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In: Home Theater
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Last week, Sonos released software revision 2.0. This is the third time they’ve released an update in the ~1.5 years I’ve owned one. What impresses me most is that I’ve made requests in their user suggestion forum and they have implemented many of them. Customers speak and Sonos listens. Too bad more companies are not like this (I’ve been complaining to Philips about their omission of ProntoProNG button backlights for a couple of years now and no change.) One of the coolest new features is integrated Real Rhapsody Service. Previous support was barely functional – it used a networked PC running Rhapsody as an intermediary.Read More →

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In: Home Theater
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I no longer subscribe to any magazines that offer reviews of home theater-type equipment and I don’t generally read online review sites either. Why? Because, I’m sick of reading worthless and inaccurate information and that doesn’t help me pick a product and understand its limitations. I’m convienced the only way to get a useful opinion is through aggregation of forum posts, where multiple individuals can give multiple opinions to allow once to reach their own, overall consensus. This methodology is reinforced by the book The Wisdom of Crowds (Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few) by James Surowiecki. Paperback link, Audio book link .Read More →

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In: Home Theater
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Great, after spending hours and hours ripping almost all of my DVDs to my server, I find a firmware patch that allows my DVD drive to read movies at about 10 times the speed.  Apparently there is a RipLock feature on most DVD drives that prevents high-speed reading of DVD movies.  I guess this is great if you're watching a movie, because the drive is spinning very slowly, but not when copying.  AnyDVD has a feature to slow down a drive in software, so if I really wanted it slow during movie playback, I can easily set it back to "slow" that way. Anyway, hereRead More →

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In: Home Theater
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The story in question: "The DVD War Against Consumers" on BusinessWeek.com David H. Holtzman of BusinessWeek: You need to do some more research. This guy has no idea what AACS does and I'm surprised this article was even published.  For starters, he needs to go to wikipedia.com and search for AACS . It has nothing to do with downscaling non-HDCP video outputs.  It is an advanced content sharing system that enables the exact functionality he is championing. It allows users to distribute the content of HD-DVD/Blu-Ray disc across multiple devices for personal use.  These copies are encrypted, so they can't be shared widely on downloadRead More →

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In: Events & Travel, Home Theater
With: 3 Comments

As soon as I walked into the theater and glanced up at the trailers on the screen, I knew that I wasn’t watching film.  I immediately suspected that I was looking at the output from a digital projector. Digital projection was first introduced in many cities a few years earlies, but not in Indianapolis.  I wondered how digital would compare to film and if it really was an enhancement or just a method of lowering distribution costs.  Make no mistake, the image is superior to film. What I immediately noticed was the vivid colors on the screen.  Images were more saturated without being over-saturated.  IRead More →

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In: Web
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Say you have a brother-in-law (a.k.a. bother-in-law) and he is a web developer and he develops almost exclusively for Microsoft products. You know, the type that develops those web pages at work that are only viewable in Internet Explorer because they are not even close to being W3C compliant. What is the best way to get him to see the light and switch to Firefox? I’m not sure this is the best way to present the argument, but here are some thoughts: Advantages of the browser itself: Tabbed browsing – once you start using tabs that open with a center mouse button click, you can’tRead More →

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In: Web
With: 3 Comments

I've been working on a branding project that required consistent use of color throughout every aspect of the company.  The specified standard was a Pantone color.  I figured I'd search the web and find a color equivalency  converter.  I found several, and most all of them gave different results.  So I called Pantone and got the exact HEX (html) / RGB conversion values.  It turns out, only one of the color conversion sites was correct.  And the winner for best Pantone color conversion goes to: SEO Consultants http://www.seoconsultants.com/css/colors/conversion/Read More →

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In: Home Theater
With: 102 Comments

As I mentioned in a previous post, I’ve build a media server to store all of my music and movies for playback throughout my house. I decided to store everything the original, lossless format. This means that music is stored at full CD bit rate, and more significantly, movies are backed-up with all menus and extras in the original file format. Although I could save a bunch of space by compressing everything to a different format, I want to keep everything in the original format. The drawback is that this requires quite a bit of disk space, more than I originally anticipated. I justed addedRead More →

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In: Web
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I’ve been looking for easy-to-use software to convert DVDs to XVID files to play on my Treo 650 (using the excellent The Core Pocket Media Player). I was about to purchase Lathe from Omniquiti when I found out that it is based on Pocket Divx Encoder, which uses GLP (link to license). In the Lathe forums, those who have purchased Lathe report that also states in the help file that it is distributed under GPL. Unfortunately, according to the thread, they have basically refused to release the codes by ignoring all requests. This is similar to the tactic taken by Simple Devices, as I reportedRead More →

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In: Home Theater
With: 27 Comments

Update 2010-Jan-21: For playback of FLAC in Windows 7, use either the xiph.org Directshow Filters or the Shark007 Codec Pack. The Lossless Audio Blog is reporting that FLAC lossless audio files can now be played in Windows Media Center 2005.  This is great news, because every music player I own now supports FLAC, the format I use to encode all of my music files.  So I can listen to my FLAC music files at my PC using dbPowerAmp or one of many players, around the house on my Sonos, in my car with my PhatNoise PhatBox, and now in my home theater with Windows MediaRead More →