Zoekresultaten voor: label/home%20cinema

32sickbeardDownload TV episodes automatically with SickBeard

As TV and movie con­tent gradu­ally moves, kick­ing and scream­ing, onto the Inter­net, the demand for ways to man­age all the media we con­sume con­tin­ues to grow. Whilst the major­ity of TV is still not avail­able from legit­im­ate sources online, there are now some series which are, includ­ing Pion­eer One — a Bit­Tor­rent only TV series. Good lists of leg­al tor­rent pro­viders are avail­able from gigaom here and here. Pub­lic Domain Movie Tor­rents also provides links to movies which are now free of copy­right. In some jur­is­dic­tions it may also be con­sidered legit­im­ate to down­load con­tent you already own in anoth­er format, or to down­load con­tent instead of record­ing it on a set-top box. Either way, the time for improved auto­mat­ic down­load ser­vices is now here. Below I detail the easi­est way to auto­mat­ic­ally down­load TV epis­odes that I’ve dis­covered so far.… Lees het volledige artikel

2Replacing the BT Infinity SmartHub with pfsense

When I moved into a new home a year ago I was finally able to join the 21st cen­tury and ordered BT Infin­ity which is sup­plied with a SmartHub. The SmartHub is actu­ally reas­on­ably decent kit con­sid­er­ing it comes for free, but as with most ISP sup­plied devices it is locked down in some ways, for example you can­’t use your own DNS serv­ers which I prefer to do. In the early days of ADSL (circa 2001) I ran a smooth­wall box in place of a router, and for a range of reas­ons (includ­ing inter­net fil­ter­ing con­trolled by me, rather than an ISP) I decided to go back to a linux-based fire­wall router.
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0BlogrollBlogroll: Sites we visit

Rather than put­ting a blogroll wid­get on the menus which takes up space on every page, we have instead decided to have a ded­ic­ated page with a list and descrip­tion of the sites we reg­u­larly vis­it. We recom­mend all the fol­low­ing from per­son­al exper­i­ence — there are no sponsored links here.

TheHTPC.net

Run by anoth­er Jon this is the closest to a “sis­ter” site to DIYMH in our opin­ion. Des­pite some tech­nic­al wobbles in early 2012 the site is now fully back up and being reg­u­larly updated with excel­lent HTPC related articles.

Anandtech

Well known tech­no­logy news & review site primar­ily focused on reviews of PC hard­ware. Unlike many of the oth­ers has remained con­sist­ent and clear without sug­ges­tion of any “paid-reviews” or oth­er dodgy influ­ence. Provides more cov­er­age of home media tech­no­lo­gies than most oth­er sites.

SemiAccurate

Tech­no­logy tabloid. Openly biased and some­times bor­der­line trolling but an enter­tain­ing read with some impress­ive insight at times.

Digital Photography Review

The most com­pre­hens­ive and thor­ough reviews of digit­al cam­er­as on the web. Includes all the latest digit­al cam­era reviews and digit­al ima­ging news, lively dis­cus­sion for­ums, vast samples gal­ler­ies etc…

DIY Audio

The home for audi­o­philes on the web. A com­munity ded­ic­ated to help­ing every­one learn the art of audio. Pro­jects by fan­at­ics, for fan­at­icsCon­tains thou­sands of dis­cus­sions and prob­ably all there is to know about modi­fy­ing HiFi

Doom9

Tech­nic­al for­um, mainly a DVD backup resource. Cov­ers top­ics like video cap­ture, MPEG encod­ing and transcod­ing, video fil­ter­ing and format conversion.

GSM Arena

Com­pre­hens­ive and up-to-date inform­a­tion and reviews for just about every mobile tele­phone ever made. Espe­cially use­ful for com­par­ing spe­cific­a­tions of new and upcom­ing handsets.

Hack Windows 7 Media Center

An almost-sis­ter-site to DIYMHProvides lots of detailed inform­a­tion about Win­dows Media Cen­ter on Win­dows 7. Describes itself as “Using plu­gins, pro­grams, tools and hacks to cre­ate a bet­ter Win­dows 7 Media Center.”

Silent PC Review

Site ded­ic­ated to quiet com­put­ing. The stand­ard an depth of reviews is second to none. If you’re look­ing for inform­a­tion about PSU’s, fans or HDDs this is the place to go. Describes itself as “Everything about low-noise PC com­pon­ents, silen­cing tech­niques, DIY mods and com­plete quiet com­puter systems.”

Video Help

Con­tains a wealth of guides to con­vert­ing between video formats. Describes itself as “How to make a VCD, inform­a­tion about soft­ware play­ers, down­loads, DivX and a for­um with tips on cre­at­ing DVD and VCD movies.”

XDA Developers

Home to Android & Win­dows Phone apps, mods, roms and devel­op­ment. If you want a new ROM for your phone or you want to hack it in some way this is the place to go.

Tech Stream

Web devel­op­ment inform­a­tion with par­tic­u­larly good inform­a­tion on fea­tures and uses of the new HTML5 and CSS3 standards.

W3Schools

Com­pre­hens­ive guide to all HTML and CSS ver­sions and tags. Includes inform­a­tion on browser compatibility

0Storage SpacesMicrosoft Storage Spaces: Virtual RAID for Windows 8?

Microsoft’s Steve Sinof­sky has writ­ten a detailed art­icle about a genu­inely excit­ing new fea­ture of Win­dows 8 — Stor­age Spaces. I won’t repeat the details here, for those you can go straight to the horses mouth. How­ever I will point out a key line from a home media serv­er point of view: “There’s anoth­er resi­li­ency attrib­ute, called par­ity, which dir­ects Stor­age Spaces to store some redund­ancy inform­a­tion along­side user data con­tained with­in the space, thereby enabling auto­mat­ic data recon­struc­tion in the event of phys­ic­al disk fail­ure.” To me, this sounds a LOT like a soft­ware RAID5 sim­il­ar to that provided by UnRAIDUntil Win­dows 8 is released and the tech­no­logy is fully reviewed the details are of course some­what spec­u­lat­ive, but my read­ing of the art­icle leads me to believe that Stor­age Spaces will enable the strip­ing of disks, with a par­ity in the event of single disk fail­ure. Fur­ther, it is reas­on­able to assume that this sys­tem will work with stand­ard non-enter­prise drives without suf­fer­ing any [int­link id=“90” type=“post”]compatibility issues[/intlink].  Finally, it is reas­on­able to assume that Stor­age Spaces will offer some of the per­form­ance bene­fits of hard­ware raid‑5 too. If you have a home serv­er with a lot of media and you want some redund­ancy, without huge cost, then this tech­no­logy sounds like it might be the per­fect solu­tion. Thanks Microsoft!

14Boxee Remote LogoThe search for a HTPC remote-keyboard

I’ve been look­ing for a new (more ver­sat­ile) remote con­trol for my HTPC. At the moment I have to use a full-size key­board as the remote con­trol has no such facil­ity. I’ve been look­ing for a suit­able remote con­trol with key­board, and whilst I haven’t yet found quite the right thing I have found some inter­est­ing products…
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0Expanding smarthome on the cheap

As I’ve writ­ten about before, I have begun to exper­i­ment with the world of smarthome devices, and cur­rently use a smartth­ings hub and a google home mini. So far these have just turned on lamps and oth­er “plugged in” devices via smart­plugs, but with more com­pat­ible devices at reas­on­able prices finally start­ing to appear I wanted to start doc­u­ment­ing more of what I’ve tried
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11Windows Update IconFix Windows Update or Service Pack error 80073712

It’s that time of year again, and as always, when I vis­it the fam­ily over xmas there are vari­ous PC issues to resolve. This year there were blessedly few issues, but there was 1 prob­lem that it took me quite a while to track down and resolve. One of the fam­il­ies PCs was fail­ing to install Win­dows 7 ser­vice pack 1. It’s a fairly new PC and came with an OEM install of Win­dows 7 x64 Home Premi­um, all legit and activ­ated. It also has up-to-date anti-vir­us pro­tec­tion, and oth­er than the SP1 install prob­lems it seemed to be in excel­lent work­ing order.… Lees het volledige artikel

0FFmpeg LogoThe Ultimate Codec Guide

How data is stored in a multimedia file

Files on a com­puter (or on an optic­al disk like DVD or BluRay) need to con­tain more than 1 type of data. A typ­ic­al movie will include at least 1 video “stream” and one audio “stream”. Most movies include mul­tiple lan­guages and sub­titles, each of which requires an addi­tion­al stream. Each of these streams is effect­ively a file in its own right, but they are all stored togeth­er with­in a “con­tain­er” which also starts each of them at the right time (sub­titles don’t start imme­di­ately at the start of a movie for example) and keeps them in sync as well as stor­ing meta-data about each of them – i.e. what lan­guage they are, what fram­er­ate and res­ol­u­tion the video is, and what com­pres­sion stand­ards have been used.

Video streams

Video streams con­tain only the video part of the movie. They are com­pressed using a par­tic­u­lar sys­tem and there should be meta-data about their res­ol­u­tion, fram­er­ate, if they are inter­laced or pro­gress­ive and details of the encod­ing sys­tem used.

Audio streams

Audio streams con­tain only the audio part of the movie. There are usu­ally mul­tiple audio streams included with the movie and each has its own stream. They can be com­pressed in a range of ways or in some cases they are uncom­pressed raw audio. There should be meta-data about their bitrate, res­ol­u­tion, lan­guage, num­ber of chan­nels and details of the encod­ing sys­tem used.

Oth­er streams (e.g. Closed Captions)

Many movies con­tain oth­er streams, most com­monly closed cap­tions (also known as sub­titles).  These come in sev­er­al formats, but are typ­ic­ally just text with time stamps. They are so small rel­at­ively that no com­pres­sion is used. There should be meta-data about their language.
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Con­tain­ers which bundle all the streams together

All of the streams that com­prise the movie are bundled togeth­er and kept in sync by a con­tain­er. The con­tain­er should con­tain (and provide) all the meta-data about each stream. The con­tain­er also enables the col­lec­tion of streams to be stored as a single file. The most com­mon con­tain­er formats are VOB (used by DVD) and M2TS (used by BluRay).  Oth­er com­mon con­tain­er formats on PC are TS, MPEG, AVI, MKV, WMV, WTV, DVR-MS and MP4. The obsol­ete HD-DVD format used EVO containers.

2Wordpress LogoFixing Rich Snippets Testing Tool for Microdata

Over 2 years ago I pub­lished an art­icle on how to fix prob­lems with Word­Press themes which did­n’t pass the Google Rich Snip­pets Test­ing Tool. Since then lots has changed — Word­Press and most themes have bet­ter sup­port, HTML5 and CSS3 have arrived, and Google, Yahoo and Bing got togeth­er and decided to focus on Microdata, via schema.org. At the time micro­formats seemed the easi­est way to mark up pages, and the test­ing tool had the most com­pre­hens­ive sup­port for these. The move to Microdata and the changes to Word­Press required a new art­icle: this is it!

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