McWilliams’ World

Just got an email from Microsoft stating that I got in on the New Xbox Experience (NXE) preview program.  Should be available to me by Nov 8th.

Sweet!

I’ll be sure to test out streaming from Netflix too! Unfortunately I just don’t have the HDD space to install games to my 20gb hdd (thanks a lot Rock Band!) . I’ve been looking around for deals on a 120gb upgrade… but that’s not in my plans at the moment.

I’m just excited to get in early and try out the new dashboard!

I finally made the full switch to web based email. For the longest time I used Outlook to retrieve my email along with SpamBayes to sort out my spam (at least 97%). It took longer than normal to pull down mail, especially when people still find it necessary to forward 5mb+ videos via email; Hello! YouTube! I just got sick of it.  So I started testing Yahoo and GMail web mail clients. Although Yahoo has a pretty snazzy interface, GMail just gets it done for me; simple and to the point with the features I need.

I set GMail to pull my ISP mail – worked great. After a number of weeks of playing around, I finally jumped into my GoDaddy account and had my mail sent to my GMail account permanently. GMail still checks my ISP account in case any mail comes to that box but it will be low volume.

One drawback, I can’t get at GMail at work. I used a web based email service with one of the web hosts I go through, but for some odd reason, I can’t get it to connect to GMail. So I found that you can get at your email via RSS. NewsGator’s FeedDemon allows you to access secured accounts with login credentials, so I can at least see what mail’s coming in throughout the day.

So now I have GMail as my homepage, and I see a nice and virtually spam free inbox. No annoying downloading, no worrying about loosing email to a system crash, just quick, safe access. I should have made the switch a long time ago.

In previous posts I’ve been telling you that I’ve been dumping my DVD’s onto my PC for streaming to my Xbox 360s (I have two).

Right now I think I have around 50 movies dumped at around 1.5gb to 2.5gb each on my new Maxtor 500gb external drive. We’ve watched a few movies over the last few days and they played over my 802.1g wireless network without hiccup. The movies looked as good as the DVD version without the need to find a disc and put it in the player. Very cool.

Converting, as stated before, is lengthy. I’m guessing I’m able to convert probably 6 8 movies a day – I’m going to for quality rather than size (although size is a concern). So HandBrake has been chewing away, non-stop for the last week or two.

The tools I’m using? DVDFab 5 (to rip the movie to my hdd), HandBrake to convert to an MP4 movie and the Zune software to stream to the Xbox 360. I’d use Windows Media Center but the way I have my wireless network setup – Media Center won’t work plus I don’t think MC will stream H.264 MP4 (correct me if I’m wrong).

Some wishes I have:

• The ability to embed DVD cover art. Right now, all that is displayed is a frame from the movie. I’ve read reports that MP3Tag can do this but I’ve been unsuccessful in doing so. It’d be nice if HandBrake handled this or someone turns me onto a good tool that does it.
• Parental Controls or the ability to tag movies as to their rating via the Xbox/Zune. Right now all movies are available to view from the menu. It’s not like I have a ton of inappropriate movies for my kids, but there are some movies I’d rather my kids not watch. Coupling a rating system with the Xbox 360′s parental controls would be nice.
• Much faster encoding. But once it’s done, I guess I won’t have to do it again.
• Sightly better interface for HandBrake. It still has a lot of exposed advanced features that I’d rather not see and have that stuff tucked away under an “Advanced” button/tab or something.

Storage may not be an issue either. Although I think 500gb should be enough to hold my most viewed movies, I managed to score another 500gb drive (for a total of 1 terabyte for those not good with math) free via www.externaldriveoffer.com/. You just sign up for a Discover credit card, get approved and activate it by making a purchase, balance transfer or cash advance and they’ll ship you the drive (6-10 weeks after activation). I’m patient. I can wait. I waited nearly a year for $1000 gift card, I can wait a few weeks for a hard drive.

So far I’m very pleased with the results and the extra flexibility. After the Xbox 360′s fall update I’m strongly considering signing up for Netflix and being able to stream unlimited movies through my Xbox and get DVD’s for about $9/mo.

I’ve been playing around with streaming DVD movies to my Xbox 360. The challenge is finding a decent, simple DVD converter that’ll give great quality as well as small file sizes. I would be great to have all my movies accessible from a menu without having to find a disc. I could potentially eliminate the need for a DVD player (almost).

I’ve tried almost 10 different converters. DVD Fab and DVDShrink are my main apps to get the DVD to the hard drive, but you still need something to convert it to a format that the Xbox 360 and either the Zune software or Media Center recognize.

I think I found my answer in HandBrake. Fairly simple to use. Has presets for the most common applications – especially Xbox 360. Just select what you’re format your aiming for and let it go. In about an hour or two, you’ll have about a 1.5gb movie file ready to stream to your Xbox. I wish there was something faster. If you know of a free, simple solution that’s fast, let me know.

I tested out one movie last night and it look really good. I don’t think I could have told the difference between the actual DVD and the streamed copy.

I network my 360′s wirelessly over 802.1g, so occasionally I had a few hiccups – but I think that may have been from my system chewing on converting a few other movies. If it becomes problematic I may consider running a cable to go direct – but that involves getting into the attic to drop the line, etc… not sure I want to do that.

Where does the 500gb hard drive come into play? I’ve been patiently waiting for hard drives to come down in price and ideally I would have liked to pick a 500gb external for $50 I don’t think it would have happened, so I managed to pick one up for about $73 through Staples.com. Based on a tip from FatWallet.com I found a Maxtor 500gb external drive for $95. I bought a $25 off $75 coupon code for about $1 and BANG! $75. Not bad.

I currently have a 160gb external that I built for about $20 but that’s starting to run low on space with the amount of music I’ve been scarfing up lately so I need some extra headroom if I’m going to start dumping movies. 500gb should tide me over.

I’ve been on a bit of a new music quest. I’m getting tiered of my current music collection and need to add some new blood to the mix. I’ve been trying to buy all the Trouble CD’s and managed to pick up three of them (Psalm 9, The Skull, Plastic Green Head). I’ve been watching eBay for the others but every time I do find them – bidding continues to go over and above what I’m willing to spend – even if they are rare/hard-to-find. I also managed to snarf up a few older CD’s I’ve been meaning to pickup; Wish For Eden, Sometime Sunday, and Jacob’s Trouble.

In my search for Trouble CD’s I stumbled upon Supershine; a cross between King’s X and Trouble and that’s exactly what you get. It’s a 2000 release; a collaboration/side-project between Doug Pinnick of King’s X (bass, vocals) and Bruce Franklin of Trouble (guitars). It’s a great listen with a lot of heavy grooves and driving guitars. I think its overall sound/production is similar to King’s X’s Dogman CD; fat and heavy. If you’re into either of those bands, you owe it to yourself and pick it up – got mine for under $5 off Amazon.com.

I wouldn’t put it quite like that; yet. Since FeedDemon is free from NewsGator, I thought I’d give it a spin. So for the last week or so I’ve exclusively used FeedDemon for all my RSS needs.

I’ve been a Bloglines user for quite a while. It was my browser’s home page. It’s were I started on the web every time. I like how it works and looks. I didn’t have to install anything – it was just available.

I tried NewsGator’s web based RSS service once or twice; it just never felt right for some reason.  So I stuck with Bloglines. I knew of FeedDemon from Nick Bradbury (the author); I use his TopStyle CSS editor for my web development needs – so in following that product I also heard of FeedDemon. At the time it was a purchased program. I just couldn’t figure out why anyone would want to pay for a RSS reader with so many free options on market. Sure it has some offline features and other customizable do-dad’s…but what’s the big deal?

So then came the announcement that FeedDemon was being offered for free. I downloaded and gave it a shot. It allowed me to connect directly to Bloglines (nice), import or access my Bloglines subscriptions (very nice). It has several reading options and layouts, pre-fetching of feed content and pod-casts, alerts of feed updates, and if you want, convert your subscriptions to FeedDemon/NewsGator. If you do convert your subscriptions your feeds will be synced between FeedDemon and the web based interface. Pretty dang cool.

For a while I just used it to connect to Bloglines, but after a while I figured I’d just convert my feeds and go FeedDemon whole-hog. So far so good. I have it installed at work and at home. I love the interface, the features and functionality. I may just leave Bloglines for good. We’ll see. Thanks Nick and NewsGator!

A while back Jake Ludington posted a contest for a copy of Halo 3 Legendary Edition. All that was needed was a link to Jake on your web site and to let him know that it was there.

I just received an email from Jake stating that I’m the lucky winner! Saaaaaaaweeeet!

I’ll post pictures once I get it in my hands!

I love winning stuff and this is one hell of a thing to win. Thanks Jake!

Received our two Zunes this morning yesterday via FedEx that I bought off of Woot.com for $99/each – a smmmmmmmmokin’ good deal if you ask me. Let me tell you, I shared the same enthusiasm as everyone else that got in on the deal. Everyone was clamoring to get tracking info and counting down till the units arrived.

Ours arrived in perfect condition – if the refurbished sticker or refurbished notice wasn’t on the box, you’d never know these weren’t new. Absolutely flawless.

I spend most of the day ripping A LOT of my Cd’s that I haven’t got around to dumping. I still used my trusty old Quintessential Player to rip – It just works nice. I’m also going through and cleaning up all the ID tags on my music so they’re recognized better in the Zune software. Again Quintessential Player helps out by using GraceNote to find the track information and apply it en mass.

I’m sooo stoked I got these Zunes! They rock!