Jmilley.com

Managing and organizing media in such a way to make it useful has always been a tricky situation.  Having my music and videos accessible away from my PC has always been a big hassle.  Either you burned the video to DVD (a lengthy process) or hooked a computer to the TV (a hassle).  Playing back my music without having to put CD’s in the machine either involved hooking an MP3 player to the TV, or using the DVD player to play back a CD full of songs. Now I’ve changed the way I do things, and I’m currently pretty happy with my multimedia setup. 

I have a decent TV (32″ I think) that works well for the size of room I have, and I use a Logitech sound system that I originally purchased as computer speakers (a 4.1 system) that has good enough sound.  For playback now I use an Xbox running XBMC, the Xbox Media Centre.  This application can pull media from multiple sources, including windows file shares.  In my office I have a desktop machine that acts as my server.  I currently have close to 750gigs of storage, and it is slowly filling up with TV shows and ripped albums/movies.  This is more than 6000 times the hard drive capacity of my first PC, some 15 years ago.

Now since I work in an office at a computer all day I’d like to have access to my music collection, without having to duplicate it on my work computer, or dragging around external devices.  I was recently turned onto Slim Devices (recently purchased by Logitech) Slim Server and Squeezebox devices.   The Slim Server runs on the machine that stores your Media, and the Squeezebox is a hardware device that connects to your network and streams the music to your stereo.  The Squeezebox can control your music, and let you search,etc.  If you don’t have one of these hardware devices you can download the SoftSqueeze program that emulates the Device on a PC.

So at work I run SoftSqueeze, point it to my home server (through a dynamic DNS address) and stream my music to wherever I am.  It sounds great, and I have no issues with skipping, etc.

The only thing I need to figure out now is how to efficiently rip my DVD’s to the computer so I can play them back at acceptable quality without using all the harddrive space for just a few movies.

Computers are becoming more and more a part of every second of everyday…  It’s amazing how much advancements have come in the last 15 years or so.

Jon

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