And now to the heart of the matter 
Organising, Viewing and Playing Back
For pictures I keep things organised with Picasa2. For quick viewing of single shots (and some basic editing) it’s IrfanView
For audio I organise, bulk listen, grab podcasts etc with iTunes. For individual files it’s Winamp.
For video I mainly use VLC, but sometimes will fall back to the old favourite Media Player Classic, which uses the cool ffdshow to do some extra smart work.
For recording
To do audio recordings I use Audacity. It can also do sound processing and convert to MP3 etc.
As for digital TV recordings, I have a Nebula Electronics DigiTV box. This high defintion USB-based system is very reliable and gives excellent results.
For video conversion
I use the wonderful MeGUI to convert my videos. Bit of a learning curve, but well worth it. Great stuff, developed and supported by a smart bunch. I convert to X.264 (an open version of H.264; the leading-edge video conversion scheme )
If it’s a TV recording – from the Nebula box – I will first pass it through VideoReDo Plus. This frame-accurate MPEG editor let’s me remove the ‘junk’ before and after the main show as well as get rid of the ads. I don’t record (keep) that many commercial TV shows, so don’t use the ad-removal that much.
Okay, on the main PC – running Windows XP – I use:
- Firefox as my browser, with these great add ons (extensions)
- Thunderbird is my email program for ‘mail stored on the PC’ ; my main mail these days is the web-based Gmail
- For BitTorrent stuff I used Azureus
I’ve seen a sample of a high defintion (720 lines, progressive) AVI with AC3 (Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound). The quality of the picture and sound was stunning.
Some rough comparisons for how big a 38 minute recoding is, for different quality and type. This is for the lot, sound and video:
- Standard defintion TV recording (MPEG2): 1.5 GB
- Compressed to ok quality MPEG4 (XviD or AVC): 230 MB or 0.22 GB
- The above Hi Def AVI - MPEG4 (DivX) : 1 GB
I use an old PC plugged into the new LCD TV and the amp (receiver)
The LCD TV has a fair few inputs, one of which is a standard PC socket. I had planned to just test this out before moving to the ‘real’ one; the pure digitial HDMI. However the picture quality was excellent so the digital socket is free for a BluRay player one day. The rest of the kit is:
- I am licensed for Windows XP so left that on the PC.
- The free and open source (foss) Media Portal is my media centre software. Besides being an excellent librarian for my video files, it keeps track of where I’m up to in each. Saves a lot of remembering or writing down that I was 28 mins and 15 seconds into file2test.avi. Invaluable. Supports remote shares directly via UNC, so no need to map drives.
- The excellent, powerful foss ffdshow provides a number of useful codecs plus enables me to then ‘post process’ the video; that is sharpen-up divx, xvid, mkv (x264) files. The compression used in these files usually makes the picture ’soft’ or a bit blurry. ffdshow is a great way to sharpen the image back up.
- In fact I use the uber-cool avisynth to help out ffdshow too; another must-have application.
- Rather than keep getting up to control the Media Portal, I’ve got a dedicated PC-remote for media centers; an iMon Station. Now that works a treat!
Most stuff is shown (streamed) from the PC in the study over wired Ethernet. This PC also has the HD/SD USB2 digitial tv box, so recordings are made on the Study PC and streamed to the 2nd PC in the lounge room. More on the Study PC in another post,
The lounge PC also supports digital sound out, so it can send the Dolby 5.1 or DTS etc signal to the amp for conversion to surround sound. Happy to report it too works.
