Recently in Project Studio Category

I'm always looking for more audio sound effects - especially free ones. Beatsuite.com has a collection of Royalty Free and free as in no cost audio samples designed specifically for podcasters. Terms of use are simply that you need to credit Beatsuite.com for providing them. As far as I can tell, the collection is available only on Apple's download site and the files are listed as requiring Mac OS X, but fear not, the WAV files in the download will work just as easily for Linux and Windows users too. The list of included sounds in the Royalty Free Podcast Promo Soundpack include:

Cafe Quarter Sting
Energize Sting
Night Metropolis Sting
Urban Tribe Sting
Constellations Loop
Eko Loop
Sci High Loop
Wave Movement Loop

While this isn't a massive collection of free loops, some is always better than none.

Royalty Free Podcast Promo Soundpack

For other free and royalty free sounds, be sure to check out Meanrabbit Sound Effects and The Freesound Project.

I started out with a plan to write an article about how HD-DVD is visually superior to downloads available in Xbox Video Marketplace. After all, how could a 6.1GB HD 720p download possible look as rich as the 1080p content on an HD-DVD? As it turns out, Xbox Video Marketplace does an outstanding job of delivering great looking video that is almost indistinguishable from HD-DVD. Here's how I came to this conclusion.

With the current limited selection of movies available in both HD-DVD and the WMV HD format used by Xbox Video Marketplace, I used V for Vendetta as my movie of comparison. Watching each movie independently, I could find no artifacts in either video file, no macro blocks during motion sequences, and a great range of colors in both cases. The Xbox Video Marketplace file looked just slightly brighter than the HD-DVD, but overall I couldn't tell any real difference.

Since my reasonably well-trained eye couldn't see a difference, I decided to go a step further and compare the videos using software tools. At the moment the HD options on Xbox Video Marketplace are limited, so I choose V for Vendetta as the title available in both HD-DVD and the Video Marketplace for a test. I captured the 20 second segment of V for Vendetta on the rooftop where the explosions happen during the 1812 Overture. You can read more about how to capture HD video from an Xbox here. I captured both versions of the movie at 1280x720 and left the VBI data, which represents 20 pixels at the top of a movie file, as a reference color for true black.

After capturing the videos, I created an AVISynth script to play the two clips side-by-side to look for obvious differences in each frame. To my eye, the only difference is a very slight color variation.

Full-size comparison

For deeper analysis, I enlisted my friend and colleague, Brandon Wirtz, who is among the smartest minds in video compression. Brandon does a very detailed analysis of each video, with the net result that both look great. You can read his video analysis methodology for more details.

The one thing I'll point out about the slight difference in color variation is the HD-DVD authoring tools must use a different encoding solution to get their output than the Windows Media Encoder used to create the Xbox Video Marketplace files. By pulling the two files in side-by-side in VirtualDub, applying a level filter that drops the Gamma of the video to 10, and looking at the result you can see that the color in the two files does not match. Setting the Gamma of the video to 10 has the net effect of moving colors darker than the exact middle of the spectrum closer to black and colors lighter than the exact middle of the spectrum closer to white.

You can see that the HD-DVD file on the left has blacks that match the VBI data in the top 20 pixels of the file, while the black levels in the Xbox Video Marketplace file are effectively shades of grey. This exposes an existing limitation of Windows Media Encoder and the newer Studio Encoder from Microsoft, which both apply the NTSC color space to all video encoded rather than the ATSC standard HD color space when encoding video that's meant for HD.

For the end viewer, this comes across as looking similar to running the contrast and brightness up a little on your screen and gives the image a marginally flatter feel. Considering most people don't calibrate their television correctly in the first place, this is likely a non-issue, although it might throw off one of those dynamic filtering options found on many HD screens. There's no artifacting in either the Video Marketplace file or the HD-DVD. Both have smooth motion. Both give you a great looking movie.

If you own a 1080p screen, HD-DVD is definitely the way to go, since the disks provide the full 1920x1080 video. If your screen is either 720p or 1080i, Xbox Video Marketplace movies give you a great way to sample HD movies and ultimately look better than anything I've ever rented from Comcast's HD On Demand.

It's still too early to call the horse race on HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. One format may win or we may end up with two competing formats for the foreseeable future. I'm going with HD-DVD because I can connect an HD-DVD drive to my Xbox 360 and get great looking movies.

One of the key disadvantages of HD-DVD is no convenient way to make back-up copies of the discs. The HD-DVD spec supports what's known as a managed copy, but so far none of the HD-DVD disks I own have this feature. If I want to watch my HD content somewhere other than my Xbox, or if I want to backup my $30 investment, at this point, I have to create my own solution. Until someone starts giving me managed copies, I'm making copies of my HD-DVDs to watch them where I want to using an analog solution. Following the guidelines presented here, you can use an Xbox 360 with the HD-DVD drive and a PC to make copies of HD-DVD movies.

As the image outlines above, you need an HD capture card with analog component inputs. This card captures both the audio and video from the Xbox 360 via the component output cable. Audio will be passed either via the stereo outs on the component cable or via Toslink to your soundcard (the 5.1 Surround option). A four drive array of SATA disks provides enough disk write speed for real time capture of the HD video.

Breaking this down, the requirements for copying HD-DVDs using this method are:

• An Xbox 360 and Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive.
• Tons of fast-write drive space
• HD capture card with component inputs
• Video Capture Software
• Proper cabling
• Video conversion software to output a compressed HD video file

Xbox 360 and HD-DVD Drive

The Xbox 360 and HD-DVD drive are self explanatory. If you don't have these, you likely don't have any reason to copy HD-DVDs. In theory, you could also create a similar workflow with the Toshiba HD-DVD player. I find the Xbox 360 to be more compelling because it allows you to extend your media from your PC, play HD-DVD movies and play games. After further investigation, the component output of the Toshiba HD-DVD player only supports resolutions up to 480p, so an Xbox is required to make this work.

Allocating enough Hard Disk Space

Capturing HD video requires massive amounts of drive space. More importantly you need drive space with fast write times. The easiest way to do this is to create a cheap RAID 0 array using either an onboard SATA controller or an external SATA card. For the HD-DVD capture scenario, you want a minimum of 4 eSATA drives connected to a controller, which provide throughput to easily caputre 720p or 1080i video. Capturing HD-DVD consumes approximately 6GB per minute of video. For a combination of speed and space, a four-drive configuration of 320GB SATA drives provides a little over a Terabyte of storage at a reasonable price.

Promise SATA 4-Drive Enclosure
Promise SATA Card
Seagate 320GB SATA Drives

HD Capture with AJA XENA LH

The best solution I've found for analog HD capture is the AJA XENA LH. It includes both HD-SDI support as well as the analog connections required for this component out capture process. I connect the onboard component input connections from the Xbox to the XENA LH. For my purposes, I'm capturing the audio as stereo, but you could also capture to a Toslink-capable audio card as well. The XENA LH ships a video capture application called Machina, which also has plug-ins for most major video editing apps.

PC Optimized for Video Editing

Most PCs can handle standard definition DV from a digital video camera with no problem. HD capture is more complicated because you need to write the data as fast as it's coming off the capture card. Disk drive write speeds will be a major limiting factor, but you also need plenty of horse power from your CPU and more memory will come in handy when it's time to process the final video output.

It's worth noting this scenario currently will not work with Windows Vista as there are no HD capture solutions with Windows Vista drivers.

After recently grumbling about the smoggy haze in some of my photos from Beijing, Gary B. sent me a tip from Luminous Landscape about how to tweak contrast to make subtle details pop. The original article was geared to making subtle highlights like shadows standout for printed photos, but it seems to work for improving the look of images taken on a couple hazy mornings in China. The trick involves using some kind of Unsharp Mask filter, which as defined by the Photoshop Elements help file is a technique for giving the illusion of greater detail in an image (sharpness) by increasing the contrast between the light and dark areas of the image. Photoshop, Photoshop Elements and Paint Shop Pro all have an Unsharp Mask built in. I haven't found a good freeware plugin solution for this particular technique if you happen to use some other tool.

I'm stepping through the process here in Photoshop Elements, but the process is very similar using virtually any other sharpen filter with an Unsharp Mask. After opening your image in the editor, locate this tool from the menu by choosing Enhance > Unsharp Mask (or from the Sharpen Filters and choosing Unsharp Mask in older versions of PSE).

There are three settings here to work with:

Amount determines how much to increase the contrast of pixels. We're working with subtle highlights here, so for most cases you won't want to boost this by more than 20-30%.

Radius is used to identify how many pixels around edges to sharpen. For sharpening contrast in the localized fashion were working with here, a number between 40-70 seems to work well depending on the image, because you can really make edges stand out.

Threshold determines how far pixels must be from surrounding area in order to be considered an edge. By leaving the threshold at 0 the entire image is sharpened. Increasing this number to anything greater than 0 seems to make the effect useless for what we're doing here.

In my two examples, the original image is on the left. The Unsharp Filter is applied in the image on the right.

In this example I used the following settings:
Amount = 30
Radius = 50
Threshold = 0

A number of things grab me about the changes here. The pillars stand out more. The roof has the appearance of more detail. Even the wall in front of the building seems to have a little more character. I'm sure the settings could be tweaked further for a better result, but I was impressed by how little effort was required to make a few more details stand out.

In this example I used the following settings:
Amount = 25
Radius = 50
Threshold = 0

The big thing I notice here is that the trees have more edges to them and the doorways on the tower jump out a little more. The original image was flat.

The ideal scenario remains having great lighting in the first place. There's no replacement for having a clear sky or an overcast sky with no haze.

For more on this technique, you can also check out the Luminous Landscape tutorial

Here's several other Digital Photography related articles you might find useful:

Panoramic Photography Tutorial

Using your camera's Continuous Mode or Burst Mode

How to Take Glamor Photos

Tom Bihn was kind enough to help me out with luggage for my trip to China. I also talked them into giving away one of each of their three most popular bags to you, my readers. Obviously they can't give a bag to everyone reading this, so the three recipients will be selected at random.

Whether you like Philip K. Dick or not, A Scanner Darkly looks amazing. The rotoscoping technique used by Richard Linklater was perfected in his previous film Waking Life and applied in a beautifully disturbing way in A Scanner Darkly. If you want to make something similar yourself, all you need is a video, Photoshop and a whole ton of patience. A guy named Jared at barnt.org walks through how to start with a video clip, export it as individual images using QuickTime Pro and then edit the resulting image files in Photoshop using specific filters before ultimately re-importing the files back into a video editing app to publish your finished file. While this isn't exactly rotoscoping, the visual appearance of the footage looks very similar and you get a striking result.

Learn how to make your own Rotoscope video

You can see a sample video hosted on Metacafe (for best results, right-click save target as).

Or here's one based on the same tutorial from YouTube:

Exact Audio Copy is one of the most reliable tools for ripping CDs. If you've ever ripped a disk only to play it back with strange skips and pops in some tracks, you know the frustration of dealing with a bad audio copy. Exact Audio Copy (EAC) solves this by building in smart error correction to handle the issues associated with ripping tracks to your hard drive. Digital Media Thoughts recently posted a tutorial on how to use EAC to rip your music directly to MP3.

"Ripping MP3s from your CDs can sometimes be a daunting task.
Daunting enough that people are often willing to use the first program they find, which is usually supplied on a disc with their digital audio player. I know I was in the same boat until I found Exact Audio Copy, a powerful CD ripping program available for the price of a postcard. The difference was immediately clear and I never went back. Unfortunately, while EAC is a fantastic program, it is a program written by Andre Wiethoff, a student in Germany, and therefore, is still (and likely to be for a while) in beta. There's no documentation to the program, and guides and tutorials are scarce. So while I raved about this fantastic new program I found, and recommended it until I was blue in the face, the majority of my friends and family were unable to use it. I decided to write a guide: this guide. By following it from beginning to finish, you will learn to use one of the most powerful CD ripping programs available. I encourage you to try it out, even if you don't think you need to. You may be as surprised as I was at the difference."

Read the Tutorial on Ripping the Perfect MP3

Bre's Video Output Recipe

Deciding which video formats to support when creating a Web video project is confusing. Whether you're video blogging, posting video how-tos online or sharing your short film with an online audience, you need to offer video in formats the audience can handle. At the moment, this means publishing in several formats to a number of different services to make sure the widest audience possible can watch your video creations. One video maker with a massive online viewing audience is my pal Bre Pettis who makes video for Make Magazine and for himself. Bre recently posted a detailed list of all the formats he outputs for the Web, including the reasoning behind why he choose the formats and resolutions. While not everyone has available bandwidth to distribute a 1280x720 HD version of their video project online, it's great to see he's looking to the future and offering a high res version that should look great both on computer screens and on television. The rest of the formats are definitely good common sense and should be emulated by anyone making video for the Internet.

Using a dolly for motion camera shots is likely a little out of the norm for home movies. For tracking motion or creating perspective motion in a video shot, it's an absolute must because you can't get a smooth sequence without a dolly. In most cases a camera dolly consists of a platform with a tripod mounted camera and seat for a camera operator elevated on a track to obtain smooth precise motion along the path of a planned shot in a video sequence. While doing some online research for a little video project I want to create, I ran across several inventive solutions for do-it-yourself dolly rigs from common parts available at the local hardware store (or possibly the local skate shop).

For tracking a shot in a confined space like a large room, a dolly mounted on a small track like the one at Andersson Technologies, pictured here is likely an easy solution. If you ran a track on the ground using this type of setup, you could build a path to emulate a dog's or cat's eye view perspective run through the house. The hardest part in shooting is likely keeping the track out of frame because you're dealing with potentially narrow entryways between rooms.

In larger spaces or for outdoor shots, building a track using a combination of PVC, skateboard wheels and a plywood platform creates a dolly large enough to support a person, a tripod camera mount and a way to power the dolly for smooth motion throughout an entire shooting sequence like the two examples below. It appears the more detailed directions from Joren Clark are essentially the same dolly stucture as what's found in the Matt Hawkins How to Make a Dolly schematic, although I have no idea which came first.

 

Regardless of the size of your dolly, keep in mind that you need extra track to build up momentum to get smooth video throughout the motion shot with enough extra track at the end of the run to avoid running out of track before your shooting sequence ends.

Word HTML Cleaner

If you have a Microsoft Word document you want to format for the Web, do not post it online until you have use the Textism Word HTML Cleaner. Word is notorious for adding a ton of funky text formatting to .DOC files. Converting those files in Word by saving them as HTML only makes matters worse. All this extra formatting can make your text display badly and it's guaranteed to greatly increase the size of your page, ultimately slowing down page load times and creating a lousy experience for many users. I use Microsoft Word and I've almost never used the feature of Word that re-formats text to HTML because it's simply to awful. Word HTML Cleaner fixes this problem for free. Simply save your current Word document as Web Page using the Save As dialog in Microsoft Word, find the new Web Page document on your hard drive in the Word HTML cleaner dialog box, hit process and you'll have a kinder, gentler version of your file ready for posting to the Web minus all the messy formatting. Your readers will thank you. It's Web-based so it works with both Mac and Windows.

Thanks to Business Know-How for the tip.

SmartSound Sonicfire Pro

Sometime back I received a review copy of Smartsound's Sonicfire Pro software. The software is designed for adding soundtracks to movie projects, by taking stock audio and manipulating a number of variations of the track to get a sound that fits the mood of your video. The mood concept is extremely interesting and works better than I can put into words, which is why I've been wrestling with how to write a review of the software. At its core, Sonicfire Pro is good at a number of elements in combining audio and video or adapting a piece of music to fit a specific time target. In fact, this is my favorite use for the software, browsing the library of available audio, choosing a mood and then setting the audio length to exactly the amount of time I need to fill. Each of the tracks is automatically customizable and includes 10 different variations on the music theme. If you only need a specific piece of a track, you can grab a loop from any segment of that audio and integrate it into your audio or video project. If there's an instrument in the audio track you don't like, you can remove the instrument from the track, which makes the audio infinitely customizable to actually fit the sound you're looking for from the audio. Of course, what I love about the software is that using a few quick options gives you a feel for what the sound might be; it's often great and better than good enough to keep as the soundtrack for the final product. I won't go so far as to say you could fire a composer from a professional project, because there's no replacement for human creativity, but it certainly makes it easy to build out great sounding audio in places where you might never have thought of using a soundtrack. The only thing that's a little scary for home users and DIY creative types is the price. A base package with some core audio sounds and the actual program starts at $199, putting Sonicfire Pro out of the price range of many users. At the same time, if you ever purchase royalty free tracks, the price of individual packages adds up quickly to the point where buying Sonicfire Pro will save you money and deliver a better sounding product over the long haul. I guarantee the trial version will have you hooked. [Windows XP | Mac OS X | Various Prices]

Remote controls are generally something that's cheaper to replace than repair, but if you're particularly fond of a specific remote, you might not be keen on giving it up just because a button or two don't work quite right. It appears that over time, the contacts wear down and need a little assistance to keep functioning. A hole punch, some super glue, aluminum foil, and whatever tools are required to take the remote apart is all that's need to make the remote buttons functional again. Simply use the hole punch to create a small round of foil, glue the foil to the contact from the remote key and voila.

I'm personally sticking with eBay, where remotes are available by the hundreds, or the local electronics store here, but it's certainly a cool project and might keep the kids busy fixing broken remotes for a few hours in the summer.

One interesting thing I learned recently about Vista is Sound Recorder finally supports unlimited record times. This means you can theoretically record as much audio as your hard drive will hold without ever downloading an additional app. For podcasting, this becomes interesting because the barrier to entry for the recording side of the equation is reduced to zero because there's only one button.

My laptop's Intel chipset either doesn't have the right drivers or is simply too weak to support the Vista glass, so you'll have to pardon the scrap metal skin on the screen shots, but you'll get the idea.

One thing Windows Media Player 11 finally supports is an effective search. As you search the results are narrowed quickly to albums, artists or songs specific to your search criteria, which eliminates the mess of digging through tracks. If you happen to subscribe to URGE and have a music library on your local computer, you get results from both. The search results look nice with stacked album art, but the important thing is getting results. In addition to basic searches, I've got a few tricks for getting better searches from large music libraries.

Find an Exact Phrase using Quotes which means a search for Madonna might return the Black Madonnas and Madonna, while searching for "Madonna" will return only Madonna.

Exclude Albums from an Artist search by typing either Aerosmith NOT "Toys in the Attic" or use a minus in place of NOT like this Aerosmith -"Toys in the Attic" to show all Aerosmith songs and albums except those found on Toys in the Attic.

Narrow a Search by Combining Search Terms using Aerosmith AND "Toys in the Attic" or use a plus sign in place of AND like this Aerosmith + "Toys in the Attic" to show only albums

Combine searches with OR to search for multiple tracks or terms. Say you want to find the version of Cars by both Gary Numan and the remake by Fear Factory. You could use the search query Cars Artist: "Gary Numan" OR Artist: "Fear Factory"

Note: Make sure when using modifiers like the above example Artist: to put a space between the colon and the start of your term or the search will fail in some cases (which I'm hoping will be fixed by final release).

Here's a list of all the search modifiers you can use to quickly narrow a search. Some seem very useful, like Album: or Title: or Genre: but who's really going to search for tracks with or without DRM?

Desired Search	Search Modifier
Album Name	Album:
Performing Artist (person on a single track)	Artist:
Genre	Genre:
Song title	Title:
Album artist	AlbumArtist:
Music composer	Composer:
Orchestra Conductor	Conductor:
Contributing artist	ContributingArtist:
Album release date	DateReleased:
Length of track in seconds	Length:
DRM Protection	Protected:
Your 1-5 Star Rating	Rating:
Content Provider	ContentProvider:

In a recent discussion about options for sharing movies as Flash FLV or SWF format files, we were trying to find the most cost effective way to convert files for Mac OS X. I wrote about my favorite method for converting movies to Flash for Windows earlier. If you want really easy, YouTube is likely the best way to get the job done. Create an account, step through their wizard and your movie is online in fairly short order. At the same time, image quality is suspect and you get no control over parameters. YouTube also maintains control over where the file is hosted. If you want to host Flash movies on your own server, you need to convert them on your Mac and upload them yourself. FFMPEGX recently added support for converting most movie formats to FLV files. The following is a tutorial to step you through the process.

When you want your entire video project to stand out, a first impression goes a long way. The first images displayed in most movies are the opening credits, which are often an afterthought at the end of a long video project. Keeping them plain is one way to leave no impression, saving the bigger bang for the actual movie footage. Another option is to create something simple that captures the essence of your movie without going over the top. Something unique to the event on video goes a long way toward setting up the movie and leaving a lasting impression about the whole package. When I shot a video of Steven Page performing at a live in store in Seattle's Easy Street Records, I used the store marquee as the backdrop for my title screens. This tutorial shows you how to take any outdoor sign and fit it into the context of your video project.

For this tutorial, I'm using Adobe Photoshop Elements and Adobe Premiere Elements. You could also use something as basic as Microsoft Paint for the photo editing, although it might take longer and paint doesn't support creating multiple layers. Any video editing application can handle the JPG photos we're creating here.

The first stage is to get a high resolution photograph of the sign you want to use. This can be done either before, during or after the actual event you are covering, just make sure the shot looks good. Bring the photo into your favorite photo editing application to convert it from a still photo into the backdrop for your opening credits.

The marquee sign has a bunch of text on it related to the event. I'm going to erase the original text and replace it with my own text.

Erasing Text with Photoshop Elements

Open the photo in your photo editing app and save a copy with a new name. Zoom in to at least 200% of the original size (Photoshop uses the shortcut Ctrl+'=' to zoom)

Use the eyedropper tool to select an area in a section of the sign with a color closely matching the background where letters currently appear.

Select the Eraser tool and switch the selected color to the background using the Foreground / Background color swapping tool. Use the Eraser tool to eliminate all the letters currently on the sign, being careful to keep the individual sign spaces intact.

Once you erase all the letters resize the image to 720x480 (cropping as necessary) which is the default size for video recorded using a DV camcorder. Save the file to use this image as the template for your titles.

Adding Title Text Using Layers

Choose a font and size that fits your sign. For my sign I went with Placard Condensed both because it was easy to read on screen and because it fit reasonably well in the marquee sign. In lining up the font with the boxes, I was generally able to simply add a single space between each letter to fit text in the boxes. Not perfect, but close.

The trick here is to use the layer capability of your photo editor to save time in creating titles. I use the same base template image and reveal layers as needed in creating new title slides.

When I have the text I need for a title, I simply do a save as and create a JPG image which only shows the currently visible layers.

After saving hide the current layer and add new text in it's place.

After all the title slides are created, import them into your video editing application to assemble the titles ahead of your movie.

Insert your title slides in order on the video timeline.

Adjust the display duration on each file until you get the timing right for your titles. Photoshop Elements should let you set a default based on frames, but I'm getting a glitch where it won't recognize a minimum smaller than 150 frames for the global value (5 minutes). Right-clicking the image in the timeline and choosing Time Stretch lets you set a different value for duration. For my titles 2 seconds is almost too long.

Save out the finished movie project. You can see an example of the titles demoed here in action below:

You can take the concept of using individual layers in Photoshop Elements a step further to build out titles that appear to write text on the screen as well. Start with the same basic image and gradually add a series of letters to spell out what you want giving you an effect like what's demonstrated in this video:

The full movie where I used these titles is at pmcmovies.com.

Make your own microphone zeppelin windscreen

I'm a big fan of DIY gear for shooting video or recording audio when your budget is holding back your ability to produce an otherwise great creative endeavor. You can save a ton of money in many cases and you get the satisfaction of creating something useful along the way. Case in point, the DIY microphone zeppelin windscreen from Joel Greenberg of Joel and Karen. Zeppelins are those fuzzy things you see covering microphones on long boom arms and help to greatly reduce wind noise when recording with a shotgun style microphone. Using some PVC, leaf guard, fur from the fabric store, and a hot glue gun, Joel built a very functional zeppelin to help cut down on wind noise when recording audio in windy outdoor environments in Texas. He details all the steps and provides a before and after audio recording sample to demonstrate the sound difference. As a bonus he also shows how to build a microphone shock mount using PVC too.

Motorola Bot Testing
How to build a Warbot video

After spending two days at the CTIA Wireless conference where the tradeshow revolves around cellular technologies and cell phone add-ons, it's good therapy to see someone making creative use of a RAZR. In preperation for the upcoming Seattle Warbot competition, Bre Pettis of I Make Things interviewed two guys who are building an armor piercing bot. Their crash test dummy for the lab trials was a rather unfortunate Motorola RAZR. You can watch the carnage over at I Make Things as well as see Bre's planned entry for the competition.

Build Your Own Robot with a kit from ebay.

Make a PVC DIY Steadicam

If you're shooting video of your kid's soccer game, wearing this $50 DIY steadicam rig might look a little silly, but it's almost guaranteed to get better video than trying to shoot handheld through the entire event. For filmmakers on a budget, this is the kind of DIY solution sure to help reduce costs while also dramatically improving shooting options in places where a tripod won't cut it. The PVC is lightweight, reducing fatigue from wearing, although you certainly need to tape the foam for a longer wear life. The swivel mount in the middle of the frame seems to be the real clever hack in this rig, avoiding any need for a traditional tripod mount while building something equally functional. Not to mention this is a more versatile upgrade to the $14 DIY solution from 2004.

If you prefer to avoid the time investment of building your own Steadicam, ebay has affordable Steadicams along with a selection of pro gear.

With the December 4, 2007 update, Xbox 360 now directly supports streaming DivX AVI movies from your desktop. All you need is Windows Media Player 11 or the Zune software. I personally prefer Windows Media Player 11, because it also supports playing back Amazon Unbox videos on the Xbox 360.

Here's what you need to do to configure your computer to share video, music and photos with your Xbox 360. Make sure your Xbox 360 is turned on and connected to your home network before beginning.

Make Custom Windows Movie Maker Titles

This one requires some coding knowledge or at least the ability to read and write XML, but it's one of the more useful hacks I've seen for Windows Movie Maker. Among many gripes about the current version is a lack of custom settings to configure your own Title and Credits settings. You're either stuck with the defaults or need to hack together your own title screens using a photo editing application, like I did for the Steven Page video. Apparently there's a way to make your own titles and credits, Microsoft just never documented it in the API. Awhile back Rehan Ahmad documented this trick on his rehanfx site, complete with a number of examples and all the specifics you need to make custom titles.

DIY Video Bluescreen or Greenscreen

When I needed a greenscreen to try some chromakeying, I went with the lazy and more expensive approach of buying something for around $150 through a theatrical supply store. Not the same as doing it yourself, but the timesaving tradeoff looked better under the circumstances. If you're on a seriously low budget, consider the DIY solution detailed at Jeff's Computer Support Online. Jeff provides step-by-step instructions on constructing a greenscreen from muslin fabric and PVC piping. The upside is a lower cost of materials for your project. The downside to this approach, as Jeff points out, is that the PVC frame isn't very mobile when put together. Apart, the frame is lightweight and could easily be transported anywhere. Thanks to Make for the tip.

Mount a Camera to Your Bike

I remain amazed at the amount of response I get from my DIY Bottle Cap Tripod. The latest inspiration is a DIY camera mount for your bicycle from 7mc. He uses a 3/4 machine screw, a 1 foot length of bicycle inner tubing, and a metal hose clamp secured onto bicycle handlebars from a front recording view with a digital still camera. While I'm sure the video looks a little bumpy unless you're riding a bike with an insane suspension on a ultrasmooth surface, if you want to record your ride, this is an easy way to get the job done. There's also the alternative Bicycle Camera Mount I wrote about several months ago. You can geek it up a notch and record your video coupled with ShotMapper Deluxe to track GPS coordinates on your video tape.

Lifehacker Flickr Tips
Jake on Flickr

While I like some of the online photo sharing alternatives, Flickr remains my default for uploading photos (when I remember to upload them, that is). There are a ton of ways to make Flickr more useful, including assigning yourself a human-readable URL, uploading photos via email (which makes it easy to upload via cell phone) with varying degrees of privacy, email tagging, posting to multiple blogs and a whole host of options for sharing photos with other people. Lifehacker recently put together a reasonably comprehensive list of features designed to maximize Flickr functionality. The advanced email tips are probably the best of the bunch, offering some useful tips that make uploading via cell phone a workable alternative for camera phone snaps.

Simple AMP photos
Velleman Assembly Manual

O'Reilly's Make Magazine has a great DIY community at Instructables.com where people post photos and steps for a wide variety of how-to projects. A recent post over at Gizmodo reminded me of one of my early favorites, posted back in April 2005. The project is a small amplifier for iPods and other portable players, designed to sit between the headphone jack and a speaker system of some kind. Steps walk you through acquiring the parts from Radio Shack and Velleman, includes some shots of testing out the project and a shot of the finished assembly. Ideally you want to download the manual from Velleman to help with building the project, which isn't entirely clear from the Instructables photo series.

There's some confusion around the appropriate steps to take in adding an Xbox 360 to a home network with optimal results. In an ideal universe, connecting an Xbox 360 with a wired connection is the best course of action. Wired connections generally guarantee close to 100Mbps per machine across a local area network. Wireless networking is significantly less reliable, with things like cordless phones and microwave ovens operating on the same frequency as the 802.11b and 802.11g standards.

802.11a is the standard Microsoft is recommending, but it's not necessary. My own home network is segmented with an Xbox 360 on one 802.11g access point and all other wireless devices are on a second 802.11g access point. My wired Media Center successfully streams the 1080p HD content available from Microsoft's WMV HD Showcase without any hiccups.

When you finally track down an Xbox 360 console, one of the key aspects of a great gaming experience is networking. If your network isn't optimized for your Xbox 360, game play will suffer. From cordless phones running interference to keeping network traffic separated to protecting yourself with the right security measures, you need to make sure your network settings are optimized. The right settings make it easier to stream video and audio, in addition to playing head-to-head on Xbox Live. You don't necessarily need to throw out your existing networking hardware, but there are a number of changes you will want to make if you already have a home network. In the course of my regular column for InformIT.com, I compiled a hit list of suggestions for making sure your connection doesn't drop at a crucial moment in this handful of Xbox 360 Networking Tips.

You may also want to check out some
Xbox 360 Wireless Adapter Alternatives.

So far, the Windows Live Gadget collection is nothing more than a novelty act filled with clocks, astrological updates, and weather data I can get somewhere else. The AJAXY drag-and-drop interface is killer and I like being able to create my own news page, but the functional benefits of existing plugins aren't cool. I want features that enhance my experience, not make it quaint. Microsoft is finally delivering with a new gadget for scheduling Media Center Edition shows, recommending shows based on previous viewing experience and keeping on top of what's coming up from your Windows Live account. The gadget monitors your Media Center recordings making it possible to update your recording schedule anywhere you can get signed in to Windows Live. We got a sneak peak today at Search Champs V4 complete with permission to post a semi-exclusive screenshot of the experience. Presumably this is an extension of the existing MSN TV Remote Record feature. No word on an official ship date for the MCE gadget, but you can bet I'll install it the day it goes live.

Full Size Screenshot

Surf the globe from the comfort of your couch by combining Google Maps with the Windows Media Center interface. Colin Savage hacked together a solution combining the Google Maps API and the Windows Media Center SDK to make a map surfable from the 10-foot experience. Up and down buttons on the MCE remote control move you around the globe with the channel buttons zooming in for a close up. Numbers 1, 2, and 3 switch between map view, satellite view and hybrid view respectively. To add Google Map functionality to your own Media Center install, add a shortcut Google Maps in the More Programs section by right-clicking this Media Center Google Maps link and Save Target As to: {system drive}\Documents and Settings\All users\Start Menu\Programs\Accessories\Media Center\Media Center Programs\

If saved properly, you should see the Google Maps button in your Media Center navigation like the one below. If you have an Xbox 360 as Media Center Extender, you can browse the world from your Xbox too.

You can also navigate the map online here:
http://savage.org.za/GMAPMCE/

Chris wants a MCE feature to find and schedule movies in Windows Media Center based on what's either coming up later in the month or what's coming up next on his platinum package of movie channels. While there's no instant messaging solution with a reminder of upcoming movies, scheduling a recording in advance is a snap.

If you want movies playing now or later today step through the screens below to find something you want to watch:

DivX MCE Hack

One of the big gripes everyone has about using an Xbox 360 as an extender for Windows Media Center edition is lack of DivX support. If you can't live without your DivX movies, one solution is to convert them to WMV, which makes them available as part of your compatible media library. Another solution is to use the Brains N Brawn hack to convert DivX files on the fly and stream them to your Xbox 360 using Media Center Extender.

You need some basic understanding of Windows Media Encoder to make the hack work and there are a handful of installation files required, but if you follow the included directions, you'll be streaming DivX movies to your Xbox 360. With any luck, someone will write a plug-in to do this more automagically in the near future. If you can find the right codecs, this could work for other incompatible formats as well.

The idea of a Linux media center intrigues me. I'd love to find a combination of free software applications delivering the level of usability I get from the actively developed media center apps like Beyond TV, SageTV and Microsoft's XP MCE. So far, the usability falls down at some point in the process for anyone who's not a hardcore geek. At first glance, this intrigue is what makes Tom Lynema's Ubuntu media center implementation look compelling. Tom walks through the hardware used to create his media center configuration, as well as a number of tricks for configuring hardware drivers. For many usability reasons, I'm sticking with a Windows-based media center implementation for the foreseeable future, but it appears Linux solutions continue to evolve.

Tight network security and network-aware applications like Xbox Live are constantly at odds in our computing universe. While there may be firmware updates for wireless routers to automatically solve Xbox Live connection issues in the long run, using your NAT in one of the more secure modes might lead to audio problems or just plain failure to connect your Xbox 360 to Xbox Live. You can do some troubleshooting with a solution posted over at Xbox360Fanboy and details provided from the Test Xbox Live Connection in the Network Settings portion of the System blade. Depending on your network settings, your connection may fail in a Moderate or Strict protection mode on the router.

The solution is to open the ports listed over at Xbox360Fanboy.

UDP 88, UDP 3074, and TCP 3074 for those too lazy to click-thru.

Sometime back I wrote about CustomFlix, a company that publishes DVDs on demand, offering distribution for independent projects, ranging from home movies to feature length indie movies. CustomFlix was purchased by Amazon.com awhile back and they remain one of the best sources for print-on-demand DVD distribution. Possibly the best known release through CustomFlix is the indie flick Clique, directed by David Basulto, who acted opposite Stevan Segal, produced the film Love and Action in Chicago, which stars Jason Alexander and is the host of the outstanding Filmmaking Central Podcast. CustomFlix is affordable, with a setup fee of $49.95 and through January 30, for any title you setup, send an email to holidayspecial@CustomFlix.com and you'll get a coupon to waive the setup fee on a second title. If you've got a creative masterpiece you'd love to distribute on DVD, or you don't want to hassle with all the nonsense involved in printing your own cover art for the clamshell and mailing family members a DVD, CustomFlix might be the perfect alternative.

Feed2Podcast

PT over at Make tipped me off to a slick new service for turning any RSS feed into a Podcast. Basically you sign up for the service, add your text RSS feed to your account and Feed2Podcast automatically converts text entries to speech. The audio sounds a little robotic and could stand to use the AT&T Natural Voices that power TextAloud, but for free it's an impressive use of available technology. The service processes individual RSS posts as individual audio files, making it easy to listen to as much or as little of a particular site's content on your schedule. If you publish a Feed2Podcast feed, I recommend following the steps I suggest for avoiding feed hijacking, because anytime you give up control of your URL to a third party, you can put yourself at risk of losing subscribers over the long haul. I'm not sure if Feed2Podcast will extend beyond the current novelty into something viable in terms of audio quality, but the idea warrants further exploration and I'd be surprised if similar services don't start appearing in the coming months.

To see Feed2Podcast in action, subscribe to the MediaBlab text-to-speech podcast to hear articles from me as powered by Feed2Podcast:
MediaBlab Feed2Podcast or hear the full feed in their preview player.

When you purchase something new, you expect it to work. Whether it's a brand new HDTV screen or a commodity like a MiniDV tape, the potential for failure isn't part of the thought process as you remove the packaging. Jason Dunn of Digital Media Thoughts recently recorded a friend's wedding with his Canon GL2 mounted on a pro tripod. While being a skilled videographer certainly goes a long way, if your gear lets you down, no amount of video chops can salvage faulty equipment (short of hiring MacGyver).

As Jason puts it: Here's a little story, and an important life lesson, for anyone that uses a video camera to capture memories. Please learn from my mistake so you don't have to go through what I did.

Read Jason's Cautionary tale to videographers

The ongoing saga of Sony music CDs installing a rootkit from DRM provider XCP is well documented at this point. The trick is knowing if you're system is compromised and how to clean up your computer if you are compromised. Microsoft responded to the threat by bundling a solution into the latest build of Microsoft Anitspyware. An update to the Malicious Software Removal tool is also forth coming. This does not remove the Sony XCP software, just the bundled First 4 Internet Rootkit bundled with the XCP software. Whether this goes far enough to address the problem is still up for debate, but it certainly takes a giant step toward making sure your system is not compromised. The whole debacle will make me think twice before buying another CD. Details can be found at the Anti-Malware Engineering Team blog.

A non-comprehensive list posted by the EFF suggests that anyone purchasing one of the following CDs and played it on a PC are potentially at risk:

Trey Anastasio, Shine (Columbia)
Celine Dion, On ne Change Pas (Epic)
Neil Diamond, 12 Songs (Columbia)
Our Lady Peace, Healthy in Paranoid Times (Columbia)
Chris Botti, To Love Again (Columbia)
Van Zant, Get Right with the Man (Columbia)
Switchfoot, Nothing is Sound (Columbia)
The Coral, The Invisible Invasion (Columbia)
Acceptance, Phantoms (Columbia)
Susie Suh, Susie Suh (Epic)
Amerie, Touch (Columbia)
Life of Agony, Broken Valley (Epic)
Horace Silver Quintet, Silver's Blue (Epic Legacy)
Gerry Mulligan, Jeru (Columbia Legacy)
Dexter Gordon, Manhattan Symphonie (Columbia Legacy)
The Bad Plus, Suspicious Activity (Columbia)
The Dead 60s, The Dead 60s (Epic)
Dion, The Essential Dion (Columbia Legacy)
Natasha Bedingfield, Unwritten (Epic)

There may be others, Sony has not published a full list of at-risk titles.

Fellow Microsoft Digital Media MVP, Diane Dumas, recently completed her car computer. Diane replaced the car stereo in a 1999 Buick Century with a 7-inch Xenarc monitor and managed to fit a CD drive sized computer running Windows XP Media Center Edition under the environmental controls. She offers a quick walkthrough of what she did over at the mp3car.com forums. I'm personally amazed at how the screen looks like it was meant to be there. If you've been thinking of doing something similar, consider this inspiration. I have a reasonably priced in-car video system through some simple hacking, but my car computer plans remain on the drawing board for the time being.

Car Compuer specs and images

Bicycle Camera Mount

Car mounting a digital video camera is proving to be a tricky task from the perspective of getting flexibility in mounting and something sturdy enough to not lose the camera as the car accelerates. Mounting a digital camera or DV cam on your bicycle looks like an easier proposition. Camera Hacker offers a tutorial on converting the mounting bracket from a bicycle light into a handle bar mounted tripod for use in filming cycling excursions. No word on how well it absorbs the shock of road vibrations, but the mount looks sturdy enough for most biking activities. If you want to grab stills on your weekend ride or attempt to film trail riding footage, this tutorial is a good place to start in building your own bicycle camera mount.

Pinging is one of those things bloggers take for granted. Ping-o-matic offers a slick service to notify most of the major blog aggregation and search tools that you've made a post or updated your site. It offers a smaller subset of directories and resources for podcasters to ping. If you want a purely podcast focused ping tool, AllPodcasts.com seems to be the place to go. For a more comprehensive list of sites you should ping each time you publish a podcast, Research Buzz offers a few additional podcast ping sites and a cool resource for building a ping database in an Excel Spreadsheet (Office 2003 required for this last one, of course). I'd personally rather see a service like Ping-o-matic aggregate this stuff all in one place so I don't need to maintain my own list. In the meantime, the combination of AllPodcasts.com and the Research Buzz recommendations help guarantee maximum exposure.

The easiest way to change your record directory for Windows XP Media Center Edition is to install the Tweak MCE Power Toy from Microsoft. If Tweak MCE doesn't work with your version Media Center, here's an optional method for changing the record location:

Change the RecordPath value in the Registry to point to the new folder:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Service\Recording = REG_SZ "{system drive}:\Documents and Settings\{username}\My Documents\PSPWare\Dropboxes\Movies"

To make sure your recording list stays up to date in Media Center, edit the Watched Folders key. If the Registry Key does not exist, create it.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media
Center\Service\Recording\WatchedFolders = REG_MULTI_SZ "C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\Recorded TV {system drive}:\Documents and Settings\{username}\My Documents\PSPWare\Dropboxes\Movies"

Close and restart Windows Media Center for changes to take effect.

Make your own iPod VR

I see visions of fan sites in Phil Torrone's future. PT is a living super-smart sci-fi character bending technology to his will. A less conflicted Tony Stark for Marvel fans or maybe a hip incarnation of Mr. Wizard. His latest project combines the newly released iPod video with a set of virtual reality goggles, creating an immersive experience out of eyeglass-sized LCD screens and a pocket sized hard drive. By the time the market is ready for this creation, the drive will be jacked into our skulls and the glasses will be a portable to another dimension. In the meantime, you can impress your friends and get the odd glance from fellow travelers on the way to another dimension destination.

How to automatically convert DVR-MS files for PSP Playback

Despite the recent launch of Sony's own Media Manager, PSPWare remains the best solution for syncing content to your PSP. Chris and I were lamenting the lack of an easy way to automatically convert DVR-MS files created by Windows Media Center to files ready for playback from PSP Memory Sticks. Here is the solution.

Required Software:
Tweak MCE Power Toy $0.00
Lupas Rename 2000 $0.00
PSPWare $15.00
Windows Task Scheduler (part of Windows XP)

Install and Configure PSPWare

Download and Install PSPWare. The software is functional for free, but limited until you upgrade. Pay the developers the $15; they're working hard to make the software even better. You need to do this step first because it creates the folders you will watch for new DVR-MS files to convert.

Click the Advanced button and check the box next to Sync dropboxes to activate dropbox synchronization.

Install Tweak MCE Power Toy

Download and Install Tweak MCE Power Toy, if you haven't already. This free app from Microsoft makes it possible to adjust the skip interval for jumping through commercials, as well as changing the folder where your recorded TV files are located. Change the Storage Location For Recorded TV to:
{system drive}:\Documents and Settings\{username}\My Documents\PSPWare\Dropboxes\Movies

where {system drive} is replaced by your drive letter and {username} is replaced with your username.

Update: Tweak MCE was updated on 11/4/2005 with support for "Emerald". If Tweak MCE won't work with your version of Windows XP Media Center Edition, here are some alternate instructions for changing your MCE record location.

Install and Configure Lupas Rename 2000

Lupas Rename 2000 helps make the conversion process automatic. PSPWare doesn't recognize the DVR-MS file extension. These files are MPEG-2 files with a Microsoft-specific extension. PSPWare will recognize and convert files with the .mpg extension. By simply changing the extension, you can transcode any Media Center TV recording for playback on your PSP. The annoying part is you need to do it manually, unless you create a batch process. I chose Lupas Rename 2000 to handle this part of the process because of a documented set of command line options.

After installing Lupas Rename 2000, open the app and start the configuration process.

First, open the application General Options and uncheck the box next to Uncheck the name and extension options after renaming. Close the General Options by clicking the checkmark.

Next, enter the path to your recorded TV files, which should be the folder you changed with Tweak MCE:
{system drive}:\Documents and Settings\{username}\My Documents\PSPWare\Dropboxes\Movies

Edit the Filemask to only show DVR-MS files with *.dvr-ms (this step is only necessary for testing as you won't see it when the process is automated).

On the Ext tab, check the box next to Replace the text and enter dvr-ms and with this new text mpg. If the box next to Only rename the selected files is checked, uncheck it.

At this point, you can test the process to verify your batch convertion works by clicking the rename button. If you're files are renamed, it works. ;)

Automate Renaming

To make sure your files are converted for regular playback, you need to automate the rename process. This is one of the few times Windows Task Scheduler comes in handy. Launch Task Scheduler from Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Scheduled Tasks

Click Next on the Scheduled Task Wizard, Locate Lupas Rename 2000 and click next.

Choose Perform this task: Daily

Keep the defaults on the next screen, click Next and enter the password for your Windows XP user account.

Check the box to open advanced properties and click Finish.

On the Task pane replace the Run: line with the following:

C:\Progra~1\LupasR~1\LupasRename.exe PATH="{system drive}:\Documents and Settings\{username}\My Documents\PSPWare\Dropboxes\Movies" FILTER="*.dvr-ms" RENAME=1

where {system drive} is replaced by your drive letter and {username} is replaced with your username.

On the Schedule tab, click Advanced and check the box next to Repeat Task accept the default of every 10 mintues and change duration to 24.

Click OK (you might be prompted for your user password again).

At this point, you should be fully automated. Once PSPWare has time to convert your files, you are good to go with portable television for your PSP.

The only other change you might want to make is to modify the movie output settings in PSPWare. The default is 320x240 Normal, which appears to look fine on my PSP, but your milage may vary.

Why didn't I opt to use the new Sony PSP Media Manager?

At this point, the Sony PSP Media Manager is very inconsistent in its ability to recognize compatible files in a given folder. PSPWare is more reliable at this point and does an excellent job transcoding the files.

In some ways, creating and publishing your podcast is the easy part. The hard part is getting people to listen. In order to gain an audience you need to let people know you exist. Here are 12 strategies for making it easy for people to find your podcast.

Make Your Podcast Search Engine Friendly

The hardest part of introducing potential listeners to your podcast is making it easy for them to find you. There are two key ways people are introduced to new information online: they find something new through a link from a regularly visited site; or they find something new through Google. While you might exert minimal influence over who links to you by become pals with all the A-listers, you don't control whether people choose to link or not. One thing you control is the information on your site. First time visitors want a quick and accurate synopsis of video or audio prior to investing the time listening or viewing. Think of the accompanying text as the sales pitch that convinces a casual visitor your podcast is worth their valuable time. This text is also the information the search engine bots will see when crawling your site as part of the cataloging process. When someone searches on a topic related to your podcast, your page appears higher in the results if you have relevant text.

Create an Email List

Email seems counterintuitive to podcasting. Why would people subscribe to an email about your podcasts instead of just subscribing to the RSS feed? Because they either don't understand subscribing to audio yet or they don't want a bunch of audio filling up their hard drive. The podcasting and video blogging credo is giving people what they want, when they want and how they want it. Make reminders available in every format possible. If people don't want to subscribe to your RSS feed yet, so what. Offer an email subscription so they know when you post something new. Free services like Bloglet and Feedblitz handle the publishing hassle so you can concentrate on your podcast.

Press Releases

Press releases are seen as old media notification tools, but they still work. If there's an interesting angle in one episode of your podcast, write up 300-500 words about it and submit the release to free press release services like and I-Newswire. Events like your 100th episode, annual anniversary, interviews with interesting people or upcoming contests are all compelling reasons to send out a press release.

Subscribe to Your Podcast

I'm not kidding. Subscribe to your podcast in Odeo, Yahoo, AOL, MSN, Google Reader, Bloglines and any other online service you can think of. Some of them won't support the audio enclosures, but that's not the point. If the service has one customer subscribed to a feed, the service knows that feed exists, which means your feed is indexed by that service. You don't have control over which service or applications your listeners choose, but you can make it easier to find your podcast within those services by subscribing to it.

Tag Your Text

Tags are a hot topic in generating traffic. Search sites like IceRocket and Technorati use tags to help generate meaningful search results. To associate your podcast with specific tags, you never need to visit these services. Tags are added in the text description associated with your podcast. For instance, if you have a podcast about cooking and in one episode you talk about making clam chowder, include tag links related to your topic in the post. The links look something like this:

<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/cooking" rel="tag">cooking</a>
<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/clam+chowder" rel="tag">clam chowder</a>

The rel="tag" designation is what tells search engines that link is a tag. For two word tags, using the '+' sign designates a space. The link can technically go anywhere, like the Wikipedia entry on clam chowder and still be seen as a tag by search engines like IceRocket and Technorati.

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is related to the concept of tagging. If you ever tag your photos with keywords on flickr or archive posts on del.icio.us, you are already familiar with the concept. Like tagging, you assign keywords to a particular URL. The big difference is you do it within the constraints of a service. To continue with the clam chowder example, you log into del.icio.us and add a link to the page (not the media file) where your podcast is linked for download. You then associate keywords like 'clamchowder', 'soup' and 'cooking' with that page. People who search del.icio.us can see all the links to things tagged 'clamchowder' by everyone who uses del.icio.us and find your podcast in the list of tags.

Interview Interesting People

Interview people in the topic area of your podcast. If you do a music show, reserve a few minutes of every show to interview one of the artists featured on the show. When you post the show, send a link to the person you interviewed and encourage them to link to it from their own Website or blog. Other people in the interviewee's circle of influence will find out about your podcast and come check you out.

Comment on Other Podcasts and Blogs

If someone else covers a topic related to your podcast, comment on what they are saying either in their comments or in your podcast. Mention in the text synopsis of your podcast that you talked about what The Cooking Blog had to say about making clam chowder on your clam chowder episode and link back to their post about clam chowder. Participating in forums related to your topic is also closely related to commenting.

Guest Blog on Related Sites

You are already spending time talking about your favorite subject in your podcast, but a whole universe of people don't know you exist. If there are bloggers who write about your topic, offer to guest blog when they need a break or want to go on vacation.

Affiliate with a Network

Some of the early successes in podcasting are the result of network affiliations. Certainly, the show I produce, The Chris Pirillo Show, benefits from Chris's Lockergnome network. Engadget's podcast became popular with the help of a large Weblogs, Inc readership. Something more informal works too. Identify a group of bloggers, podcasters and video bloggers all talking about related topics and arrive at a way to team up and drive traffic to each other's efforts.

Build Relationships with Listeners

While listening to audio is technically a one way communication, encouraging and incorporating listener feedback in your show creates a sense of community. Actively solicit feedback from listeners by providing ways to call and leave messages or send email feedback. If you get email raves, read them during your podcast. If you get questions from listeners, answer them during your podcast when appropriate.

Get Listed in Directories

Don't limit yourself to podcast directories. Since you're now adding value to your RSS feed by creating meaningful text posts to accompany the audio, submit your feeds to every RSS and blog directory you can find. Robin Good offers a solid list of 55 places to submit your feed.

Some of the popular podcast directories include:
http://www.ipodlounge.com/
http://podcasting.meetup.com/
http://www.podcastdirectory.com/
http://www.podcast.net/
http://www.podcastingnews.com/
http://www.podcastpickle.com/
http://www.podscope.com/
http://www.podcatch.com/
http://www.podcastcentral.com
http://www.podcastalley.com/
http://www.syndic8.com/
http://newtimeradio.com

For a frequently updated list of submission directories, see Robin Good's MasterNewMedia

NetworkGarage.com Fireproof Safe Backup

Backing up digital photos and home movies is important for any kind of catastrophic data loss. What happens if the data loss has nothing to do with your computer failing and everything to do with your house burning down? Having a backup isn't enough; you need a backup protected from heat damage. NetworkGarage.com provides an interesting solution, combining a fireproof safe with a network attached hard drive, connecting the hard drive to the network using Ethernet over power lines. Using the NetworkGarage.com tutorial as your guide, you can build a fireproof backup solution that automatically backs up files, backs them up from every computer on your network, has full protection from fire and doesn't have an incremental subscription cost. It sounds a little more complicated than it is. The solution demonstrated on the site isn't cheap, but it certainly has me thinking about how to implement a disaster plan for losing crucial data for those unplanned events. Thanks to Digital Media Thoughts for the tip.

It's definitely smart to make your audio offerings available for subscription via RSS and direct download via a Website link. Enabling audio playback from the familiar audio playback experience of the Windows Media Player play controls helps get some listeners past the hurdle of figuring out how to tune in. If your audio file is a WMA or MP3 file, there are a few simple steps to linking your audio to Windows Media Player controls imbedded in the browser.

When you offer a direct download, users click on a link to the audio file and either view the video in their desktop Windows Media Player or save it to their hard drive. To stream your audio file with visible Windows Media Player controls, you need to embed the player in the page where you post your audio file. This requires some specific HTML code included in the page or blog post where the audio is linked.

One of the reasons I like Azureus over all the other BitTorrent clients is plugin support. Azureus fans found a number of clever ways to extend the software by developing a series of add-ons. The downside is, some of the add-ons are a little geeky, but with a decent set of instructions, they do the trick quite nicely. A particular favorite of mine is the RSS support in Azureus. I can subscribe to an RSS feed with torrent files in it and fully automate the process of discovering and downloading the files in the torrent. It keeps all of my torrent downloads managed in one common interface, while also handling the files I normally use some kind of RSS client to track down.

Downloading Azureus RSS Support

This tutorial assumes you installed the Azureus BitTorrent client. If you haven't already installed Azureus, check through the list of Azureus configuration tips before proceeding.

After installing and configuring Azureus, you need to add a plugin for RSS support. There are two plugins available: RSS Import and RSS Feed Scanner. RSS Import was the first plugin with RSS support, but RSS Feed Scanner offers more feature configurability, which is why I recommend it over RSS Import.

To download the plug-in, choose Plugins > Installation Wizard from the Azureus menu. At this point, you can either browse the available plugin list on sourceforge.net or go to the Azureus RSS Feed Scanner page and download the file directly. The SourceForge list automatically filters out anything you already installed in Azureus, so you don't end up with duplicate files. Check the box next to RSS Feed Scanner and click next.

Choose Install the plugin(s) for all users if you want everyone who logs into your PC to have access to RSS within Azureus.

Installing RSS Feed Scanner

The next prompt verifies your intent to install RSS Feed Scanner. The plugin is downloaded from sourceforge.net and automatically installed as soon as the download completes. When installation is complete, Azureus provides a popup notification. Click the Close button on the installation dialog box.

Configuring RSS Feed Scanner

The first part of configuration for RSS Feed Scanner is in the Azureus Options menu. Open the options using Tools > Options (Ctrl+,) and expand the Plugins section. Highlight RSSFeed. Check the box to Load RSSFeed Tab on Startup. If you don't do this, you need to manually activate the plugin each time you open Azureus, which defeats the purpose of automated downloads.

Adding an RSS Feed

After configuring the basic RSS Feed Scanner options, you need to add some RSS feeds. Choose Plugin > RSSFeed from the Azureus menu. On the Options tab, click the icon next to the empty RSS Feed URLs: box to add a feed. Locate a feed you want to add.

For this example, I'm going to use the RocketBoom BitTorrent feed available from their RSS page.

Name the feed, paste the URL in the URL box, choose a folder where you want to download the torrents and check the box to make the feed Active. Click the Save button to save your feed settings.

The rest of the default options don't necessarily require change, although you may want to be kind to the feed provider and set a delay corresponding with the frequency of feed updates. For instance, in this case, I know RocketBoom updates daily so I only need to check their feed once every 24 hours. The Delay is calculated in seconds, so I add 86400 as the length of delay. This prevents wasted repeat checking of a feed that changes in a fixed period. Leaving the default 0 uses the delay selected in the Plugin Options, which is 15 minutes (900) unless you changed it to something else.

Adding an RSS Filter

After setting up a feed, it's time to configure a filter for your feed. Click the icon next to the empty Filters box. RSS Feed Scanner supports applying one filter to all feeds, which works if every feed you add matches your default criteria.

Choose a directory for your filter, which is the location the filter will download files. In this case, my filter criteria is looking for .torrent somewhere in the title or link of each RSS item. This seems obvious, but if you don't add a filter RSS Feed Scanner simply identifies RSS items without taking any action. The two other changes to make are to set the Type to None and check the Enabled box. Click Save. This is a great default filter because it automatically queues every .torrent file in your RSS feeds for download.

A second method of filtering is to search for a particular word or phrase in the title and link of each RSS item. Some feeds lump a bunch of different content items together and you might not want every file in the feed. For instance, if a feed contained The Daily Show and Chapelle Show, and you hate The Daily Show, you might use the phrase 'chapelle' as your filter instead of defaulting to every .torrent file.

Activating your RSS Feed Scanner

If you want your filter to take effect immediately, the final step is to restart Azureus. By restarting, you force Azureus to check your feeds and run the filter against them for any files matching criteria. When the filter finds a match, it will initalize the torrent download and add the file to the download queue.

Switching from the RSSFeed Scanner tab to the My Torrents tab, shows you all the RocketBoom files queued for downloading.

Watch Systm on AV Cabling

If you haven't seen Kevin Rose's Systm show, it's definitely worth checking out. In Episode 3, they demonstrate how to make your own high quality A/V cables using a Paladin 4320 kit, Belden 1694a coax and Canare CANRCAP-C53 75ohm RCA connectors. This is a package on par with the pricey stuff sold by Monster, without paying for a brand name. The video shows you everything from sizing and cutting your cables, connecting ends and crimping the wire and soldering the whole thing together. Systm makes DIY cabling look like a piece of cake. Choose your favorite format for downloading the show, including high resolution H.264, MOV and WMV options.

One of the tricky parts about shooting home movies or recording video for your video blog is lighting. In professional video production, there are people who spend their careers perfecting video lighting. Most of us don't want to think about the complexities of getting lighting just right; we just want to record something and play it back later. One of the biggest tricks in lighting is eliminating shadows. For a professional setup, you eliminate shadows by positioning multiple light fixtures in a way that diffused light is evenly spread on your subject to prevent any unwanted shadows. A quick way to help reduce shadows is to make use of existing light by reflecting it off a shiny white surface back at the person or thing you are recording with a bounce card. In a short video tutorial, I demonstrate how to do this, by yourself, using a piece of foamcore from the local office supply store.

Apple's AAC format allows podcasters to create "enhanced podcasts" complete with embedded photos at publisher defined points throughout the podcast. These files are only compatible with iTunes and iPods, leaving a large universe of listeners out of the picture. Microsoft's Photo Story could easily create something similar, with a voice track narrating beneath a series of images, but the WMV file created in Photo Story isn't compatible with most portable music players. One alternative that bridges the gap and maximizes compatibility is to create a script enhanced WMA file, These WMA files with embedded scripts play just like a normal WMA anywhere scripting isn't supported.

While it looks slick to publish your QuickTime movie embedded in a Web page, the size of the movie will potentially slow page load times. One way to get around this is to create a poster movie which launches the QuickTime player in the external QuickTime Player application when clicked. The image displays just like it would if you were embedding the movie to play in the browser, but you avoid the wait by keeping the file size smaller. Opening the QuickTime Player on the desktop also eliminates some of the confusion about how the player works.

Just like the example on embedding the QuickTime Player in your Web site or blog page, the code for launching the external player also gets pasted in the <body> of your page or blog post so it displays properly when you serve the video. There are two main differences for the code to launch QuickTime Player in an external browser. Notice this time, your src value has a href value, which tells the player to launch something else when clicked. The other change is the addition of a target value of quicktimeplayer which tells the embedded file to launch the external player when clicked.

When you create a WMV movie using Windows Movie Maker, Windows Media Encoder or any of the dozens of video editing apps supporting WMV, you have a number of options for sharing your video. The widest audience is obviously online. Windows Movie Maker includes a rather deceptive Save to the Web option, which really means, "save to Web if you have an account with Neptune Mediashare." You don't need to use Neptune or the Save to the Web option to in Windows Movie Maker to share your videos online.

There are two primary ways to share a WMV file online: direct download or streaming playback. A third option would be to offer the video as an RSS subscription, which is loosely related to direct downloads and gets covered in another article. When you offer a direct download, users click on a link to the video file and either view the video in their desktop Windows Media Player or save it to their hard drive. To stream a Windows Media video file, you need to embed the Windows Media Player in the page where you post the video. This requires some specific HTML code included in the page or blog post where the video is linked.

Publishing QuickTime MOV files for people to view takes one of several forms. The simplest way to share a QuickTime movie is to simply upload the file to your hosting provider and create a link to the file. People clicking the link will either save your movie to their computer or wait for QuickTime to open and play the movie back. While this is the easiest way to share a QuickTime movie, it's not the most elegant way to do it because some viewers still don't understand how to watch a movie on the Web without play controls right their helping them out.

A better alternative is to embed the MOV file in you Web page. This is possible whether you are linking to the file from a blog or from a corporate video site. The process of embedding the movie is the same for virtually every circumstance. There are a few optional configurations, but the basics will get you started.

To create your own Windows Movie Maker custom export profile, you need the free Windows Media Profile Editor, which is installed as part of the Windows Media Encoder download. Despite Windows Media Player being at version 10, the latest version of the encoder is still associated with the Windows Media 9 Series codecs. You can download the encoder from Microsoft:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/9series/encoder/default.aspx

Once you install Windows Media Encoder, open Profile Editor from Start > All Programs > Windows Media > Utilities > Windows Media Profile Editor. You can create an export profile from scratch by manually configuring each setting

The first part of this process is naming your profile and providing a description. This makes it easy to identify in the Windows Movie Maker Save Movie wizard. Check the boxes next to Audio and Video, accepting the default Windows Media Audio 9.1 and Windows Media Video 9 for the codecs.

With the basic configuration out of the way, define the parameters for your video output by adding a target bit rate. Click the Add button to get started. Select a target bit rate type of either K (kilobits), M (megabits) or G (gigabits). Assuming your movie will be viewed on either a portable device or by people downloading it from the Web, K will suffice. The actual target bit rate will vary depending on your project, in my Smartphone example, I'm using 160Kbps while something like the Portable Media Center has a maximum bit rate of 800Kbps.

The target bit rate is a combination of audio and video settings. My ears perceive a noticeable audio quality difference for most audio below 64kbps, so that's my audio minimum. You may have different preferences. If I set a hard limit on 160Kbps, my maximum video bit rate is 88Kbps, because the combined 64.04kbps for audio and 88Kbps rounds to 160Kbps (in the example I rounded up to 89Kbps video rate). I prefer full motion video at 30fps. If you switch to 30fps from the 15fps default, it's a good idea to change the keyframe interval to 3-4 seconds from the default of 8 because the number of frames between keyframes is doubled when moving from 15 to 30fps.

With all your settings configured, click the Save and Close. Name your profile and save it in the :\Program Files\Movie Maker\shared\profiles folder. The next time you step through Save Movie Wizard, select your new custom profile from the Other Settings drop down menu before saving the final project.

Another option is to base your profile on one of the settings already included in Windows Media Encoder. To use one of the encoder profiles as a guide, click the Import button and browse through the list of options included in:

:\Program Files\Windows Media Components\Encoder\Settings

After podcasting for a few weeks, you realize your current hosting solution isn't working out. Maybe you were hosting your own podcast and decided to go with a dedicated service, or maybe you decide you want to continue hosting your audio files, but want better statistics from a service like FeedBurner. When you elect to make a change to the location of the RSS feed for your podcast, you risk alienating subscribers, because the podcast client they subscribed with still has your old URL saved. You need a way to bring those subscribers over to the new location without making them all resubscribe.

If your Web server is an Apache Web server, you need a minimum of FTP access to your server in order to redirect your old RSS URL to the new RSS URL. The first thing to do in setting up a redirect is to check for the existence of a file named .htaccess in your root Web directory. Depending on who you are hosting with, this directory may be called public_html, site, www, or something else entirely. If you aren't sure where the root Web directory of your server is, you may want to locate a geek who can be of assistance.

On the outside chance there is no .htaccess file in your Web directory, you can create one and upload it. This file is simply a series of single line text entries telling Apache what to do when it receives specific types of requests. You need a plain text editor for this task (DO NOT attempt this with Microsoft Word) I personally like Metapad for tasks like this one (or BBEdit if you're using a Mac). For purposes of redirecting your current podcast RSS feed URL to a new RSS feed, you need to enter only one line:

Redirect permanent /oldrssurl.xml http://www.domain.com/newrssurl.xml

If your current podcast URL is http://www.yourdomain.com/podcast/oldrssurl.xml then replace the /oldrssurl.xml in the line above with everything to the right of .com or:

Redirect permanent /podcast/oldrssurl.xml http://www.domain.com/newrssurl.xml

Once you've either updated or created the .htaccess file, you need to save it back to the Web root of your server. This redirect takes effect immediately and subscribers with any podcast client (including iTunes) should notice no interruption of service.

CPanel access also comes in handy because redirects are configurable from a Web interface using CPanel. If you have CPanel, login with your username and password, look for the link in CPanel to Redirects and follow the onscreen instructions.

If you host your podcast RSS feed on a Windows server the process is a little more straightforward. Open the IIS management console, browse to your site, right click the file for your RSS feed and enter the information in the dialog box on the File tab.

There's a certain style to movies from the late Sixties and early Seventies that managed to maintain a PG rating through subtlety. It's not that you don't know someone is violently murdered off screen or that the main characters just participated in some illicit act. The story is told in a way that allows your brain to fill in the details. If you don't know what the details are, your innocence isn't tainted by the images or the dialogue. One of the more clever cinematic tricks, used primarily in zany comedy from the crew that spawned The Kentucky Fried Movie and British television like Monty Python's Flying Circus, was the use of illusory images in place of onscreen intimacy.

The thing these companies had at their disposal was access to stock footage, either through a licensing budget, or in the case of Monty Python, likely through the BBC archives. If you wanted to do something similar in a short film today, tracking down the clips would take hours of browsing newsreels and paying prohibitive licensing fees. Or would it? It recently occurred to me the Internet Archive; particularly the Prelinger Archives and Universal newsreels are perfect for this sort of thing.

Tape backup was once the norm for archiving files from home PCs. Consumer grade tape drives tended to be flaky and slow, but were the only alternative to using dozens of floppy disks. With DVD burners priced as low as $50 for dual-layer burning, it almost seems unnecessary to think about tape backup solutions. Tape storage still has advantages, particularly if you want to make a more permanent archive to store in a lockbox in case of fire. Instead of investing in a tape drive and expensive tape media, your Digital Video camera and affordable MiniDV tapes provide a resource for 10-15GB backups compatible with millions of drive units available in homes all over the country.

Dual-layer DVD+/-R blanks currently cost $5-7 each, storing a maximum of 8.5GB of data. Single-layer DVD blanks remain a cheaper option, but don't work well for backing up large video project files. The average price for MiniDV tape in consumer quantities is about $4 or as low as $2.60 in 100 unit lots. MiniDV tape stores 8-12GB in SP mode or 12-18GB in LP mode, depending on how much compression is used during the backup process. The new 80min MiniDV tapes hold as much as 22GB in LP mode.

The one catch in using MiniDV tape as a backup solution is compatibility. Computers are designed to recognize DV cameras as a video source, not as tape drives. You need software to make the connection. Firestreamer is the one reliable solution I've found for consistently backing up data to MiniDV tape and restoring from MiniDV tape. Firestreamer acts as a bridge between your DV camera and the Windows XP Backup software.

When backing up to MiniDV tape, make sure your DV camera is plugged into a power source (so the batteries don't die mid-backup). Connect the camera using the FireWire (IEEE-1394 or iLINK) connection. Insert a blank tape. Open Firestreamer and click Launch Backup Utility. If you backup to a DV tape previously used to record video, Firestreamer warns that it will prepare the media and erase anything on the tape.

Once Firestreamer configures your DV camera, you walk through the Backup wizard. When you get to the option to select backup type, choose 6mm Digital Video and accept the default 'New' tape. If the files you choose to backup are larger than the storage available on one MiniDV tape, Firestreamer, in combination with the backup software. From this point on, the Backup software manages the process just like you would if backing up to DVD, CD or any other media type.

Mac OS X requires the DV Backup app from Tim Hewett's Coolatoola.com. Unlike the Windows Firestreamer solution, DV Backup is a self-contained backup solution for Mac OS X. DV Backup handles the tape management as well as configuring and executing the actual backup process. DV Backup sells for $50, with an LE version priced at $20. The LE version lacks tape spanning and selectable file recovery options and does not support scheduled backups. DV Backup supports maxium storage sizes of 11.5GB in SP mode or 17.5GB in LP mode.

Linux users can achieve similar results with the command line dvbackup tool available at Source Forge. In theory, an industrious Windows programmer could write a GUI and recompile the code for this app to create an open source alternative to Firestreamer.

How Fast is Backing up to MiniDV?

According to the DV Backup help files, expect to transfer approximately 187MB per minute with no protection or about 94MB per minute using the full duplication mode. My own experience using Firestreamer is about one hour to fill an SP mode MiniDV tape with no compression. Your mileage may vary.

If you ever watch sitcoms on network television, you've seen a J-cut in action. The characters in the show comment on plans to meet for dinner somewhere. A traveling exterior shot breezes through the streets of New York before framing the exterior shot of a restaurant. Dull metal on ceramic sounds of knife and fork contacting plate as someone slices the steak in front of them play as the camera lingers on the storefront. A conversation begins as the scene dissolves to the characters engaged in mid-meal dialogue.

This setup subtly tells you a number of things about the story unfolding. You know they left the previous scene. You know they traveled outside to get to the restaurant. And it leaves room for the characters to have a conversation about the cab ride to the restaurant, without needing to act it out on screen.
You just witnessed a J-cut in action. J-cut refers to any audio transition where audio from the upcoming scene plays as the video from the current scene continues to run. You can use a similar trick to compress the timeline of your own video without losing any of the story.

For instance, if you record a Little League game, you could show the fielding team running out from the dugout onscreen, play audio from the announcement of your son as the lead-off batter and dissolve to him at the plate, compressing the downtime that takes place as the kids dig around in the dugout locating batting helmets and bats for their turn at the plate.

To create a J-cut, drag the two movie clips you want to edit to your video timeline. Drag another copy of the second movie clip number to the Audio/Music section of the timeline, matching it up with the version on the video timeline.

Select the second clip in the timeline, drag the slider to the point where you want the video from the second clip to start playing and use the Split button to divide the clip at that point. Make an identical split in the clip on the Audio/Music Timeline. If you can't get the exact spot you want to line up using your mouse to position the slider, use the Previous Frame and Next Frame buttons to tweak your settings for a more accurate position.
Slide the Audio/Music clip over so the end of the clip lines up with the end of the first video clip. You may need to zoom in on the time line for a perfect match up.

Once this section of audio is moved, delete the fragment from the second video clip from the timeline. Slide the remainder of the Audio/Music clip over to eliminate the gap between clips.

If you haven't already done so, expand the Video on the timeline to show the Audio and Transition sections. Right-click the Audio clip associated with your second video clip and Mute it to eliminate duplication of the audio between tracks.

To further make the transition between video clip one and video clip two, you may want to split video clip one at the point where the Audio/Music track starts and fade the audio associated with the video clip.
If you add a transition between your two video clips, be sure to account for the offset created as the software overlaps the two clips to make the transition.

Note: If you prefer not to clip the Audio/Music track, keep track of the exact minute:second:fraction where video clip two was split and slide the Audio/Music track over an equivalent number of seconds to keep it in sync with the video. If you use transitions, this particular strategy can get messy because you also have to factor in the offset for the transition.

How to make an auxiliary display today...

One of the promises for Windows Vista is a collection of display options making it easy to add a second functional display to your system. Microsoft has previewed this stuff with options like having a second screen on the top side of your laptop, so you can quickly check appointments or change your song list without flipping open the lid. Another obvious use for this is system monitoring. In theory, you could quickly monitor vitals on a machine running with no monitor, without needing to make an RDC or VNC connection. Last weekend, PT posted a great how-to on making this work with technology available today. You need a Pocket PC to make it work, but this is a genuinely cool hack that could be useful in environments where KVM switching between multiple machines is common or if you just want to geek out your system.

One of the things I find poorly implemented in Windows Media Player and completely missing from iTunes is something I refer to as emotional playlists. All the major music players have rating systems based on the concept of one to five stars. Music is either one start, which presumably means it sucks; two stars for not quite so bad; three stars for middle of the road; four stars for better than average; or five stars for killer track (or something). Who honestly thinks about songs on a scale of one to five? Rating your music based on emotion makes more sense.

Take two tracks I really like. Hello Medecina by The Vells and Brother's Gonna Work It Out from the DJ Spooky vs. Dave Lombardo collaboration. On a five-star scale both tracks are a five. That doesn't mean I want to hear the two tracks in the same mix. The Vells album is an upbeat throwback to late Sixties pop music. DJ Spooky vs. Dave Lombardo is an aggressive collection of tracks heavy on drum samples and fast beats. These are certainly not two tracks that are emotionally compatible.

In an ideal universe, the Auto Playlist feature of Windows Media Player (or Smart Playlist in iTunes) would include a configurable list of playlists for things like Angry, Sad, Happy, Angst Filled Afternoon or whatever. The list of emotions might have a few base emotions, but would also include an Add Your Own feature so I can define emotional music lists based on the way I think about my music collection. Adding a file to one of these lists would automatically tag the song file as being a 'Happy' song or a 'Sad' song.

Windows Media Player 10 includes an overwhelming tag editor called Advanced Tag Editor, which was available as a standalone download for Player 9. It's got some annoying quirks, like over-riding user defined Genre choices if you re-sync with the online music database for updated details like Album Art and Artist Info. In general, the editing features work well, allowing you to browse your entire library and make changes. One feature included in the Track Info tags is a Mood setting, which hints at my emotional playlist concept. Mood includes twelve selections including: Angry, Groovy, Happy, Party, Quirky, Rockin, Sad, Soothing, Spooky, Sunday Brunch, Trippy and Work. While I wouldn't use most of those terms to describe anything, it's a basic framework for what could be a killer feature.

Taking the Mood tag a step further, I flip to the Windows Media Player Library tab, right click Auto Playlists and choose New (another feature that should be easier to use).

The New Auto Playlist wizard pops up. Click to add criteria and choose More to expose the complete list of options.

Scrolling through the filter list, I find the Mood option, which adds it as Mood Is (which could also be Is Not). Assuming you have defined at least one mood, the click to set drop down list will include any available moods. Since I set Hello Medecina as a Happy song, I'll choose 'Happy' from the list. After changing the name of my play list to 'Happy Songs', I close the New Auto Playlist wizard by clicking OK.

As long as I tag a whole bunch of songs as 'Happy' this list will continue to grow. A better system would be to create the playlist and allow me to grow the list by dragging and dropping tracks to make them part of the Happy Songs playlist, auto-tagging them with the Mood 'Happy' as they add to the list. Keeping that five-star system relevant, an additional iteration of my 'Happy Songs' list a playlist that only plays 'Happy' mood songs with a 4 or 5 star rating, so I get my favorite Happy Songs.

The next stage is to pass this mood data to my portable music player so that I can change my mood music throughout the course of a day.

The screen resolution on my Audiovox SMT5600 is 220x176 if you tilt the screen sideways for a normal 4:3 view. For some reason, the preferences on the device are set to display video at 160x120, which doesn't make full use of the already tiny screen real estate. I transfer most of my video content to my phone using Windows Media Player. The software detects the phones preferences and automatically sizes everything it transfers at 160x120, leaving a black border around the available screen space. Diane Dumas of Pocket PC Magazine recently tipped me off to a solution.

The fix for this involves hacking the Registry on your Smartphone. Once I got past the idea that editing the Registry on my phone is a little freaky and could potentially cause me to need to wipe the phone, I dove right in. I have tons of experience hacking the Windows Registry, but digging around in my phone was quite foreign. After a quick search of available options, I settled on Mobile Registry Editor from G. Ingelmo Blog. This is a free app that uses ActiveSync to interface the Registry on your phone from a Windows desktop. There's another on-device Registry editor, but I opted not to take chances with T9ing my way to a broken phone.

All the video preferences are stored in the:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\ASFCodecs\Video

Three MP4 settings based on Microsoft MPEG-4 codecs (MP42, MP43, MP4S) and six WMV settings (WMV1, WMV2, WMV3, WMVA, WMVP, WVP2) all default to 160x120 in the respective PreferredWidth and PreferredHeight settings.

By changing each of these settings to 220x176, instead of playing back video with black bars around the outside, wasting valuable screen real estate, the conversion process will now yield true fullscreen video on your Smartphone. This fixes the conversion problem for both WMP10 and Windows Media Center Edition.

If you've already synchronized content with your Smartphone in the past, you need to clear any settings caching already established with the desktop version of Windows Media Player 10. One way to do this is by clicking the Clear Cache button on the Privacy tab of Tools > Options

The other way to clear cached information is to delete the WMPInfo.xml file from your Smartphone. This is located in the top level directory of the phone when viewed using Windows Explorer on your desktop. Removing this file makes Windows Media Player 10 think it's connecting to a new device.

After making the Registry changes and clearing cached information, the next time you sync video to your phone using Windows Media Player 10, the default size should be 220x176.

Apple did many things right in their support for podcasting in iTunes. For instance, if you listen to a podcast in iTunes and then browse away to something else in iTunes, when you return, the podcast picks up where you left off. Configuration options for syncing podcasts with an iPod work well for managing large subscription lists. It's easy to keep the latest episodes on your iPod, while leaving plenty of space for music. iTunes podcast support istn't without a few flaws. Apple forgot to enable the ability to manage podcasts using Smart Playlists. There is a way to make them work.

Podcasts are listed in a special iTunes playlist, walled off from the general iTunes Library. This is similar to the way Audible subscriptions are presented in iTunes. Podcast audio files live in the Podcasts folder, which is inside the iTunes Music Folder. The general Library ignores the contents of the Podcasts folder by default. The only way to create a Smart Playlist of podcasts is to add them to your Library from File > Add Folder to Library or simply by dragging the folder (from Finder or Windows Explorer) into the Library.

Adding the Podcasts folder to your library catalogs everything in the folder with all of your music. It's still neatly segregated in the purple Podcasts master playlist but now commingled with all your music. The upside to this is you now have full access to configuring a million ways to sort your podcasts. The downside is you have to sort around your podcast files when working with your songs.

Beyond the specific <channel> tags within the <itunes:x> tag collection, some of the tags are optimized for assigning more information to individual episodes of your podcast. These tags are placed inside the <item> and </item> tags for each entry listed in your RSS 2.0 feed. Depending on which software app you use for publishing a podcast, these may be handled automatically or you may need to manually add them to each item. At the moment, making a modification to WordPress and Movable Type RSS 2.0 templates is the easiest way to add these tags to your feed. Hosting services like LibSyn are handling many of these configuration issues automatically, which is a massive value-add for anyone paying for their service.

<itunes:author>Name of Podcast or Your Name</itunes:author>
<itunes:subtitle>255 char summary of episode</itunes:subtitle>
<itunes:summary>4000 character show notes of podcast</itunes:summary>
<itunes:explicit>no</itunes:explicit>
<itunes:keywords>Keyword1 Keyword2 Keyword3 Keyword4</itunes:keywords>
<itunes:category text="Category">
<itunes:category text="Subcategory" />
</itunes:category>

The individual <itunes:x> tags making up the iTunes RSS 2.0 specification don't add value unless implemented correctly. After verifying proper linkage to the Document Type Definition (DTD) it's time to place the within your feed. Some of the tags are meant specifically for the <channel> section of your feed. These tags are placed somewhere after the opening <channel> reference and prior to the <item> reference within the feed.

As a group this collection of tags looks like this:

<itunes:author>Name of Your Podcast</itunes:author>
<itunes:subtitle>Subtitle of Your Podcast 255 character max</itunes:subtitle>
<itunes:summary> Description of your podcast goes here. </itunes:summary>
<itunes:owner>
<itunes:name>Name of Your Podcast</itunes:name>
<itunes:email>youremail@yourdomain.com</itunes:email>
</itunes:owner>
<itunes:category text="Category">
<itunes:category text="Subcategory" />
</itunes:category>
<itunes:image href="http://yourdomain.com/yourimage.jpg" />
<itunes:explicit>no</itunes:explicit>

Once you understand how all the iTunes tags fit into the big picture of your RSS feed, it's time to implement them within your feed. Some of these tags are specific to the <channel> section of your RSS 2.0 feed and some are specific to individual <iten>. In order for any of these additions to work, you must designate a link to the Document Type Definition (DTD) for the iTunes namespace changes. In a standard RSS 2.0 feed, the namespace definition looks like this:

<rss version="2.0" xmlns:blogChannel="http://backend.userland.com/blogChannelModule">

This tells aggregators to interpret your feed as an RSS 2.0 document and display it accordingly. Adding the iTunes DTD for podcasting requires you to include a second xmlns: tag within the rss definition space like this:

<rss version="2.0" xmlns:blogChannel="http://backend.userland.com/blogChannelModule" xmlns:itunes="http://www.itunes.com/DTDs/Podcast-1.0.dtd">

Make sure you do not define rss twice like the example below because this will break some aggregators:

<rss version="2.0" xmlns:blogChannel="http://backend.userland.com/blogChannelModule">
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:itunes="http://www.itunes.com/DTDs/Podcast-1.0.dtd">

The iTunes Block tag is specifically designed to tell iTunes to ignore a particular post in your podcast feed. This might be particularly useful if your feed combines text only posts and posts containing audio enclosures, because the text only posts are useless in the context of iTunes RSS support. Another potential use for this tag is to exclude an episode that is intended for a select audience (say subscribers using iPodderX, for instance). The Block tag is entirely optional and should only be used in those cases where you don't want a post to show up in the iTunes Music Store. To implement the Block tag in your RSS 2.0 feed, include the following in the <item> for your post: <itunes:block />

Duration is the iTunes tag associated with the 'Time' component of each episode of your podcast. This tag is implemented at the item level, displaying a time value for each episode in the format HH:MM:SS. Since people have few details about your show when they encounter it for the first time, this tag provides information that may help a listener decide whether they have time to tune in for one of your episodes. While it won't hurt anything to leave this tag out, as Apple indicates duration is for informational purposes only, not having it listed displays a Not Available notice in the Time description in iTunes Music Store. After a subscriber downloads any episode from your podcast, the Time is based on the actual audio file header information. Display the Duration of your individual episode file like this: <itunes:duration>HH:MM:SS</itunes:duration>

The iTunes image tag is one of the few tags added by Apple with any substantial value over the base RSS 2.0 specification. The RSS image tag is limited to maximum dimensions of 144x400, which seems fairly non-standard and certainly doesn't match the square dimensions of the album art displayed in the iTunes Music Store. Maximum dimensions for the iTunes Image tag are 300x300. It's recommended to use the maximum. This is one tag you should definitely include to make sure your podcast is differentiated from the default image in iTunes. Supported file formats are JPG and PNG. Apple seems to have two different methods for linking their image tag. Both appear to be correct.

The first method for including an image is the standard:

<itunes:image>http://www.YourPodcastURL.com/YourImage.jpg</itunes:image>

A second method shown in Apple's example is using the <itunes:link> tag to imbed the image:

<itunes:link rel="image" type="video/jpeg" href="http://www.YourPodcastURL.com/YourImage.jpg"></itunes:link>

The iTunes Owner tag designates the name and email address of the person or persons associated with your podcast. The designation is broken into two separate tags, one for email and one for name. These are wrapped with the overall Owner designation. This is another of the many redundancies in the iTunes name space defined by Apple. In almost every case the email will be the same email used to designate <managingEditor> in RSS 2.0, which often specifies email and a name in parenthesis.

The correct format for the Owner tag is:

<itunes:owner>
<itunes:name>Your Name</itunes:name>
<itunes:email>youremail@yourdomain.com<itunes:email>
</itunes:owner>

In theory the iTunes Keywords tag improves search relevance when people search by topic rather than searching for the name of your podcast. So far, I haven't found that search functions in iTunes check for anything other than Title, Author and Description fields because the keywords I've injected don't deliver any results in a search. I'm hopeful this is a temporary oversight, because using keywords certainly lends itself to making the feed more meaningful considering we don't have mechanisms for searching inside the audio contents at the moment. Use this field to key on specific topics covered in your podcast to aid in search relevance. This tag is used for individual items in your podcast feed.

Based on these criteria, the Keywords tag will look like this:

<itunes:keywords>Keyword1 Keyword2 Keyword3 Keyword4</itunes:keywords>

The Author tag is either the name of your podcast or your name, depending on the type of theme for your show. If you are the sole host of the podcast or the star of the show, using your name makes sense. If you have a group effort, sticking with the name of the podcast keeps all the egos satisfied, while also branding the show as being a collective effort. The author tag is used both at the RSS channel level and at the item level. At the channel level, this is an all encompassing tag for the podcast as a whole. At the item level, author could be the same as the channel level author or it may designate a specific collaborator. Based on these criteria, the Author tag will look like this: <itunes:author>Your Name</itunes:author> Or this: <itunes:author>Name of Podcast</itunes:author>

The Summary tag is exactly that, a summary description of your podcast. This is the elevator speech iTunes Music Store visitors read before checking out your podcast or ignoring it for something more compelling, so make it count. This is the only iTunes custom RSS tag without a 255 character limit. Think about what you would say to convince someone in 15 seconds or less why your podcast is awesome and use that text for the summary. In many ways this is the same thing as the <description> element in an RSS 2.0 channel definition, so it's redundant but necessary.

Your summary might look something like this:

<itunes:summary> In every episode, the MediaBlab podcast covers consumer electronics tips and technology hacks. Learn about VoIP, HDTV, Digital Video and more.</itunes:summary>

The Subtitle tag is used in iTunes to provide a quick 255 character summary of your podcast underneath the title on it's information page in iTunes. This can be a clever phrase or a continuation of the theme defined in your name. In the case of podcasts with names longer than 255 characters, this might be a good place to extend your name so that iTunes doesn't inadvertently cut it off. This doesn't seem like a particularly useful tag on the surface, but it's part of the retro-fit Apple made to conform podcasting to the layout of the iTunes Music Store. This tag is used in two places in your feed, with two different uses. It appears in the channel definition as a subtitle for the podcast and it appears in the item definition and is used for the Description of individual episodes in iTunes Music Store. For a Movable Type generated feed, I use the <$MTEntryExcerpts$> definition to populate the item level Subtitle.

The Subtitle tag looks like this:

<itunes:subtitle>Subtitle of Your Podcast</itunes:subtitle>

Apple wants podcasts inside iTunes to put the digital equivalent of a parental advisory on podcasts with foul language or mature topics. While this is very subjective across cultures, it's presumed the benchmark for explicit content is based on the norms in the United States. While the feed for our show made it into the iTunes Podcasts listing without a clear definition this is one designation you may want to include. Apple hasn't made it mandatory for listing yet, but it is most definitely not in their optional tag list.

If you do use explicit content in your show, the tag for your feed looks like this:

<itunes:explicit>yes</itunes:explicit>

A nice wholesome podcast gets no label at all using this tag:

<itunes:explicit>no</itunes:explicit>

While the RSS 2.0 <category> tag may be populated with any text, Apple has a specific list of requirements for the <itunes:category> tag. Currently iTunes supports 19 categories, with a smaller subset of them supporting a specific list of subcategories. You may designate more than one subcategory where appropriate. These categorizations are used to determine the hierarchy within the iTunes Music Store Podcast Section, so it's important to pay attention to what is allowed. iTunes allows multiple top-level category definitions for the same podcast, but will default to the first one listed when cataloging the Podcast in the iTunes Music Store.

Within your RSS 2.0 feed, an iTunes category with two subcategories looks like this:

<itunes:category text="Technology">
<itunes:category text="Computers" />
<itunes:category text="News" />
</itunes:category>

Top level categories are listed in bold below with subcategories immediately following. If a category has no subcategories, the next top level category is listed.

Arts & Entertainment Architecture Books Design Entertainment Games Performing Arts Photography Poetry Science Fiction Audio Blogs Business Careers Finance Investing Management Marketing Comedy Education K-12 Higher Education Food Health Diet & Nutrition Fitness Relationships Self-Help Sexuality International Australian Belgian Brazilian Canadian Chinese Dutch French German Hebrew Italian Japanese Norwegian Polish Portuguese Spanish Swedish

Movies & Television Music News Politics Public Radio Religion & Spirituality Buddhism Christianity Islam Judaism New Age Philosophy Spirituality Science Sports Talk Radio Technology Computers Developers Gadgets Information Technology News Operating Systems Podcasting Smart Phones Text/Speech Travel

One key area where I see iTunes making a big difference in the podcasting space is improving the subscription process. Currently, most of the subscribe options require podcasters to explain to users how to right-click and copy the URL before pasting it into a specific podcast receiving application or news aggregator. At the moment, most of us are stuck with scaring listeners away when they click on a link that reveals raw RSS code. A few javascript hacks have attempted to make this better, but the real solution is to have something imbedded in the URL that directs listeners to a subscription location. iTunes does this better than any other option (assuming your podcast is already listed in iTunes) Clicking on a link to the iTunes page for your podcast launches iTunes and displays the page with the option to preview specific "episodes" or subscribe to the podcast in iTunes.

There are two ways to accomplish the iTunes launch. You can reference a standard http://link, which looks like this:

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330048

Or you can use the iTunes Music Store Specific reference prefaced with itms:// which looks like this:

itms://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73330048

Both options direct subscribers to your page in iTunes with a simply one-click subscribe process directly in iTunes.

Audio Tutorial of Survival Chinese

China is somewhere I'd love to visit, but verbal communication in anything other than English (or a very bad mixture of French and Spanish) is about all I'm capable of. I'm planning to devote some time over the next several years to learning Mandarin (and possibly Cantonese) A student from Western Kentucky University offers a crash course in pronunciation of Mandarin Chinese words and phrases with the help of a few MP3 files. While the selection of words and phrases is somewhat limited, the pronunciations and explanations of reading Pinyin seem quite helpful. Digging around, there's also a link to another site which covers some of the Cantonese dialect. Greetings are covered, some shopping basics, simple food words, key travel phrases like 'I am lost' and a variety of inquisitive sentences are all covered to provide a source for hearing correct pronunciations of common words and phrases. You won't master Mandarin with this site alone, but it might help break you in to the idea of learning a new language.

A Six Point Guide to Buying Backup Software

In Part One, I mentioned the six attributes that the backup industry uses to classify the various features of their products. In this second part, I will explain each attribute in greater detail so as to give you a thorough knowledge of what to look for in backup software.

Ease of Use: You need to ask a set of questions in relation to how easy it is to install and configure the software, to use the product to back your data and to use the product to restore your data. For example: Is the install interface clear and unequivocal? Are the steps written in plain English and do not leave any place for choosing the wrong options? Is the product easy to use and user friendly? Is the user interface built in a Windows-familiar environment? Are the user-interface and the commands intuitive? Does the product allow step-by-step backup and restore? Does the product allow non-technical users to make use of this product? How easily can the user browse around the various options to set up backups and restores? How easily can the user browse around the documents and application settings to set up backups? Are there any shortcuts to this data and settings? How easily can the user browse the backup archive to find and restore multiple or single files?

Value for Money: Money is always an issue, otherwise, we would all be living the life of the rich and famous! However, this may not always be the case with backup software. We usually advise people not to look at the price tag on its own but to make calculations as to the relationship between price and functionality and price and time spent on backup and restore. For example, does the vendor offer limited functionality with the bare-bones product and more functionality pricey add-ons that only together will the product provide the required protection? Does the product sacrifice performance and reliability for price? Are upgrades and patches available at a charge? In relation to the time factor, buyers must beware. Beware, some brands may be more costly than others to administer. If, for example, the compression technology of the particular product is not strong, it takes longer to perform backups the data backed up is spread over a larger number of media (taking up more storage space). Therefore, although a product may be less pricey, it may be more expensive to run in the long term.

Reliability: The issues of reliability are three-fold - (a) does the product deliver consistently a 100% accurate restore of the set of data that was backed up? This includes such aspects as reliable schedules, accurate reporting and fault logging features (whether you are alerted when and if things go wrong), and validation of data integrity. Data validation or verification is extremely important because there are certain technologies (e.g., bit level validation) that guarantee that your data restores are 100% accurate. (b) Does the product secure your data from prying eyes? Although, at face value, this may not be important to the user, think about whether you would like somebody else to steal your backup files and looking at (or distributing) your personal data. Therefore, ask whether the product has password protection and supports the best levels of encryption. (c) Is the vendor reliable? Does the vendor provide technical and customer support? Is the vendor slow to answer?

Performance: The product must be fast and it must not sacrifice sheer power for reliability, value for money, and ease of use. You must be able to backup your data securely and accurately in a few minutes and not spend a fortune on such basic functions.

Depth of Feature Set: What features does the product have? How does the product compare to other vendors? The features that you should have are - compression, encryption, scheduling and reporting, popular media support, high data volume support (as few products have actually overcome the problem of memory leakage), validation or verification of data integrity, full and incremental backup feature, restore multiple or single files to original and to any location, and strong fault-logging.

Breadth of Backup and Media Coverage: Finally, make sure that the product backs up your PC (or notebook) and supports a strong list of backup storage media including CD, Pen Drives, and Zip Drives.[by Kevin J. Vella of Uniblue Systems]

A Six Point Guide to Buying Backup Software

Many people and businesses lose their data because the product they've bought doesn't live up to its initial promise. With hundreds of backup software vendors on the market, people usually perform searches on such generic keywords as "backup software" to find themselves with millions of documents to sift through before making an informed decision. With so many pages people would typically look at the first ten or twenty entries and either buy the first thing that comes near their budget, or give up or end up buying software that is too expensive for their needs.

Before buying backup software, you must first look at your real needs and make a list of product attributes and related features that will satisfy these needs. Second, look at the software vendors who are reviewed by computer magazines and compare their products across your needs list. Third, look at whether the vendors have been in the business for several years and whether they have a reputation for great customer support and product innovation.

The most difficult of these stages is building the attribute and features list. The Six Point Guide to Buying Backup Software should give you thorough knowledge of what attributes and features you should look for in any backup software. Due to constraints of space, I have split this guide in two parts. In Part One I will briefly describe each of the attributes while in Part Two, explain each attribute and detail all the related features.

1. Ease of Use: Ask, how easy is it to install the backup software? How easy is it to set up the first backup? How easy is it to use the backup software regularly and to create backup schedules? How easy is it to restore data?
2. Value for Money: this is rather subjective and does depend on your budget. However, don't just look at the price of the product. Think of how long does it would take to use the product. How long does it take to make backups and restores? As a home user, this may not be that important but as a business user, you wouldn't want to spend half an hour just to run your daily backups.
3. Reliability: Many backup companies focus only on the backup side of things rather on the restore. Just think, what is most important in backup is the ability to restore data without losing anything. Therefore, ask, can I install the product, set up a schedule and then rest assured that my data is being backed up with 100% accuracy?? What levels and types of data validation does the product have to guarantee restores?
4. Performance: Of course, you must have a product that is fast and that does not sacrifice reliability, value for money and ease of use for sheer raw power. Who would want to have a 100% accurate restore product that takes one hour to backup a few hundred megs of data!
5. Depth of Feature Set: What features does the product have? How does the product compare to other vendors? Many times you would have to draw up these comparison sheets unless the vendor has done it for you.
6. Breadth of Backup and Media Coverage: Finally, make sure that the product backs up your PC (or notebook) and supports a strong list of backup storage media including CD, Pen Drives, Zip Drives, etc...
[by Kevin J. Vella of Uniblue Systems]

So you've decided to backup your data but what is the next step? You must have a backup strategy irrespective of whether you are a home user or a business user. The depth of the strategy is the only variant between these two types of users.

As time goes by people and businesses are facing massive and ever-increasing amounts of data that are difficult to manage and that remain unprotected. In this light, the need for a backup strategy becomes critical. Let me just take email as an example: the 12/2004 issue of Smart Computing reports that 88% of adult PC users send and receive emails. The International Data Corporation reports that 16.8 trillion emails were transmitted in 2004 with this figure climbing to 19.7 trillion this year. According to Smart Computing, American businesses send about 9 billion emails a day. On average, home-users transmit around 435kb in email attachments every day. One other research firm estimates that typical corporations with 5000 employees accumulate 4 terabytes of emails every year. The size of my Outlook PST file for 2004 at work rested at 1.4Gb; at home it was 650Mb! And finally, Dataquest estimates that the total number of hard disk drives shipped in 2002 rests at 212.5m units representing around 8.5m terabytes of storage space.

Home-user data includes documents, audio and video files, scanned images, and digital photos. Businesses have marketing collateral developed and stored electronically, customer information stacked in databases, financial records posted in accounting packages, budgets and business plans recorded on network storage devices. As this list grows, the need for a backup strategy becomes even more obvious!

We usually advise customers to look at 5 key elements of any backup strategy:

Invest in good Backup Software: Read the reviews, visit the websites and look out for features and assurances that the product you are buying is reliable, fast and easy to use. Spend time reading the websites of the various suppliers. Some products cost no more than $40 but your data costs much more. Losing your data because the software you have bought is not effective means that you have thrown away an extra $40!

Plan Your Backups: Most software packages on the market have schedulers. Use these schedulers. It doesn't take much time to set up a timetable for backups. Depending on how many times you use your PC you can schedule your periodical backups: at work, I backup every day at 9 a.m.. At home, I backup once a week.

Check the Integrity of your Restore: Even though you have backed up, what guarantee do you have that your data can be restored when disaster hits? The best way to ensure full "restorability" of your data is to buy a backup product that has bit-level verification (like WinBackup 2.0). Such a feature makes sure that while the product is performing your backup it checks all the data down to the level of bits and bytes. In essence, the software first backs up the data and then automatically performs a test restore to make sure that every single bit has been copied.

Check the Integrity of your Backup Medium: You can have the best software in the world and back your data every hour, however, if you do not have a good medium to store your archives, you are doomed. The second best way to ensure the restorability of your data is to choose good mediums and to do regular test restores from them.

Check your hard drives regularly and make sure you have good anti-spyware and anti-virus software. There is no harm in checking hard drives for errors and bad sectors as these drives do fail over time. [by Kevin J. Vella of Uniblue Systems]

Coming Up: Backup Features Part 1

I really hope that what you are going to read in the next few lines has never happened to you. It was a Sunday, Sunday the 23rd November 2003 at 4 p.m. to be precise. I was in my final months of Graduate Business School, working on a paper due the following week. Also, two chapters of my research project were ready and stashed on my hard drive – no hard copies, just bits and bytes created over a three months. I was punching away at my keyboard when all of a sudden, my notebook slowed dramatically. I started closing down open applications in the hope of speeding up my machine. I was not too worried though as this had happened to me before. My fix was the usual reboot. While my machine was rebooting I obliviously went to fix myself a sandwich. When I returned to my desk, I saw a black screen with a one short phrase: “drive C not present, retry, ignore, abort?” Naturally, I clicked retry. Seconds after the screen went black. I felt an eeriness seeping through my innards. I tried rebooting again. White words, blank screen, panic. Reboot again and again. My mind, glued up. I spent the next ten hours playing with this blessed machine. The next day, I took the hard drive to her office to try taking an image of the blessed device. The result: nothing, except anger, loss and regret.

I lost 2.5 Gigabytes – two years worth of assignments, documents, lecture notes and articles. On top of that, the notebook that I was using was the same one I used at work. On it I also had stored four years worth of work documents, brochures, customer databases, emails, email addresses, marketing plans, competitive information, and much more. Nothing was backed up and hardly little was printed.

Why didn’t I back up? I honestly thought that disaster happens to other people. I thought of backup as a tedious procedure to take all the files on one drive and individually stick them onto floppies or on some other storage device. I firmly believed that my hard drive would never die on me while I was studying. After this episode, I did however buy several USB drives and a CD Burner. I also spent a fortune in CDs to store the individual files I created after 11.22.

Most people and, sadly enough, most businesses, only react to disaster after the damage is done. This is “OK” because, at least, they are doing something to prevent future attacks. However, can you imagine if I were to put a price tag on the data I lost, the time I wasted in trying to recover the data, the products I bought, the time my colleagues spent helping, the time and money spent to build the customer database? I put in the region of $50,000 to $75,000 including lost potential short-term revenues for my company.

My strategy for preventing disaster was seriously flawed. True, you must save and save again however imaging a hard drive in its native format onto a number of media is not a long-term solution. There are better ways of doing it. Backup software allows you to take all your data and compress it into an archive that is small enough to be handled on the least amount of storage devices. My method is expensive and extremely time consuming because there is my physical and constant input while backup software essentially does everything on its own.

I hope I have raised an urgency rather than mere awareness to the importance of backing up. Over the coming weeks, I will cover two other important aspects – the need for a planned backup strategy (if you have a business) and the features that you have to look out for if you want an all-round robust backup solution.

Ironically, since then I have changed jobs and am now working for Uniblue Systems, the makers of WinBackup 2.0. This is how seriously I am taking backing up!

[by Kevin J. Vella of Uniblue Systems]

Maintaining fine hair details when cropping images

Leg hair. We've all got it. Some of us choose to shave it off. When it comes to editing photos, you don't want to accidentally lose the important wisps of this standard human feature. EyeWire offers a great tutorial for making legs look as detailed as possible, by maintaining a realistic level of protrusion from your follicles.

One of the bigger hassles in editing voice audio tracks is cleaning up loud pops in the recording where plosive 'p' and 'b' sounds cause a burst of volume. These are easily avoided by placing a screen between the person speaking or singing and the microphone. By creating a fixed distance between the vocalist and the microphone you get the added bonus of reducing sibilant sounds made through speaking words with 's' and 'ch'. Buying a pop screen from a music supply store will set you back $20-30, depending on the quality of the screen and the stand it's mounted on. It's easy to build your own screen with some nylons and an embroidery hoop available at most craft stores for a couple of dollars.

http://www.freedomaudio.com/

Implement an MP3 or OGG radio interface on your Web page without the requirement of a built in player. XML playlist support and synchronous XML data streaming provide an open source solution for simultaneously streaming audio and dynamically updating the content on your audio page. JavaScript controls the audio playback functions. FreedomAudio recorder adds to the functionality, letting you record an audio stream directly to a remote server. Additional support for Icecast streaming rounds out the package. The site provides plenty of implementation examples, giving you all the details needed to serve music, talk, or random noise from your Web site.

http://www.jakeludington.com/archives/000405.html

Podcasting is the buzzword du jour in the blogging world. It's basically a convenient way to subscribe to audio or video content and have it automatically download to your PC, ready for syncing to your portable media player. The name is derived from origins conceived to make transfer from Web to iPod easy. Most of the content currently available is amateur at best, but some of the shows, like the Gillmor Gang, show really promise as alternatives to traditional radio content. As soon as a few smart broadcasters start adding things like listener call-ins, and some basic formatting, the medium offers the potential to be a time-shifted NPR on a global scale. Considering most available content is in MP3 format, I figured there's no reason Pocket PCs, portable audio players, SmartPhones, or other compatible devices can't work just as well. To find out how to schedule downloadable audio for your portable player, check out this tutorial. If you simply want to know how to automatically sync a specific Windows Media Playlist to your audio player, skip to part four.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

I'm addicted to the idea of taking tons of video with me everywhere. A $10 Compact Flash or SD card will hold the equivalent of three Hollywood features. A Zune or an iPod will hold hours of video. For an easy 1-click solution for converting DVD content to a portable WMV file use Xilisoft DVD Ripper Ultimate. Or if you prefer a do-it-yourself solution to convert the VOB movie files created when a DVD is ripped to Pocket PC and Portable Media Center friendly WMV files, follow the steps in the rest of this tutorial. The DIY method is free, but downloading DVD Ripper Ultimate will get the job done more quickly.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

At the risk this newsletter seeming like I've changed the theme to Data Recovery Lifestyle, I'm going to share a few more experiences related to my drive crash. BartPE includes a file explorer called A43 File Management, which is best described as a alternative to Windows Explorer. One thing A43 was able to do, unlike both Windows Explorer and GetDataBack, was recover my PST file. About 33% of the PST file was located in the damaged drive sectors. Somehow, A43 was still able to copy the file in spite of its location. Unfortunately, Outlook couldn't open it when I connected my recovery drive to a undamaged computer, because the PST file was corrupted, but the file was all there.

http://www.intuitive.com/blog/archives/000540.html

Turning your Mac into a TV is surprisingly straightforward if you know all the steps required, and have a map, and this illustrated weblog entry from Dave Taylor details exactly how he hooked up his Dish Network recorder into his Mac, recorded the video feed, and then burned his own DVD backups of the original material.

http://www.jakeludington.com/archives/000335.html

As I indicated in the previous issue, I'm in the market for a new external hard drive. Several readers pointed out the availability of external drive cases, combined with an internal hard drive as a DIY alternative to paying for a preassembled external drive. After looking at the price difference, I couldn't say no. Because of a killer deal on 200GB drives at CompUSA, I modified my target drive size and dove into the project. It took longer to snap the pictures for the tutorial than it did to put the drive together. External 300GB drives are about a wash when choosing DIY or out-of-the-box options, but at 200GB, the do-it-yourself route wins every time. If you need an external drive and want to save yourself a few dollars, take a look at this tutorial and then order the parts.

These step-by-step instructions for creating a digital camera tripod from a Pepsi bottle are inspired by the Bottle Cap Tripod for Digital Camera From Japan as featured in Gizmodo.

	Master parts list: 1 1/4-inch Stainless steel washer 1 1/4-20x1 1/2-inch stainless steel pan head machine screw 1 1/4-20 Bar Knob 1 1/4-20 stainless steel lock nut 1 lid from a 20oz bottle Tools required: Drill with 1/4-inch bit Screwdriver Wrench All parts for the project were purchased at Lowes. Total cost is $3.37, not including the Pepsi.
	Step 1: Drill a hole in the center of the bottle cap using a 1/4-inch drill bit.
	Step 2: Insert the washer in the bottle cap. This helps stabilize and strengthen the bottle cap.
	Step 3: Insert the screw in the bottle cap, until the pan head is flush against the washer.
	Step 4: Tighten the lock nut until it is firmly secured against the top of the bottle cap. The lock nut prevents the machine screw from turning while using the tripod.
	Step 5: Twist the bar knob on the screw until it's flush against the top of the bottle cap.
	Step 6: Connect your DIY tripod to the base of the camera, then screw the cap down on the bottle. The bottle should contain some amount of liquid to counterbalance the weight of the camera. For additional stability, place a second washer between the bar knob and the camera.

Below is my original concept, which was later modified to the version above because the machine screw spun on the bottle cap prior to putting the locking nut on top of the cap. You can also see some inspired variations of DIY tripod mounts for bicycles:

Mounting a Camera on Your Bike

Bicycle Camera Mount

	Master parts list: 1 1/4-inch Stainless steel washer 1 1/4-20x1 1/2-inch stainless steel pan head machine screw 1 1/4-20 Bar Knob 1 1/4-20 stainless steel lock nut 1 lid from a 20oz bottle Tools required: Drill with 1/4-inch bit Screwdriver Wrench All parts for the project were purchased at Lowes. Total cost is $3.37, not including the Pepsi.
	Step 1: Drill a hole in the center of the bottle cap using a 1/4-inch drill bit.
	Step 2: Insert the washer in the bottle cap. This helps stabilize and strengthen the bottle cap.
	Step 3: Turn the nut on the machine screw until it's tightened flat against the screw head.
	Step 4: Insert the screw in the bottle cap. Tighten until the top of the nut is snug against the washer.
	Step 5: Twist the bar knob on the screw until it's flush against the top of the bottle cap.
	Step 6: Connect your DIY tripod to the base of the camera, then screw the cap down on the bottle. The bottle should contain some amount of liquid to counterbalance the weight of the camera. For additional stability, place a second washer between the bar knob and the camera.

The great thing about the bottle cap tripod is it easily fits in a pocket of your camera pouch (or in your pocket) and is compatible with virtually any 20oz bottle from any manufacturer. For larger cameras, a 2 Liter bottle may provide more effective counter balance.

Video Clip (QuickTime, 2.29 MB): http://jakeludington.com/steadycamqt

A few months ago, Jake featured an easy to build steady-cam in the newsletter. [Disclaimer: The web site owner's political views at the top of the page are his own. We do not feel one way or another about his beliefs. We do, however, like his $14.00 steady-cam.] As an aspiring videographer, I decided to create one, and found it to be a cheap and essential tool for removing some of the shakiness associated with hand-held digital-video recorders. The steady-cam mount was easy to build, with all of the parts available at any hardware store, and took about half an hour to fully assemble. I performed a custom modification by slipping a couple of bicycle grips over the metal pipes for added comfort and control. All told, the total cost was about $20, which is significantly less than the price of a low-end steady-cam rig. Commercially available rigs start at $200-300 and can range up into the $1,000's for gyroscopically controlled models. Are the expensive models better than my cheap rig? Probably. However, I found that my setup was capable of capturing motion shots with a great deal of control, and also functioned as a handy monopod for balancing the camera on the ground. With a digital-video recorder attached, the steady-cam weighed about 7 pounds, and after 4 hours of filming my forearms were getting tired. But you can't beat the price; and if you're in a pinch for some sweeping motion shots at your family picnic, consider a trip to the hardware store. [Mathew Brady]

http://www.snapstream.com/Products/freeshipping_promo.asp

If you've been holding off on creating your own custom home theater PC, SnapStream is currently offering an incentive to get your PVR and remote. Until May 31 Beyond TV3, Firefly PC Remote, and the Beyond TV3 starter kits all have free shipping when purchasing directly from SnapStream. Beyond TV3 is the best standalone PVR software solution available, with built-in commercial skipping and none of the subscription fees associated with PVR solutions like TiVO. I haven't had a chance to test the Firefly remote yet, but based on the quality of other SnapStream offerings, I'm betting its a winner too.

For a town that is generally a tech backwater, Des Moines, Iowa contains a proliferation of autos with overhead video screens. A visit to any local gym in town reveals more portable CD players than media players, but apparently Iowans need movies on wheels. The number of wireless hotspots in Des Moines rivals almost no one, yet the youth of Iowa will not be without their Finding Nemo DVDs while being transported from home to the local grocer. So far, I haven't seen anyone watching anything they wouldn't want their mother to see, which hopefully speaks well of drivers here.

Buying a car with a DVD player and multiple screens built in seems to be easier than finding one without. It's almost like asking for a car without power windows; the salesman will just tilt his head to the side and assume you've gotten too much sun. For those of us who aren't ready to upgrade to a new car, just so we can add video, third party add-ons still look very expensive. A headrest with built-in screen runs $1500 in most places.

The creative shopper can easily put together a headrest multimedia system for under $200, using a little creativity and a trip to the local Best Buy store or BestBuy.com. Next week, I'll walk through the installation process. In the meantime, I'll make a list of the hardware I'm using to get the job done.

The screen: Audiovox VBPEX56. This screen is intended as an add-on for the Audiovox portable DVD player line, allowing two simultaneous viewers. Luckily, the screen works with anything capable of outputting S-Video or Composite signals. Built in speakers provide adequate sound, although sound may optionally be routed almost anywhere, including the car stereo system. Best Buy seems to have the best price on this unit, coming in at a mere $99.99. If you can track down an Eddie Bauer by Audiovox MEX1020 at Target, you have the same screen. Part of the reason for choosing this model is the included strap system for easily connecting the screen to the back of a headrest. It comes with both a 12V car adapter (you know, the cigarette lighter plug) and traditional AC cable.

The DVD player: CyberHome CH-DVD 300S. The most important factor about a car DVD player is size. The only convenient place to stash a player is under the car seat, which means the form factor needs to be small enough to fit under the seat, while still providing convenient access to the controls. CyberHome makes this disposable model half the size of a normal home theater component, making it perfect for hiding below the front passenger. It even fits in the under seat drawer, although I would need to cut out the drawer front to provide room for the tray to open. This particular model is louder than anything I would want in my home entertainment system, but for car use, the noise blends in with the grind from the road. And did I mention the DVD player claims to work with both NTSC and PAL?

Power Supply: The Audiovox screen includes a 12V connection. The DVD player uses a traditional plug connection, so powering both devices is a two stage process. Unless the car you drive includes two power outlets on the console, a 12V Y-adapter is necessary to power both devices. One side of the adapter will connect the Audiovox screen. A power inverter plugs into the other side of the 12V splitter, adding traditional outlets. This Tripp Lite model with 375 watts of power provides enough juice for the DVD player and a laptop, if one of your passengers needs a battery charge.

A run down of component costs:

Audiovox VBPEX56 Screen:	$99.99
CyberHome CHDVD 300S:	39.99
12V Y-adapter:	7.49
Tripp Lite Inverter:	39.99
Total Cost:	$187.46

All necessary cables should be included. Pictures and a detailed explanation of the installation process are coming next week.

Integrating audio into the car stereo system gets a little more difficult. Most high-end factory systems include auxiliary input jacks on the back side of the receiver. More plain-vanilla varieties require a system upgrade. Unless you are looking for the boom emanating from the lowered Nissan Sentra in the next lane, the Alpine CDC-X204 makes a sensible replacement for a factory system. The 22 watts (45W peak) per channel may not seem impressive, but it bests most factory models (my Suzuki is rated at 14W). Why this model? It's one of the few car players with a front face 1/8-inch auxiliary port. That single little port offers a line in for the DVD player, and more importantly, no more FM broadcasts from a portable media player to the car stereo. This addition brings the total to just under $300. For future compatibiility with XM, look for an XM ready stereo with additional inputs on the back.

http://moblg.net/

I've had a LG VX6000 camera phone for ages and I rarely take pictures of anything other than people I add to my contacts list. I finally got around to signing up for a photo blog at MoblogUK. Why the long wait? Partly because I realize most people don't care about random pictures of Iowa. And partly because I hate the terms of service presented by most of the mobile blogging services. In general, moblogging sites all make you give up ownership of any content posted to their sites. MoblogUK is different. Full copyright is retained by the photographer and they even recommend using Creative Commons licensing for good measure. I'm not sure who will ever want my photos, but at least they remain mine. Did I mention the service is free?

Normally it would be grossly unfair to compare a 3CCD DV camera against a 1CCD DV camera, because the playing field is anything but level. With Panasonic's recent foray into consumer-friendly pricing on 3CCD DV cameras, I decided to put my Canon ZR70 to the test against the Panasonic PV-GS70.

In a nutshell, CCD stands for Charged Coupled Device, which are the chips used by a DV cam to capture image information. 1CCD camcorders capture images by capturing one of the three RGB color values and interpreting the other two. 3CCD cameras capture image data by assigning one color to each chip, resulting in more accurate color information. This is one instance where more is almost always better.

At the time I purchased the ZR70 last year, it was still priced around $700. With a new model year on the horizon, the ZR70 is currently priced under $450, with its generational equivalent, the ZR90 priced at just under $600.

Panasonic's entry level 3CCD DV cam, the PV-GS120 sports the same lens/CCD configuration as the PV-GS70 I tested and may be found for as low as $665. Because I didn't want to wait for the PV-GS120 to become available, I picked up the PV-GS70 for $699. The extra $35 got me MPEG-4 recording (in addition to uncompressed DV), Webcam functionality, and a wired external microphone/remote control. I point out these differences only to illustrate the pricing proximity of the 1CCD and 3CCD DV cams being discussed here.

For my testing, I set each of the two DV cams on tripods positioned as close together as possible, in order to approximate the same angle from each camera. I'll let the images speak for themselves.

1CCD images are displayed on the left - 3CCD images on the right

Outdoors Mostly Sunny

Outdoors Cloudy with a Slight Haze

Indoors Basement Incandescent Lighting

This comparison is obviously unscientific in nature, but it's fairly clear which DV cam produces better images, especially in low-light situations. 1CCD cameras with larger lenses would probably fare slightly better, by allowing more light to hit the CCD, but the color information will still be lacking.

There are many 1CCD cameras priced well below the Panasonic PV-GS120. Quite a few cost several hundred dollars more. Unless you are looking for a professional level camera, like the Canon GL2 or XL1, until Canon and Sony offer competing 3CCD models, I won't be recommending anything but the Panasonic 3CCD line for home and small business users for the foreseeable future.

Buy the Panasonic PV-120 from JandR PANASONIC PV-GS120 MiniDV Camcorder

One of the more frequent questions I see related to creating movies with Windows Movie Maker is how to normalize the soundtrack audio. Normalizing is the process of leveling the peak volume of an audio selection, which is particularly useful when combining a series of tracks mastered in different locations at different times. Currently, Movie Maker is very limited in audio editing features, so any heavy duty audio editing must be done in some other application. This video tutorial demonstrates the process required to normalize a soundtrack for a Movie Maker project using the Sound Editor app included in Roxio Easy Media Creator.

http://www.jakeludington.com/free-tutorials/videos/moviemaker/

Step through the process of using Windows Movie Maker to create photo slideshows with this 10-minute video.

Please feel free to provide criticism of the tutorial. This is something of an experiment, which may become a regular addition to the newsletter, if there seems to be enough interest. I'm also open to suggested topics.

Camtasia handled screen capture duties, with Windows Media Encoder shrinking the file size down to a manageable size.

"How do I rip a DVD?" or sometimes, "how do I copy a DVD to my hard drive?"

These are two of the most frequently asked questions I receive on a weekly basis. Whether you're making a backup copy of your DVDs to keep the original from getting scratched or trying to build a library of movies on your hard drive to create your own personal movie jukebox, I find Xilisoft DVD Ripper Platinum to be one of the most comprehensive solutions around. The software is optimized for automatically creating versions of your DVDs playable on your PC, iPod, PSP, or simply for playing on a burned DVD. For foreign movies, you can even add the subtitles to versions for portable players so you can easily follow along while you're traveling.

The steps required to rip a DVD with Xilisoft DVD Ripper Platinum are simple:

Select the DVD Click Open, select Open DVD Folder option, and then select a DVD folder from the list of choices. Load the DVD file. Once the DVD is loaded you'll see list of available chapter information for the DVD.

Select output format Select one or more files in the list of available chapters. Click the Profile drop-down button and select the output format you want from the dropdown list of choices. You can tweak these settings by reviewing the detailed parameters of each format (in most cases you won't need these).

Choose output folder Click the Browse button in the settings panel, select a destination folder for your file and click OK.

Extract file After completing the initial steps, you're ready to rip the DVD. Once the settings are configured, make sure the file you want to extract from the DVD is checked and click the Start button to begin ripping the DVD.

For the foreseeable future, DVD will remain an integral part of any home theater experience. At an average price of $20, it doesn't take long to generate a huge investment in DVD media. If you have small children or pets (I've personally witnessed a DVD being dented by dog teeth), putting the original DVDs in the closet while using a backup copy makes more sense, especially considering blank DVD-R media cost less than $1/disk in consumer volume purchase quantities.

In order to perform backups of DVD media, you need software. There are tons of choices, all with minor limitations and quirks. At the moment one of my favorite solutions is
Xilisoft DVD Ripper Platinum. It's an ideal tool for ripping DVDs to your hard drive for playback via your Media Center or for simply making a backup copy of your DVDs to protect the original from scratching.

For parents looking for a way to make movies accessible to their kids, without having the original
damaged, Xilisoft DVD Ripper Ultimate is an affordable solution. Using Xilisoft DVD Ripper, you can configure the movie file to fit on a DVD, minus special features and other things your kids may not care about. The picture quality remains great, Most small children won't recognize the
quality difference between the ripped DVD and the original. Of course you can copy menus, trailers, and special features too.

After you rip the DVDs, you can either keep the files on your computer and play them back from your hard drive, or burn them to DVD. You may need to double-check the documentation on your set-top DVD player to make sure which burned DVD formats it supports before making an
investment in blank DVDs.

You can find a trial version here:

Download Xilisoft DVD Ripper Platinum

Creating a television ready interface for your home theater system would probably take more time than it's worth. Luckily, a ready-made solution exists in the form of myHTPC. Providing a convenient interface to all the media on your hard drive, myHTPC also bundles some cool plug-ins for an experience that makes browsing your computer via the TV a joy. The software is still considered an alpha product by the developers, but I've found it to be very stable.

A configuration wizard quickly steps you through locating the folders where pictures, music, and movies are stored on your computer. On finishing the initial myHTPC configuration, the interface launches, but I recommend further configuration before continuing. The configure application included with myHTPC lets you change the onscreen appearance of the application, define user permissions for each resource, modify weather information settings, and tweak the general display options for sub-menu items.

Not only will myHTPC allow you to browse media on your hard drive, it also launches applications and performs many user definable tasks. This make myHTPC a decent user interface for both multimedia interaction and as a simplified interface for navigating a subset of computer applications, which can be ideal for maintaining control over what small children have access to on the computer.

Movies and music are played through Windows Media Player while maintaining the look and feel of myHTPC, similar to interactions with Windows Media Center Edition. Queues may be created to play entire albums, playlists, or any other combination of tracks. The focus of myHTPC is to simplify all interactions with media on your PC.

To get the full benefit of myHTPC, a computer remote is a must. This allows you to easily browse the menu system, without needing to remain chained to mouse and keyboard. Supported remotes include Irman and the WinLIRC project at Sourceforge, which allows you to use virtually any remote, including the ones that come with your home entertainment system. WinLIRC does require a serial IR port in order to function properly.

One single application motivated me to create my first integrated home theater PC--personal video recording (PVR) technology. The idea of being able to record television to my hard drive for later viewing is outstanding. I already own several computers, so I don't want a standalone solution like TiVo (not to mention, a monthly fee to use the hardware leaves a bad taste in my mouth).

Software options remain somewhat limited in the television recording space. TV tuner ATI and NVIDIA video cards both include proprietary PVR solutions. I haven't tested the solution bundled with NVIDIA chip cards, but the PVR from ATI performs well. The downside to either solution is a proprietary tie in to specific video cards. I already have more than one video card with support for TV input. Spending more money on a new card doesn't make sense.

What do I look for in a PVR?

• The ability to fast forward through commercials.
• Program shifting which records shows for on-demand playback, even when they haven't finished recording.
• Video serving to any available viewing device, including televisions, computers, and PDAs.
• Remote scheduling via a Web interface.
• Compression to reduce space used to store programming.

The ATI and NVIDIA solutions will do all this. TiVo meets my requirements too. Each of those solutions meets my needs at a price I'm not willing to pay. TiVo locks users into a contract and the ATI and NVIDIA solutions both need some interface improvements before I would deem them usable.

The only software solution I strongly recommend for PVR recording is SnapStream Beyond TV 3. Previously known as Personal Video Station, this application offers all the features you could ever want in a PVR, without being tied to a specific hardware device.

Beyond TV 3 allows viewers to skip commercials. Beyond TV 3 timeshifts programs. Scheduling of recording can be performed remotely and can be configured to remember your favorite shows so they are recorded weekly. A very slick interface makes using Beyond TV 3 easier than using a VCR. Video may be served to any networked device or to a television. Compression converts video to save space and make it portable on Pocket PC devices in Windows Media format.

You will need some kind of TV tuner card to make Beyond TV 3 work. SnapStream recommends the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR250 or 350 cards. I personally prefer the ATI cards, because they support live TV streaming, but the Hauppauge cards are an excellent choice. If you have one of the older ATI All-In-Wonder cards, like my Radeon 8500 DV, you can extend the useful life of the card by recording TV with it, while saving money on a newer (not necessarily better for recording TV) card.

Priced at $59 for the download version (or $179 bundled with a Hauppauge card), Beyond TV 3 is cheaper than TiVo, which costs $99 plus $12.95 per month. The ATI and NVIDIA solutions will cost you at least $200 for a card with bundled software.

One caveat to my preference: If you happen to have an early 9x00 All-In-Wonder card, you may find the ATI solution acceptable as a free upgrade from the version of Multimedia Center originally bundled with your video card.

A lesser sound card can occasionally be enhanced with some quality speakers, but the best sound card in the world won't make up for cheap speakers. My own personal configuration routes the sound card output to a traditional home theater amplifier. A blended configuration like mine isn't always convenient, so having good computer speakers is a must. To achieve 5.1 or 7.1 Surround Sound, having the requisite speaker configuration is a must. For listeners on a budget, it's possible to get great sound out of a 2.1 configuration, without breaking the bank.

What does the .1 actually mean anyway?

Without going into the entire history of surround sound configuration, I'll briefly reference the history of perceptual sound. Dolby Laboratories began studying the way human hearing interacted with recorded sound back in the sixties, producing the first noise reduction system for audio tape, drastically improving the playback audio quality. Through further study, Dolby Labs isolated the way human hearing reacts to various audible frequencies and created an algorithm for routing those frequencies to speakers positioned at various points in space designed to reproduce something closer to real world sounds.

At the most basic level, Dolby Digital Surround Sound systems route very low end sounds to a subwoofer positioned below any other speakers in the configuration. Instead of referring to Dolby Digital configurations as three speaker systems(2.1), six speaker systems (5.1) or eight speaker systems (7.1), the standard has been to refer to the main 2, 5, or 7 speakers before the dot, with the subwoofer listed as the .1.

Starting with 4.1, Dolby Digital configurations began placing speakers behind the listener, allowing sound to seemingly approach and then passby the listener from front-to-back or vice versa. As technology has progressed, further gaps in spatial listening were closed, first in 5.1 when an additional center speaker was introduced, with an additional center rear speaker in 6.1 and yet another speaker in 7.1, with a shift to achieve even more precise sound around the listener.

Alternative technologies like DTS and THX are debated as being better at producing some types of sound positioning, but Dolby has remained the standard by which everything in the movie and recording industries is based.

Recommended speaker confurations

Dolby Digital 2.1 Surround Sound

Budget: Creative Labs Inspire 2500 2.1 Computer Speakers
Better:Klipsch ProMedia 2.1 THX Certified Computer Speaker System
Best: M-Audio LX4

Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound

Budget: Creative Labs Inspire T5400 5.1 Computer Speakers
Better: Klipsch ProMedia GMX D-5.1 Digital Computer Speakers
Best: M-Audio LX4 with 5.1 Expansion

Dolby Digital 7.1 Surround Sound

Budget: Creative Labs Inspire T7700 7.1 Computer Speakers
Better: GigaWorks S750
Best: 7.1 speaker configurations for PCs are still relatively limited. Expect some great new developments in this area soon.

If your computer is anything less than three years old, the included sound card should meet the minimum requirement of 16-bit audio. Unless you upgraded from the computer manufacturer's default card, you won't have any surround sound support, which is vital to getting an experience approximating traditional component home theater systems.

At the lowend of the sound card upgrade selection, consumer grade hardware will more than suffice for most users. The Audigy MP3+ from Creative Labs features Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound and 24-bit audio processing for under $70.

The Turtle Beach Santa Cruz card comes in slightly higher, at around $75, but comes with Turtle Beach digital signal processing (DSP) technology, which off-loads more of the audio processing to the sound card reducing the load on your CPU. The tradeoff is only 18-bit audio, which is above our minimum requirement, but less than the more affordable Audigy MP3+. The Santa Cruz also supports 5.1 Surround Sound.

For just under $100, the M-Audio Revolution 7.1 provides the best of the affordable PCI consumer solutions, with Dolby Digital 7.1 Surround Sound, 24-bit output, and some of the best on board noise shielding available in the consumer space. Assuming I ever purchase another PCI audio card, this would probably be my first choice. This card doesn't support Windows 98, but should work with Me, 2000, and XP.

For better audio performance, an external USB solution may be preferable for several reasons. The USB solution is outside your computer case, so there's less opportunity for noise from other computer components to introduce garbage into your audio signal. Many of the USB solutions offer XLR connections, which further contribute to noise reduction. Another convenience of external audio solutions is accessibility to the connectors. With even a 3-foot USB cable, you can easily position the USB "sound card" closer to all of your connections, and further from your computer case. With a USB solution, there's no more crawling around on the floor, squinting at tiny little connectors, while trying to remember which one of the arrows on the back of the card is referring to input. For under $200, here are two 7.1 ready audio devices, with 24-bit output:

M-Audio delivers here as well, offering a solution geared toward portability. For under $100, Sonica Theater offers 24-bit, Dolby Digital 7.1 Surround Sound output in a device designed to fit in your pocket.

The Sound Blaster Audigy2 NX offers 7.1 Surround Sound and 24-bit DVD-Audio playback for under $130.

There are two different paths to choose when considering video cards for your home theater PC. You can either use two cards, a separate graphics card and a TV tuner card. Or, purchasing a combination TV tuner / graphics card will also work. Most of the home theater software applications recommend using two separate cards, including many of the official Media Center configurations from OEM computer makers.

If your system looks anything like mine did before I started assembling a home theater setup, you probably already have a solid graphics card installed. Anything with at least 32MB of video RAM leaves you prepared for virtually all home theater PC applications. You still need TV tuner capability to perform tasks like recording television, playing TV shows on your computer, and in some cases, playing back video from your computer on your TV. The standalone TV tuner card most recommended by personal video recorder applications (PVR) is the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR 250. In addition to TV recording and playback, this card is great for converting old VHS tapes to DVD. The card includes a remote and is available for somewhere in the neighborhood of US $129.

Hauppauge WinTV-PVR 250

The Hauppauge WinTV-PVR 350 and WinTV-PVR USB are also solid alternatives, but be careful of some of the lower-end Hauppauge models, which may produce less desirable results.

Pinnacle PCTV also represents a reasonable standalone solution.

All-in-one solutions introduce some configuration issues with a few software products, but have the advantage of taking up only one PCI slot in your computer. I personally use an ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon 8500DV card in one of my systems. While this isn't the latest card from the All-In-Wonder line, it continues to perform nicely for both video capture and general purpose video applications. The 8500DV includes 64MB of video RAM, offers support for several types of video input and output, and handles TV tuning nicely. One of the newer All-In-Wonder cards will have to suffice, since this particular model has been discontinued. The All-In-Wonder 9600 PRO or 9700 PRO should suffice, without forcing you to bet the farm on a new video card.

All links appearing here go to Amazon because after including shipping at other vendors, the Amazon price was cheaper than several others I checked.

Before we jump into the software components of building a media center PC, having the necessary hardware is a must. Processor speed, graphics card performance, sound card quality, hard drive space, memory, DVD playback, and CD or DVD burning are necessary for building a comprehensive multimedia entertainment system. Having good speakers doesn't hurt either.

Breaking these components down individually:

Processor

To meet the minimum requirements for most of the software I'm including in this media center project, an AMD or Intel processor should be no slower than 733 MHz. It may be possible to squeak by with less, but you won't be very happy with results. Something in the realm of 1.4 GHz (or higher) would be even better. If you purchased your computer in the last 2-3 years, this aspect of your media center is probably covered.

Graphics Card

Without getting into specific card benchmarks, your video card needs the following features to even consider building a home media center: TV Tuner; S-Video or RCA outputs; at least 32MB of video RAM; WDM support. If your current video card is missing any of these components, it's time for an upgrade. If your wallet can sustain the damage, 64, 128, or 256MB of video RAM will make your system happy and speed up many of the video intensive functions of this set up. ATI and NVIDIA release new TV tuner products every year, you don't need the latest and greatest, but something built in the last two years would be advisable.

Sound Card

The most important features for your sound card are a minimum of 16-bit audio support and 5.1 Surround Sound. 24 or 32-bit audio support is recommended for long-term support of digital audio.

Memory

Buy as much memory as you can afford (up to the limit of your motherboard). Memory will speed up things like video rendering and photo editing. You won't really have a happy media center with any thing less than 512MB of RAM. 1-2GB will improve overall performance greatly.

Hard Drive Space

Hard drive space is another area where more is better. Especially if you plan on extensive use of video recording features, space is a valuable commodity. Plan on 60GB for video, 5-10GB for photos, another 10GB for applications, and additional space equivalent to the maximum capacity of your portable media player, add up to a minimum benchmark just under 100GB. Double that capacity if you want to keep all your favorite shows indefinitely.

CD/DVD Playback and Burning

Most computers built in the last three years have DVD drives for playback. Prices for DVD burning have finally reached affordable levels. For archiving TV and movies, a DVD burner is a must. Since the standards are still up in the air, get something that records both +R and -R for maximum compatibility, if you haven't already purchased a drive. For anyone still waiting for the standards to shake out, CD burners still work great and playback isn't a problem if you are outputting the video from your computer to your television.

Speakers

Nothing ruins PC multimedia faster than cheap speakers. If your home theater has great speakers, output your PC audio to your stereo receiver. Otherwise, consider investing in speakers better than the ones shipped with your system.

In upcoming issues, I'll breakdown each of these categories further, recommending several good models in each category. With the holidays coming, your wishlist will be growing.

Microsoft's idea for a computer that acts as the central nervous system for you home theater is a great one. Having a personal video recorder (PVR) to store my favorite television programming for later viewing makes sense. Offering a convenient solution for playing back video and audio from my PC through my home theater makes sense too. On the other hand, buying a new computer specifically designed for this purpose is silly; I've already invested money in most of the components required to make the equivalent of a Media Center PC, why not adapt what I've already got?

I ran into a minor issue during a recent install of Cakewalk Pyro 2003, which I'm guessing a number of other users might have experienced. The first time I installed Pyro 2003 on my Windows 2000 machine, I hadn't updated my system to DirectX 9 yet. The Pyro 2003 install went off without a hitch. I fell in love with Pyro's simplicity and outstanding noise reduction instantly.

Months later, following a hard drive failure, I decided to reinstall all my audio and video editing software on a Windows XP machine. Aside from having a completely different operating system, the one major difference between these two installs was the presence of DirectX 9 on the Windows XP system.

After installing several other frequently used apps on my new drive, I inserted my Pyro 2003 CD and clicked the install link when the Autorun menu launched. The Pyro installer told me I didn't have DirectX 8.1 installed on my system. Strange, DirectX 9 should do the trick, but I proceeded to let the Pyro installer attempt to install DirectX 8.1 on my system.

A reboot later, I'm attempting to install Pyro again. The same message appears telling me I need to install DirectX 8.1. I run the DirectX install again, reboot and get the message yet again. At this point, I think I was deluded to ever imagine I'd installed Pyro successfully the first time.

A visit to the Cakewalk site turned up nothing on the Pyro support pages, so I send a message off to the Cakewalk support team. A very detailed response later, I have a solution to my problem, including a link to the Cakewalk support page that details my issue, and a Registry hack I could use if all else failed. That's support! I received a solution to my problem and I got an alternative solution, so I don't have to wait for a response if the first solution fails. I've never had a company send me a Registry hack in response to a customer service question.

Apparently, something about the installer included on my CD doesn't play well with DirectX 9. These things happen; there's a fix, I'm happy again. Thinking I just missed this support page, I attempt to find it by browsing through the Cakewalk site again. There is definitely no reference to this DirectX problem in the Pyro support pages.

Of course, had I gone directly to the main support page, instead of clicking on the product specific link, I'd have found my answer more quickly. The DirectX issue seems to be pervasive throughout the Cakewalk product line. So if you've got DirectX 9 on your system and you want the absolute best solution for converting vinyl LPs to CD, get Pyro 2003. If it won't install, get this patch too:

http://www.cakewalk.com/Support/DX9.ASP