I like to watch TV. My computer is setup in front of my big screen so that when I’m editing photos or otherwise geeking out (which happens a lot) I can have the TV on in front of me. I watch a lot of live sports, especially NFL in the fall, the Tour de France in July, and the Olympics ever second year. And of course I watch NHL hockey. I’m Canadian…
But other than watching live sports, I live a very busy life and I normally can’t find the time to sit down to watch TV at the same time my favorite shows are on (prime time is an imaginary thing in my world). And I don’t like to watch most of the garbage that’s on outside of prime time which is generally when I do finally get to sit down to watch TV. So that’s why I like to watch pre-recorded shows such as those available for download from many, many resources on the internet. (I’ll leave it to you to Google “download TV” to find some of those sources.)
One major problem with downloadable media (including movies, music, TV shows, and even other web distributed content such as video feeds from YouTube, Vimeo, and Viddler) is that it comes in a wide variety of formats, qualities, and aspect ratios. And most people have no way of getting that content to their television without going through major hurdles.
There are many ways to get that content onto the TV, but until recently none of them were very easy. Over the years I’ve gradaully migrated from being forced to watch the content on my computer, to being able to burn VCD’s (video CD’s) or eventually DVD’s to watch on my DVD player attached to the TV. Burning discs has never been fast, and for most people it involves converting the downloadable AVI files (also known as DivX or Xvid files) into a DVD format that the DVD player and the TV could recognize. This can take hours even for a typical episode of a TV show. This got better when DVD players started to be able to play DivX and Xvid files without conversion (even now those players are pretty rare), and better yet when you could plug in a USB thumb drive containing your content (extremely rare). Unfortunately these players are only as good as the firmware they come with, and they typically don’t keep up with the newer media codecs. That results in media files that can’t be played on the player or that pop and skip and lose synchronization between the audio and the video. Not to mention that it can still take significant time to copy the files from the computer to the device.
What I’ve really wanted for a long time is to be able to directly connect my computer to my Home Theatre AV system using my local area network. I really don’twant to have a separate computer in my living room (ie. a media center PC), and I don’t want to be limited to the codecs that Apple Supports on the AppleTV.
There didn’t seem to be an ideal solution until I recently heard about the Popcorn Hour
products, which belong to a class of devices known as “Networked Media Tanks” (NMT). These are uber gadgets for the uber geek, and they do exactly what I want: they play almost any visual media format I want to display on my TV; they connect to my network, wired or wirelessly; they are very small and very quiet; they work. As a bonus they are basically small computers (running an OS variant of Linux), so they are infinitely customizeable and they can be seen and controlled by the other computers on your network, and even from over the internet. They are UPnP and DLNA compatible (if you don’t know what that means, don’t worry about it; it’s a good thing) and they can stream media to AND from your other network devices. In short, they are awesome!
I recently picked up a Popcorn Hour PCH-A-110. It came in a nice box with everything I needed to hook it up to my TV, including an HDMI cable (it works fine with standard def TV’s too). I added an old laptop hard drive that I had lying around (it will accept most 2.5″ or 3.5″ SATA HDD’s, but you don’t even need to install one if you don’t need it), and I plugged it in to my network with an ethernet cable. I’m still working on getting it connected wirelessly, but that’s not a big deal for me right away. In a very short time I had it up and running on my network and I was able to watch TV shows and movies directly from the other computers on the network. I was even able to watch some episodes of MASH that I have in Matroska (.mkv) format that up until now I’ve only been able to watch on my computer using the VideoLan VLC media player.
The audio and video quality is amazing and I’m extremely happy. My favorite part is that I was able to copy all my TV shows and movies over to the internal HDD for instant access, I’ve got utorrent setup to automatically download new episodes of my favorite TV shows onto it, and I’ve programmed my Logitech Harmony Remote
to control it. It fits seamlessly into my existing Home Theatre setup and my life just got a little bit easier. I’m a very happy Popcorn Hour owner.
I sell digital images on DVD to many of my portrait photography clients and all of my commercial photography clients. I always provide those images on a printable DVD [ Amazon: Taiyo Yuden/JVC WaterShield DVD's ] that I print directly to with my Epson Artisan printer [ Amazon: Epson Artisan 835 Color Inkjet All-In-One ]. I am incredibly happy with the results and they look very professional.
It turns out that the Epson printer driver requires that you use an A4 (US Letter) size print template that has the disc image positioned in just the right place. And to further complicate it Epson uses “Type 1″ and “Type 2″ disc trays that require very different placement of the template on the page. I created Photoshop templates for both Tray types and have provided them here for free for you to use.
