What to do with $1200 of unused silicon...
Warning: This post is a little geekier than ordinary. It also may be a tad useful :)
Since getting my netbook, I've had little (zero) use for my old laptop. What I did like about the old laptop was the extensive collection of media files I had ripped from my CDs. And growing weary of the old routine of switching CDs in and out of my player like some kind of caveman, I decided to permanently hook my laptop up to the TV via S-Video. Bam! I could access all my files from Media Player, and even have the funky visualization.
Over the last week, however, I got two things that augmented this setup greatly:
PC Remote Control
It kinda sucked having to haul the laptop out to switch albums, skip tracks, etc. So after a little poking around the net, I found a remote control. It comes with an USB IR receiver. No drivers, no fuss. It has all the common media controls (play, pause, skip, etc.) as well as a mouse control near the top. It even has common PC shortcuts. I was a little leery of it, as it isn't exactly brand name quality, but at C$15 on eBay, I figured it was worth a shot. No regrets. And a whole lot cheaper than some of the other remotes available.
Sesam TV
Unfortunately, Windows Media Player has really tiny fonts and is not meant for viewing at a distance. And while I could do everything with the mouse control on the remote, it was a wee bit clumsy to use. So, once again, poking around the net, I came up with a whole bunch of hits for "Media Center" style software. I tried three: XBMC, based on the XBox, which had an annoying habit of omitting the first 10 seconds of a song (FAIL!); MediaPortal, which is that damn loaded down with unnecessary extensions that performance slows to a crawl, not to mention that I couldn't get the display to work; and then finally, one called SesamTV. Very simple, elegant, and intuitive interface: all functions can be accessed with the arrow keys and enter. It's basically a front end for Windows Media Player, so all the visualizations, as well as any DRM media files, are accessible. And best of all: free.
Anyways, I just thought I'd share. I was about to get a set-top box like the WD TV, which, with the required external hard drive, would have set me back $300. For $15, I was able to turn my otherwise useless laptop into a media hub. Sweet!
Now I gotta go and find some other way to blow $300... ;)
Since getting my netbook, I've had little (zero) use for my old laptop. What I did like about the old laptop was the extensive collection of media files I had ripped from my CDs. And growing weary of the old routine of switching CDs in and out of my player like some kind of caveman, I decided to permanently hook my laptop up to the TV via S-Video. Bam! I could access all my files from Media Player, and even have the funky visualization.
Over the last week, however, I got two things that augmented this setup greatly:
PC Remote Control
It kinda sucked having to haul the laptop out to switch albums, skip tracks, etc. So after a little poking around the net, I found a remote control. It comes with an USB IR receiver. No drivers, no fuss. It has all the common media controls (play, pause, skip, etc.) as well as a mouse control near the top. It even has common PC shortcuts. I was a little leery of it, as it isn't exactly brand name quality, but at C$15 on eBay, I figured it was worth a shot. No regrets. And a whole lot cheaper than some of the other remotes available.
Sesam TV
Unfortunately, Windows Media Player has really tiny fonts and is not meant for viewing at a distance. And while I could do everything with the mouse control on the remote, it was a wee bit clumsy to use. So, once again, poking around the net, I came up with a whole bunch of hits for "Media Center" style software. I tried three: XBMC, based on the XBox, which had an annoying habit of omitting the first 10 seconds of a song (FAIL!); MediaPortal, which is that damn loaded down with unnecessary extensions that performance slows to a crawl, not to mention that I couldn't get the display to work; and then finally, one called SesamTV. Very simple, elegant, and intuitive interface: all functions can be accessed with the arrow keys and enter. It's basically a front end for Windows Media Player, so all the visualizations, as well as any DRM media files, are accessible. And best of all: free.
Anyways, I just thought I'd share. I was about to get a set-top box like the WD TV, which, with the required external hard drive, would have set me back $300. For $15, I was able to turn my otherwise useless laptop into a media hub. Sweet!
Now I gotta go and find some other way to blow $300... ;)
posted by Dave Green at 9:29 a.m.
6 Comments:
Have you hooked the audio into your system as well? Or do you rely on the laptop speakers?
(I seem to recall that S-video is only video....)
-- House
Yes, S-video is only video. I used my headphone jack to wire into my stereo. The nice thing about that is now I have remote volume control -- my receiver came over on the ark :)
That's pretty nice -- I've contemplated building a custom setup kind of like that for all my CD and DVDs, whereby I rip them as straight unencoded files, and have them accessible all from a file server. Unfortunately, while disk prices are quite low these days, the 8 or 10 TB I would need is still beyond my student budget.
Yeah, I was thinking about ripping some of my favourite DVD's to DivX, etc, and have them thus accessible. But I'm not switching DVD's as often, probably because I have a small collection and don't watch them that often.
There are a few options available for set-top boxes which basically play from USB drives, or act as enclosures for 2.5" drives. But they're quite costly setups, considering what you get. You can get an Archos 80GB player for under $200. A set-top box -- which doesn't have the LCD screen and requires a separate hard drive -- is about $150.
I was actually, for a short time, considering a 120GB Zune w/AV pack, which was $230 at one point on Dell's site.
The main reason I was considering a straight rip of the DVD ISOs instead of encoding to DivX was that it would preserve all the language options, special feature, etc. For a lot of DVDs this won't matter so much, but sometimes I want to watch my anime with the subtitles, and sometimes I want to watch it dubbed.
So my general notion was to either have a file server or network attached storage device with tons of disk space, and use a diskless silent/quiet PC as a playback device.
(The more grandiose notion was to have the server in its own room, and playback device connected over a household network from all my different rooms.)
Some day....
I've been tempted by the Archos devices before. The Zune -- however nice an individual model seems to be -- has never appealed quite so much, because I have no faith that Microsoft will keep them going for any meaningful amount of time.
There may be other file formats which compress the video and preserve all the neat options -- I believe VOB is one of them...
DLink offers a streaming media set-top box which would fit in nicely with your schema, either wired or wireless. Though I imagine hiccups in the wireless network could be annoying.
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