At the moment I can’t get what I want. And it’s a bit frustrating as normally technology is ahead of my requirements, not behind. Normally it’s me looking at these cool new tech toys and going ‘neat, one day I’ll get one of those’

My annoyance is that convergence (of PCs and home entertainment systems) hasn’t taken off as fast as I would like.

If you want – in your lounge room – to watch digital TV plus record it to a hard drive, as well as play DVDs and watch any media files off your PC…you currently need 2 or 3 different boxes in the lounge. Of course, I want it to be one. And not a full blown Home Theatre PC.

The more I think about this, the more I realise I’m really after an X type solution. As in Xfree86 and X.org – a small, media terminal in the lounge room, with no moving parts, but controlling the powerful PC sitting in study.
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In other words, how much disk space does it take?

I did some samples using a fast moving show. It was a standard definition recording, captured direct as the MEPG2 data. I then converted it to Raw, uncompressed frames, then did two MPEG4 compressions; one average quality, the other very good. Both used MP3 audio. The second figure is the percentage relative to the base MPEG2 recording.
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Have really got into the video conversion is a big way over the last few months. Main reason is I bought a set top box for the PC. It can record both Standard and High Definition video. As an aside, I’ve previously commented on how Australia got this so wrong.

Anyway recording digital TV is cool. The pictures are wide screen, clear and literally DVD quality (even in Standard Def mode!). But they eat disk space at the rate of 3 to 4 GB per hour.

Digital TV (and DVDs) both use variations on the same compression scheme; the excellent MPEG2. A newer standard is MPEG4, with a common implementation called XviD. I can use XviD to squash down my recording to about 10% of their original size with only a slight loss in quality.

To make this go quicker, I’ve recently hit upon frame serving.
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I may have mentioned that I use the free iTunes for Windows as my MP3 library and player.

If I did – and you installed it – this here is a note to say that the recent Version 5.0 seems to introduce an autostarting service that caused me – and others – mucho grief.

Called Apple Computer Bonjour it seems to not play with either Norton Internet Security or with http per se (https just fine). Result is that all Internet web sites won’t load, via Firefox or IE.

Apparently fixed in the ‘oops, sorry about that’ 5.01 release, where Bonjour is removed. I manually disabled 5.0 Bonjour in Services and the problem went away. But am still following advice of uninstalling 5.0 then installing 5.01.