Living with a Digital Living Room - Tips, Tricks, and Programs
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This section is dedicated to the tips and tricks I've spent hours researching and getting to work, all for a few minutes reading for you. The first trick I touched on earlier; you can in fact have two TV tuners with two different video sources and two different connection types. Googling around some will find you the lengthy means of accomplishing this task. Media Center only supports one TV guide, so the different sources will need to have the same channels. This works for my set up since the channels are all the same; expect the 100+ channels that only the set top box gets.
No one likes commercials. It really isn't an issue for me; I'll deal with them and continue ignoring them as usual. I came across a program that will automatically remove them, called Lifextender. It seeks out any new recordings in the "my recorded" TV folder, and automatically strips out the commercials from them. No input is needed outside of the initial set up.
After using it a few times, it really grew on me. It was really good at removing commercials; I haven't experienced any issues with not detecting ads or wrongly detecting ads. I never knew how great it would be to watch a TV show without commercials. I commonly will record TV shows and then the next day I watch them, and between that time it removes the commercials. This is a must have if you plan on recording TV shows.
All these TV shows and movies began taking a toll on my hard drives. The shows were taking up 1 GB per hour, and my space quickly filled up. I wanted to keep all the shows I have, but still record more. I came across another handy little program called MCEBuddy. This program will scan your recorded TV folder, grab the files, convert them to another format and delete the originals. Originally, the files are saved as DVR-MS files, but with the help of MCEBuddy, you can convert then to a number of different formats.
I usually use the standard H.264 codec. This seems to offer the best quality and slims down the size noticeably. This saves me lots of space on my hard drives and allows me to store more shows. It also helps a lot with streaming the shows to other computers such as my personal laptop or the media center in the bedroom. It is another must have if you can't afford to keep buying terabyte hard drives all the time.
I have a whole lot of movies in my house, and I've moved quite a few to my PC. It's okay to see the title and the first frame of the video, but it can take a long time to load every one of them, and can be difficult to find what you are looking for. I found a great application for managing my movies, called MyMovies 2. It comes in two parts, a server part and a client part.
MyMovies 3 allows you to organize your movies in a database format and offers a great user interface within Media Center. It displays the cover of movies and can store various information about the movie as well. You need to install the server part on your main computer or server, and the simple client part on each machine. It is a great program with an easy interface, a must have if you keep your movie collection on your computer.
My final tweak I'll talk about here is a weather one. I live in northern Ohio, and it's hard to know what the weather will be like from day to day. There is a nice little application that will throw today's and tomorrow's weather up in the lower right hand corner of the media center interface. It pulls the weather information from weather.com, my preferred weather forecaster.
Next: Getting others to use Media Center >>
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