Posts Tagged ‘Media’

I once had over 2000 movies, but through stupid circumstances that was reduced to 0 and I started over with DVD’s. It’s not quite gotten back to 2000 but it’s getting there. I’ve been using DVD Profiler for a while now to add all the movies in the collection. Annoyingly the web interface blows and the XML it exports stinks. So I’m still on the look out for a web interface that makes it all look pretty and ajaxy. In the mean time here’s a link to the existing movie library.

This year I had the pleasure of watching the Super Bowl on my Samsung HLS-5688W over QAM free and clear from the wall outlet direct to the TV. The game was decent. Found the touchdown on kick-off to be quite hilarious. Then the first 5 minutes of play to be equally hilarious due to both teams sucking. Then after that the rain didn’t help matters and it was another boring football game.

Now the things I noticed and the main reasons for watching this year were technical things. Like the first down line not doing too well on the white full yard lines. Next and the main reason for this post was the utter lack of quality at some point during the camera and the signal going into the DSP of my DLP. I actually had to go into the settings of the TV and move the picture up because CBS seemed to be broadcasting it so badly there was an annoying half inch black line at the top. Even after doing that I noticed some ads just weren’t centered vertically. Ignoring that. They simply need to have better encoding of this stuff, more bandwidth, something, as soon as they’d get in close on a player on the sidelines that would be running just a bit the picture would go blocky and all that glorious 1080i content just looked like crap on my 1080p TV. And honestly this isn’t just a problem with CBS, all the networks, service providers, whoever, aren’t really doing a good job for motion content. Hire Joel and Brandon or something , oops they’re already taken…

That being said, when they had a nice stable picture it was just jaw dropping. Blades of grass, little specks of rain. Brilliant. And shame on all those SDTV ads, yuck. I can’t wait for the day to have a full hour of TV in 100% HD… Oh wait I do, it’s on 82-5 here, KCTS-HD .

What can I say really. This has got to be the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. It’s about as good as saying something causes cancer when these days everything causes cancer. Oh and I guess SeaTac better be on the look out since there’s this webcam and the terrorists are watching. Heck it’s even broadcast over cable, oh my. I wonder what they could be planning with all those traffic cams!? The horror of it all.

With a minor addition to the Find Album Wizard pipeline hours of frustration are gone. Before one would go through the wizard for any random album and hopefully find all of the tracks one by one. Sometimes on random albums random tracks would just be gone because of common word removal and a complex search algorithm. That for the most part has been taken care of now…

What we have now is a nice new check box option and a single new page in the wizard. This new option is labeled “Use the album selected below to update all tracks in wizard.” It does exactly what it suggests. Click that one box then click on the correct album below and WMP/WMIS then presents a confirmation page with all the tracks listed, all you have to do is click Finish and it then updates all the tracks for the album with the correct metadata.

Awesome with a capital A.

UPDATE: Looks like there’s a minor bug with international characters like the umlaut (ü) and others as well. I think it’s in during the process of grabbing the information and pulling it into WMP that the characters aren’t being encoded right in the HTTP or something along those lines. To work around the problem simply do Find Album Info once more on the track in trouble and it shoud be the only track listed and should have the correct characters in the right spot. When I get into work tomorrow I’ll be checking to see if a bug on this issue exists yet, if not consider it filed.

In my last post about FLAC I talked about how to convert FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) using Adobe Audition. That works just fine. But what I wanted was to not have to run the individual files through Windows Media Player manually entering in data. So this time around we’ll do it much more fluidly.

Basically what we do is take our copy of Nero then download and install the plugin for FLAC. Default location for plugins being C:\Program Files\Common Files\Ahead\AudioPlugins.

At this point go through the normal Audio CD creation process using Nero. If the FLAC comes with a CUE file, just drap and drop the CUE file. If not, hopefully the tracks will be numbered, just drag and drop those.

Burn the project using the Image Recorder setting. Save the NRG file somewhere. Then mount the file using Nero ImageDrive. Once this is done open up Windows Media Player and enjoy. You should find that by going to the Rip pane WMP automatically finds all the track information with album art. Hug the wonderful code behind this one that analyzes things for you. Then rip to WMA VBR or MP3 and not have to worry about the metadata.

I should also mention that if you’re a fan of the SHN (Shorten) codec you can download this plugin. Then just convert the files in the same way.

If you’re a fan of WMA and the way WMP manages your media as I am this is probably the easiest solution for making sure WMIS (Windows Media Information Services) gets things right.