting a moving target.  The elimination of EDID problems is just another small step in that process.

Perusing various media center websites and forums, I am struck by one thing: people make their HTPCs too powerful.  Playing 1080p movies is a fairly easy task for most modern video cards.  You do not need some crazy system to provide a smooth experience.  All that extra processing power comes at a cost: higher energy bills.

Here are two quick rules of thumbs:

1. Do not spend more than $400 on building a media center (not including tuners). You only need to get a $50 video card to pull it all together.
2. Power consumption should drive your build.  One thing I have learned using a media center computer is that setting up Sleep and Hibernate is still a pain. For instance, my digital cable tuner won’t work after the computer is woken up.  This means I have to leave it on all the time.  Suddenly, idle power consumption becomes a big deal.  The goal should be to use less than 50W when idling.  That would equal about $3 a month in energy costs.

My ideal system would be to use an Atom processor with Nvidia’s Ion chip for 1080p playback.  I have not tested such a system but the word on the street is that Windows 7 Media Center can be sluggish with an Atom processor.  Still under 10W at idle is an impressive number.

Here are some tips for an energy  sipping build:

1. Don’t use more than 2 GB of ram.  Nothing more is needed. 4 GB is just a waste.
2. Use “green” hard drives.  No need to use the fastest hard drives on the market.
3. Use an energy efficient power supply.
4. Anything more powerful than a Dual core Pentium E5300 is a waste. I have one in my system and it works fine.  The one caveat to that is the new Clarkdale processors that Intel has like the Core i3, which would save you from using a video card.

Last year, Slysoft got a lot of criticism for changing to a subscription model for AnyDVD HD. The software is great and I use it all the time but it is expensive, especially with having to buy subscriptions.

Slysoft does have frequent sales but they just announced a new sale that is way better than any they have had before. Until December 31, you will get lifetime free updates for the price of a 2-year subscription and still take advantage of an additional 20% discount. This is an awesome price for this software.

If you are thinking about ripping blu-ray movies to a hard drive, I would definitely take advantage of this deal.

I finally made the plunge and bought an Epson projector for my basement and built a Windows 7 machine for use as a dedicated media center. First off, the projector looks fantastic. Very happy. Second, I have entered the world of converting blu-rays to MKVs. My initial impression: awesome.

Using a guide from Avsforum.com, I have converted my entire blu-ray library to MKVs using AnyDVD HD, eac3to, and mktools. The video quality is superb and is still 1080p. I have converted all the audio tracks to flac, including TrueHD. Lossless compression!

I installed MediaBrowser on the Windows 7 machine along with the Shark007 codec pack. To my surprise, the whole thing actually worked. No external player, no copy protection, and no crazy sound card just for TrueHD playback.

Using an ATI 4670, the picture looks great and the audio is sent to my Onkyo receiver as LPCM, all over one HDMI cable. 5.1 sound and everything.

I have no idea if this will actually work on an extender but right now I could care less. One thing at a time. Plus I think Divx is working on an MKV solution that will work with extenders.

Now I need to set-up a remote. I got a Harmony 880 that hopefully will do the job. Is this ready for the mainstream? No way. Is it ready for nerds? Absolutely.

When I bought my iPhone, I debated about getting the 8 GB model versus the 16 GB one. I ended up with the 8 GB even though I was nervous it would not be enough space for my music collection.

Since owning my iPhone, my consumption of music has changed, making my concerns about storage space almost irrelevant. I mainly listen to Pandora and WunderRadio, which costs about $6. I hate paying for apps but this is one I highly recommend.

The iPhone and iPod sometimes get criticized for a lack of an FM Tuner. WunderRadio overcomes that by making streaming of online radio as easy as changing a station. For a one time price of $6 (non of that monthly fee BS), you can get access to radio stations all over the world. I use it to listen to WJFK and ESPN 980 in DC.

WunderRadio is able to access all of your favorite terrestrial radio stations as well online through  RadioTime.   It uses the built-in GPS of the iPhone to find your local stations as a default. Plus, you can access any major radio station anywhere in the US.  Definitely worth checking out.   Who needs satellite radio?

Here are a quick list of features of the app from the website:

It looks like Pandora is going to survive after all, albeit with some concessions due to royalty issues for online radio. From the Pandora blog:

The revised royalties are quite high – higher in fact than any other form of radio. As a consequence, we will have to make an adjustment that will affect about 10% of our users who are our heaviest listeners.

The gist of the changes is that accounts are limited to 40 hours per month of listening. If you go over 40 hours, you can pay $0.99 (yes, less than 1 dollar), for unlimited listening for that month. Overall, I can live with that, as long as it is not a slippery slope of upcoming charges.  I might even look into Pandora One.

My usage of Pandora has picked up over the last 6 months with my purchase of an iPhone and Sonos adding support for the online music service. Pandora is basically my own private radio station. It is my most used iPhone app so I might actually use Pandora for more than 40 hours.  We’ll see.

Blu-ray movies are expensive, especially when you buy them from the big retail chains like Walmart, Target, or Best Buy. Personally, I think Amazon has the best prices on Blu-ray movies. You can find most new movies for $19.99, and sometimes cheaper. Just be aware that most of Amazon’s “sales” are not really any different than their everyday prices. They usually jack-up the prices during their sales and claim 50% off.

$20 for a movie is still too expensive in my opinion. I want to buy movies for less than $10 though Blu-rays are hard to find at the price point.

I recently started buying used movies from Amazon and have found some great deals, like Batman Begins for $6 and The Departed for $10. The prices of used movies fluctuate depending on the seller. The only downside to buying used movies on amazon is the $3 shipping that is charged for each movie. So that Batman Begins movie actually cost me $9 shipped. Still not bad. No taxes either.

Did you know you can search by “used” movies on Amazon? Combine that with sorting by “lowest price” and you can quickly scan for cheap deals. A little digging can help find movies to round out your library. Here is an example search. Happy hunting.

Since this is a “buyer’s guide,” below are some tips for buying Blu-ray movies:

1) Don’t buy kids movies on Blu-ray. Unless you are a big fan of Pixar movies, they look just fine on DVDs. The Cars DVD looked great on my PS3. Plus, you are more likely to watch kids movies on portable players or take them on trips.

2) Never shop on Ebay. You pay too much of a premium for used movies.

3) Never buy movies from a retail chain. Too expensive.

4) Buy used movies from sellers on Amazon.

Dell recently discontinued their line of XPS 420 computers. Why is this interesting? The 420’s were the only computers to come standard with the version of Vista that supports digital cable tuners (i.e. it came with a digital cable product ID). I would suggest verifying with the seller that a digital cable product ID is included; it is usually on the same sticker as the Vista serial code.

This got me thinking: the price of used XPS 420 on sites like Ebay and Craigslist should start to fall, making an entry level CableCard machine even more accessible. Typical prices right now for used XPS 420 run about $500 depending on the specs.

You can buy digital cable tuners on Ebay for about $150 a piece so for a two tuner XPS 420, you are looking at about $800. This should drop with time. If you are in the market for a CableCard machine, I would start to monitor the prices for used Dell XPS 420s.