Shopping Time

Well after thinking about the specification I have been looking around the various web and high street stores to see what is available and to also learn more about what I am trying to do.

Media Software - I have been looking at other experts blogs who are supporters of both Linux and Windows. You sometimes have to read between the lines of what various proponents are saying, but given that I want to try and integrate all of my media and I do not want to do much "under the hood" stuff in the programs, plus it has to work with DB, who lives with me and controls me for the most part, I have decided to go the Windows route with Windows Media Center(or one of its offshoots) I have WMC on my Win 7 laptop, so I have been trying to see what it can do.

I have come up against various obstacles  but generally it seems to be reasonably integrated. I set up folders called My Photos, My Videos, My Movies, My Music in the Win 7 Libraries. I copied in 8 standard movies in the DVD environment, VOB's and IFO's, mainly jpg photos, MP3 music and .MOV videos taken on my camera.

WMC did handle this all right although there are plenty of little niggles to overcome.

Music has a fair number of meta tag problems and WMPlayer or Center can't really sort them out. Get some variation in the meta tag and WMP/C will insist in filing all the variations separately, so you get multiple Album entries with one or two songs under each. WMP allows you to change tags BUT in some circumstances it is unable to actually change the tag at all. I use MP3Tag and a WMP addon called Tag Editor Plus which lets you manage the tags by right clicking individual or multiples of MP3's in WMP. Despite all this the only route to salvation in the toughest cases was to use MP3Tag to delete all the tags and re-populate. That has always done the trick for me.

Movie art was also a little bit sticky. DVD's carry their own art, but it is not accessible on a hard drive, so all of the entries in WMC were pretty blank with no synopsis art or anything. The solution for me was to use a free product called DVD Library Manager. Once you set this up it produces a list of your Movies on the hard drive and lets you select standard sites, Amazon, IMDB to download all the info and store it for you in a dvdid.xml and as long as you kept this in a flat folder with the art and movie, then it all looks great in WMC.

Music and Photos seemed to go without hitch, just a matter of folder organisation that suits you best.

I have discovered that Microsoft have abandoned internet TV streaming support on WMC, so I had a look at XBMC. People have been using XBox for streaming and TV for some while so it may be an avenue to follow. I downloaded it and it runs OK and you can see it is related to to WMC. At first sight it looks to me that I would have to do more work to integrate all the things that I want in term of searching for suitable addons to make it do what I want. I will look at it further and some of the other options that are available as I get building.

WMC seems to be a nightmare if you let it search and source all over your network, I had to stop it doing that sharing stuff it does.

Anyway I am just off to donate blood and then down to the Emirates to see what Suarez & Liverpool can do to us.