McWilliams’ World

Just received a notice from www.externaldriveoffer.com that my free 500gb WD My Book External Hard Drive has been confirmed and that I should expect it within the next 10 weeks.

All I had to do was sign up for a Discover More card and activate it by making a purchase. What did I buy? I bought some cheap 360 games off GameStop.com; The Darkness, Prey, Spider-Man 3, PGR 3. To total was just a smidge over $25 after 16% off (coupon: GAG16). I also qualified me for free shipping since I squeaked over the $25 limit. They probably aren’t the greatest of games but getting four okay games for $25… you can’t go wrong, plus the added gamerscore is also a bonus.

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.

The renewal for one of my domains, www.GamerBar360.com, came due this week. So, I dug around FatWallet and found a nice 30% off coupon and renewed for 2 years.

I recently started gathering ideas for a new version of GamerBar 360 offering greater flexibility in sizes and features. When and if that’ll ever happen is still up in the air. I have a habit of getting a good idea, starting it and then get bored. We’ll see.

Okay, I’ve had it. I wasted hours this weekend trying out other MP4 video encoders such as AutoMKV, MeGUI and nothing compares to HandBreak’s ease of use. I’m no video expert – nor do I want to be. I don’t want to know what all the terminology is; I just want to plug in my video’s, choose the target format, some very basic quality settings (or just choose a profile that is right for what I’m doing) and hit go. HandBreak does that. It hides most of the mumbo-jumbo.

The programs mentioned above have unnecessarily difficult setups, settings, and operations. Most required additional programs or files to be downloaded and placed in certain directories. Ach… too complicated. Fail!

Only complaint is that the process takes f-o-r-e-v-e-r! Nearly 2+ hrs per video. One thought is that it’s doing a two pass conversion; meaning that it runs through the movie twice to get the best possible quality. I may just try a single pass and see what happens if there is any difference ’cause it’s just too slow. The nice thing is that I can queue up x number of movies and let it chew.

Okay, I admit it. I simply played King Kong to get the easy 1000 gamerscore points. One of my boy’s friend left his copy of King Kong here and since I had time this weekend, thought I’d plop it in and rack up the points. Took me a little over 5hrs to complete.

But I’ll admit, it was a pretty fun game. It wasn’t overly complicated or frustrating. You pretty much followed the plot of the movie so there wasn’t the need for looting, upgrading items, etc.. It was just simply play through the movie. Most of the puzzles involved finding handles to turn cranks that opened doors, clearing brush with fire to get at certain areas, and having Kong move obstacles out of doorway (man there are a lot of doors in the jungle!). Not too hard. Sometimes they changed some of the puzzles up by adding a waterfall that would extinguish your burning stick – so you had to find another way (usually by throwing it to the next section and running to get it). Occasionally you get to play as Kong and smash the crap out of stuff like villagers, T-Rexes, and other smaller dinos. And yes Kong still dies – so it’s very anticlimactic.

The game is dark (as in the amount of light), however that’s how I’d expect the jungle to be. It does add to the atmosphere. As for graphics, nothing to write home about but I did like the brontosauruses and the Kong fight sequences.

Overall a fun game but I’d have felt cheated out of $60 to complete it in about 5hrs with virtually no replay value. It’s been out long enough and if you have a friend that still has a copy – 1000 gamerscore points can be yours in short order.

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.

Holy crap! Finally the last gift card I’m waiting for has shipped July 30th.

The gift card is a $1000 Visa Gift Card I got for doing 4 measly offers on TrustedRewards.com. I finished and was confirmed to ship on August 17 of 2007. It’s been nearly a year in wait. For the most part, the majority of freebie gifts I’ve received took at most six months. This one takes the cake.

My wife will be happy – since I’m giving the gift card to her – nice guy that I am. But in actuality she owes me about $150 or so since she had to dip into my last $500 gift card for her camping trip. She was hoping to have her $1k before the trip – didn’t pan out like that.

I still have a number of games to pick up through the end of the year; Rockband 2, Fable 2, Fallout 3, Gears of War 2, Guitar Hero 4 (wow…lots of numbers after the game titles). That should wipe out my stash.

I also have some cash coming in from a web design/programming gig I recently did but that’ll go toward some birthday gifts and a 500gb hard drive I just bought as well as my drum kit (thinking of picking up another drum pad). We’ll see.

But I’m glad this gift card finally shipped! Should have it by early next week – maybe even this Saturday.

[UPDATE]

Received it today; Aug 2, 08 in the form of two $500 American Express Gift Cards.

I spent most of the day putting my drum kit back together. It’s been a loooong time since I did something like this. With my acoustic kit I made setup and tear down into a science. But now with the eDrums it’s a bit different. When I first got the set, I didn’t put much effort into placement and positioning. It was functional but not optimal. This time, I thought it through and came up with a pretty good configuration that feels really comfortable.

I took pictures as I was working so you can see the progress.

Here’s the end result. Check out the rest on my Flickr site.