Get album and DVD art w/ CoverDude
Submitted on February 6th, 2006 by admin
Filed under Graphics and Audio and Services and Video
No. of comments (1)
Do you have a large (and legal, of course) movie and music collection on your PC? If so, you may want to keep a collection of all album and DVD box art on your PC as well in order to more easily find what you’re looking for. If so, check out CoverDude, a free site which finds exactly what you’re looking for by grabbing the images from Amazon’s database (as many other applications do). You get album art in three different sizes, and in a couple of variations if they are available.
[tags]amazon, album art, graphics, music, dvd, box art[/tags]
Beating Netflix throttle
Submitted on January 26th, 2006 by admin
Filed under Services and Video
No. of comments (3)
I recently switched from Blockbuster’s online rental service (yes they have one) to Netflix, and one thing I’ve noticed are the slightly longer waits for new releases, which I am attributing to their much larger userbase. I came upon an interesting post which seems to get rid of the long wait times, though neither I nor the original author know whether this will always work.
From the article: “Earlier this week, NF showed that they had received one of my movies back, so I quickly put “40 Year Old Virgin” in my queue…The status of “Virgin” was initially listed as “Very long wait.” As a test, I took out all of the other movies in my queue. Within about an hour, the status of “Virgin” switched from “Very long wait” to “Shipping.” I got it the next day. I’ve only tried this twice; but, both times, it has moved movies out of “Very long/long wait” status as soon as one of my outstanding discs is returned to NF.”
[Via Smorty71]
[tags]netflix, dvd, rental, hacks[/tags]
Create your own QTVR movie on the cheap
Submitted on January 24th, 2006 by admin
Filed under The Mac Side and Video
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Have you ever seen those cool panoramic videos usually available at real estate sites and wondered how you could do it yourself? Check out this detailed tutorial on creating QTVR movies using some pretty inexpensive hardware, a bit of time, and some ingenuity; the results are pretty cool.
[Via Boing Boing]
[tags]quicktime, qtvr, camera, video, tutorial[/tags]
Get TV listings through RSS
Submitted on January 24th, 2006 by admin
Filed under Services and Video
No. of comments (1)
There are dozens of different uses for RSS feeds including news, events, weather, traffic reports, package tracking, and more. One pretty cool site I found today is called Bootleg RSS: TV Edition (kind of a long name), which provides RSS feeds for show listings of some of the more popular local and cable channels. You can select different feeds depending on your time zone, though only listings for US channels are currently available. If one of your favorite channels isn’t listed, you could always make a request and hope it shows up in one of the updates. I only watch a short list of shows, but it’s good to know when I’ll be able to watch reruns of them.
[tags]tv, listings, rss, feeds[/tags]
Watch TV on your PC
Submitted on December 20th, 2005 by admin
Filed under Storage and Video and Windows
No. of comments (11)
Martin over at gHacks (no relation to me, by the way) has posted a pretty nice article which mentions how to go about watching TV on your PC using video streams from the web and freely available software. This can be pretty useful if your local TV stations aren’t showing your favorite sports game, for example. Pretty cool stuff, but what I’m really looking forward to is TapeItOffTheInternet 
Super easy video conversion for iPod w/ iSquint
Submitted on December 19th, 2005 by admin
Filed under The Mac Side and Software and Video
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Since the introduction of the video-enabled iPod, we’ve mentioned a few different tools which help you convert videos to a format which your new iPod will recognized. If you found that those tools weren’t quite what you wanted or were maybe too difficult to use, then you should definitely check out iSquint.
Converting videos with iSquint is super easy. Simply drag and drop the video file into the application, and click the Start button, and convert away! The application currently only supports the AVI and MPEG formats, but as these are the most popular formats use, I don’t see that as much of a problem. iSquint is available for Macs only, and completely free.
[Via Lifehacker]
Keep track of your torrents w/ TVTAD
Submitted on December 14th, 2005 by admin
Filed under Software and Video and Windows
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Like most of you, I have a few favorite TV shows I like to watch religiously, but with as hectic a schedule as I’ve had recently, it’s been a little difficult to keep up with the latest episode of anything, though fortunately, many of my favorite shows are in reruns right now. Regardless, if you won’t be home to see the latest episode of Lost (or whatever you watch), there are a few options: TiVo or broadcatching. Broadcatching is one of my favorite uses of BitTorrent in that you can subscribe to an RSS feed for a torrent site, create filters for your TV shows, then use a BitTorrent application to download a file automatically when it’s found in the feed.
The most popular way to do it is through Azureus with the RSS plugin, but there is a cool little application now which makes it a little easier called TVTAD. WIth TVTAD, just enter the names of the shows you watch regularly, and the application will scrape popular torrent sites for new episodes of that show. The program is free, and only available for Windows.
How to stream almost anything w/ VLC
Submitted on December 2nd, 2005 by admin
Filed under Audio and The Mac Side and Portables and Networking and Windows and Video and Linux
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One of my favorite media players to use, particularly for videos and DVDs is VLC, which is available for Windows, Macs, Linux, and a few other operating systems. It’s free, lightweight, and supports nearly any format you could possibly imagine. Because of the small resource usage and its ability to run even on PocketPCs, VLC makes a great tool to be able to stream video from one device to another. Imagine being on the road with a PocketPC, bored out of your mind…you could easily fire up your portable and connect to your PC using VLC and watch any movies or listen to any song you want, all for free. Engadget has posted a guide on how to stream almost anything with VLC which is sure to be very useful for a lot of you. If you use it, let us know how!
How to watch TV on your PSP
Submitted on December 2nd, 2005 by admin
Filed under Portables and Video
No. of comments (5)
The PlayStation Portable is a nice looking device for games, but Sony is really starting to push it more and more for its media capabilities. One thing you could do with your PSP, with a little bit of work, is watch television (because some of you just can’t live without it, huh?). Kotaku has put together a guide to watching TV on your PSP. It’s not free (or even all that cheap), but I’m sure some of you TV junkies would love to try it out.
Learn Mac OS X 10.4 with tutorial videos
Submitted on November 25th, 2005 by admin
Filed under Resources and The Mac Side and Video
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Looking at our server stats, about 10% of you are Mac users. Over the past year, tons of people have been switching from Windows PCs to Mac computers. While the basics of computer use remains the same across both platforms, Windows and OS X have different user interfaces and features which may take a little bit of time to learn if you’ve never either OS X before. Fortunately, I found some really useful video tutorials for OS X 10.4 which should help those of you who are recent switchers. The video tutorials deal everything OS X, from simple things like introductions to various applications, to the advanced search functionality of Spotlight. Definitely useful for all you Mac users.
