Complete Video Geekout

Fair warning -- this entry is not for the faint of heart. This is going to be a whole lot of geeky crap that nobody in our family will really care about. My only purpose in writing it is to document what I've discovered in the past few weeks, and perhaps it will help someone else who's trying to do something similar. You've been warned.

As I mentioned a while back, I've begun streaming shows to our Samsung LED TV, which is DLNA capable. This allows us to easily select a movie on our PC, right click on "Play To" and select the TV. It's great when we need a few minutes to get ready in the morning, and we want the kids to watch a few minutes of something. And it's easier than resetting the PC to output to the TV, using it as a monitor. The DLNA stuff just spits the movie over the network and plays the movie on the TV automatically. No channel changing, no video card settings, nothing. It just works.

This worked so well, that I decided to also do something similar with our TiVo. I wanted a program to stream DVDs to our TiVo without actually downloading the movie to the box. (Downloading is fine, but it's slow and fills up the already tight hard drive on the TiVo.)

I discovered a great piece of add-on software for the TiVo called Streambaby. This allows me to do exactly what I wanted -- stream DVDs and movie files to the TiVo. This is a great find, because it allows us to not need the actual DVD discs for the kids to watch their movies. I can box the DVDs up and never find them on the kitchen floor covered with peanut butter ever again.

So what I did initially was create a DVD image of each movie using DVDFab. I then used either VOB2MPG or VideoReDo to create an MPEG file of the DVD movie. I could then stream this MPEG-2 file (including the Dolby Digital surround sound) to the TiVo, and it worked great with the DLNA on the other TV. I would also use Handbrake to create an H.264/MPEG-4 file with AAC audio for the iPods using the iPod preset. (There's really no way to create one version of each movie which looks good on a 61" TV and a 3" iPod. This doesn't really bother me though, as the iPod files are very small in the end.)

The downside is that this process takes up tons of hard drive space -- several GBs per movie. And while I'd love to keep perfect images of all of our DVDs, I really don't have the money to buy scads of hard drives for our DVDs and CDs. So I need to compress.

I decided to start converting the original MPEG-2 DVD files for the TVs into H.264 files using Handbrake, similar to what I do for the iPods. Only I would use a different level of compression so that the videos still look great on the big screen. I also decided that I still wanted to preserve the Dolby Digital (AC3) surround sound, so I used "AC3 passthrough" mode rather than converting the audio to AAC, as one would usually do in an MPEG-4 file.

Since I started doing this, I've encountered several problems. The first was that I have some DVDs with 2 channel LPCM audio. What I discovered is that the TiVo can't play LPCM audio, so I needed to convert this to something else usable, namely AAC. This worked great.

The second problem I discovered is that I could not play my new MPEG-4 videos with AC3 using the DLNA features of our Samsung TV. In researching this, I discovered that Windows Media Player would play the video, but not the audio in these files. Apparently using AC3 within an MPEG-4 file is a somewhat strange configuration. It was started by Apple who packaged movies in iTunes this way, but now it's becoming more common.

In looking for a way around this, I knew that Streambaby on the TiVo would only look at the first audio track in a file, so this HAD to be the AC3 track if I wanted my surround sound. So I got clever and tried using Handbrake to put the AC3 track first and also add a second AAC audio track to each file to make the DLNA stuff (and Media Player) happy. I thought this had worked great, as the files played fine in Media Player. But unfortunately the Samsung TV still wouldn't accept the file. D'oh.

In the end, what I've decided to do is use AAC audio on DVDs without surround sound -- lots of kids movies are just good old stereo, so this is fine and plays on everything. For the bigger productions which feature surround sound, I'm sticking to my MPEG-4/H.264 with AC3 sound. This works great on the TiVo, and if they want to watch these on the Samsung TV in the other room, they can do so by playing the movie out to the TV using the TV as a monitor. It's not as convenient as using the DLNA connection, but it works.

So for anyone who is interested, here is my basic command line in Handbrake for creating Streambaby-capable movies for the TiVo:

handbrakeCLI -i "Kids Movie.mpg" -f mp4 -O -e x264 -b 2000 -a 1 -E ac3
-x ref=2:bframes=2:me=umh --strict-anamorphic -v -o "Kids Movie.mp4"

Basically this says, "Take the MPEG-2 file, use H.264 to compress it at 2000 kb/s (because the TiVo likes a constant bitrate), optimize it for streaming, pass along the AC3 surround sound, and spit out a shiny, new MPEG-4 file." The only real variations on this are changing the "ac3" to "faac" for the 2-channel stereo movies where I want to use AAC, and if the movie was originally NOT widescreen, I take out the "--strict-anamorphic." I won't go into what that means, but you can read about it here.

In the end, this compresses my movies by more than 50%, and they still look perfect on the TiVo. I could probably even reduce the 2000 kb/s to something smaller, but much like my music, I'd rather not see/hear any reminders that I've compressed my files.

Hopefully eventually the Samsung TV will let me pass an MPEG-4 file using AC3 audio, and this solution will work perfectly for every scenario. But for now, it works with Streambaby on the TiVo, which is where I need it to work 99% of the time.

And the kids can always watch the 2-channel stereo files via DLNA on the Samsung TV, or use the Samsung TV as a monitor for the other files by playing them using a video player (like VLC) which can play MPEG-4 files using AC3 audio. Either way, I can make this configuration work for any movie.

Hopefully some other poor schmuck will find this via Google and save himself some time. And if you read through this looking for pictures of the kids, don't say I didn't warn you.

Lucky Number 13 and Geek Toys

The other day I was entering Qdoba when I saw a young lady wearing a coat which prominently featured the number 13 on the back and sleeve. I thought to myself, "Hmm...what could possibly cause someone to put a 13 on their coat? NASCAR fan? Wilt Chamberlain fan (or offspring)?"

It then occurred to me that it was a letter jacket and she was graduating in 2013. How in the crap are kids graduating in 2013 now? I'm pretty sure '13 will never mean 2013 to me. I will always think of men with handlebar mustaches riding bikes with giant front wheels whilst smoking pipes when I think of '13 (although a brief search on Google suggests that perhaps I'm off by 30 years, but hey, it's my memory...don't mess with it.)

In other Hawkins family news, we finally got our new PC at home, which has resulted in endless tinkering by yours truly in an effort to get it working properly. I used to enjoy the geek thrill of setting up and playing with a new PC. Now I just find it to be a time sink away from the real things which interest me in life, namely sleep and booze.

I think I've finally got everything up and running again, but I'm still finding my way around Windows 7. I find myself frequently saying nonsensical things like "Dagnabbit" and "Doh!" and "Screw you Microsoft."

But in between these things, I have discovered some cool new stuff. One is the ability to "throw" movies from my computer to the network enabled TV in our bedroom. This is much cooler and easier to setup than I expected.

I've seen ads on TV for this, and you can read about it here on Microsoft's site. And while the quality isn't quite what I would want to watch a full movie over, it works great for showing the kids a quick episode of Bob the Builder whilst trying to shave. (Nothing quite kills a good shave like a small Chinese person clawing at you to pick her up.)

Hopefully I'm done tinkering for a while, and I can go back to the way I spent my evenings at the beginning of January when our old computer died -- lying on the couch watching Tivo while my kids try and start a fire in the kitchen.

Password = Joke

We have several computers running Windows here at work, and following our move over the past few weeks, we've discovered that nobody knows the login passwords to these machines.

At our old building, these particular machines were never turned off, but we had to turn them off to move them. Once we got to our new site, we turned them on only to discover that the holder of the password left the company long ago.

So I set out to figure out how to deal with these things. My initial thought was that I'd have to put in new hard drives, install a new copy of Windows, and start from scratch, but I did a little Internet work, and here is what I discovered.

In under two minutes of searching, I was able to find a program claiming to remove the passwords for me, which I downloaded and burned on CD.

Two minutes later, I booted up with this CD, and approximately one minute later, I had removed the passwords on the first computer. You must be joking.

You mean to tell me that I have to create a new password every 3 minutes, and it has to be approximately 35 characters long and include at least 3 "x's" and all of these -- $*)ß↔íù at least once, only so any half wit with an Internet connection could come in with a CD and bypass it? Nice.

Digital TV transition

Given that I work in the television industry, the upcoming transition to digital TV is a big deal, to say the least. The video below has been floating around work, and it cracks me up every time.

Papaw -- This one's for you. You can thank me at Christmas for having had a hand in creating this mess. :-)

Irony

We just went all Amish up in here getting rid of our cable and all, and you know what happens the very same day? My husband walks home with ANOTHER huge television. That makes three HDTV monstrosities in our home. He told me he decided for the middle sized version as--get this--he didn't think I'd want another big one and he'll be bringing home a smaller panel from his own project soon. The mid sized version is well over a 40" set, making it in female terms: GIANORMOUS!!!! We're going to have a huge TV in every room before you know it. Bret's dream. My nightmare. I know that most people don't complain about free, state-of-the-art, HDTV television sets, but there are limits. At least in girl world. We'd give them to you if we could, but we can't, so don't bother offering to "ease Erin's stress" by taking one off our hands. If only it were that easy. Ah, the life of a wife married to a TV enginerd.

Lemme 'splain de cable

Ok, so let me tell MY side of the story regarding us disconnecting ourselves from the local cable company teet.

Over the past few weeks, I've been doing a little internal market research regarding what we watch on television here in the Hawkins household. (Since I work in the TV industry, I should be billing these hours, but alas.)

What I noticed is that we watch 90% of our television on the DVR (the Tivo-like hard drive box provided by our cable company, for those of you not television addicted.) Of the shows that we choose to record on the DVR, 90% are from the local broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC). The other 10% are home improvement shows, and that show on TLC about the "little people" (which I can only assume Erin watches because of some sort of weird reverse psychology for tall people).

The second part of my little survey involved an analysis of our monthly cable bill. We spend approximately $80 per month on cable and another $20 per month on Netflix. What bothers me about this is that we spend around $100 per month on TV and movies, and the vast majority of the programming we watch for the price of cable can be received for FREE over the air.

So I started doing a little research on our options. First off, the cable company will not let us keep our DVR box without a full cable subscription, and since we love watching the shows when we want to watch them, getting rid of the DVR is out. So I needed an alternative.

This led me to start looking at Tivo, the original DVR genies. Tivo has a high definition box available for $253 on Amazon, and this box will allow you to download movies from Amazon, which may even lead to us eliminating or greatly reducing our Netflix subscription. The Tivo box also has some other cool bells and whistles, including the ability to move shows off to your home computer where you can burn them to DVD or put them on your iPod. Plus, the Tivo service is now only between $8 and $12 per month, depending on how long a contract you sign.

So the end result is that I'm reducing our $100 per month to at least around $30, and maybe even less depending on how well the Amazon download service works. I'll keep everyone posted on how this little experiment goes. Just know that we're not going totally Amish here. Just a little.

Bloggrrrr

The other night, the gentle whirr of my wife trying to suck air through her recently congested nasal passages was unable to lull me to sleep. Therefore I decided to get up and find something to do to make me comotose enough to fall asleep.

I decided to poke around on the web and check out some blogs by friends and family. After checking in on our family out west (who, by the way, we sorely miss and wish we got to see more often) and my good friends up in Chicago (who we also miss, but get to see slightly more regularly) I made a very dumb mistake.

This is one of those dumb mistakes that I, a seasoned computer engineer, should have known to avoid. I started clicking the little "Next Blog" button that appears up on the upper left side of our blog. DON'T PRESS IT... Wait for me to finish my tale of woe.

I started pressing that little button which takes you to random blogs within the "blogger.com" domain. At first, this was fascinating. I read some news about a guy wrecking his car in Chile. I saw some political dissent pages from Russia. I read multiple pages concerned about the situation in Iraq. I saw multiple pages in Japanese which were pink with lots of Hello Kitty stuff strewn about. (What IS it with Asians and Hello Kitty?) I saw a couple of pages that looked similar to ours...pictures of kids with dashingly handsome fathers. (Similar to Nate, Riley, and myself, right guys?)

And then it happened. I landed on the page full of ads for "hot women in the Indianapolis area" and, let's just say, male physiological enhancement. Before I was able to sigh and move on to the next page, my virus scanner started ringing like a doorbell. It was going crazy. Each time I clicked "delete" to remove whatever infected file had been transmitted to my computer, another warning popped up.

I was finally able to get my browser closed, and the virus scanner did stop complaining, but it was too late. I was in a sweat. It was slightly after midnight, and I have over 100 GB of ripped CDs sitting on my hard drive. I do NOT need a virus fouling up my precious iTunes cargo. I think Erin has some important school stuff on here as well, but that's not the point! It's my MP3s that we're talking about here!

I rebooted, hopeful that everything was fine. At first, everything looked good. No virus warnings, and the PC appeared to be content. But then I started noticing a few little weird things. These are those little weird things that I'll notice, but Erin won't, and they'll bug me. A new button in Internet Explorer. A couple of new files in the Windows directory. I started researching a bit on the web, and sure enough, the virus had left a few little pieces of itself lying fallow around my hard drive.

I decided that despite the fact that the virus scanner had prevented the virus from doing any harm, I still wanted to remove all traces of the stupid thing before it was able to reanimate itself, as these things frequently do.

To make the already long story short, I was up until 3:00am killing off the last traces of this evil website. I did manage to get it all (knock on wood), but my 6:30am conference call with China that morning was BRUTAL. I don't do well on three hours of sleep these days. Erin seems to do very well on no sleep. She has actually suggested that she should ALWAYS be the one to get up with Grant, since she functions like a well oiled machine on no sleep. Or at least that's what I THINK I heard her say.

Thankfully I got some sleep last night, so I'm in better shape today. And let this entry be a lesson to you. The wise web surfer will avoid that "Next Blog" button like a public toilet in Asia. It won't be a satisfying experience, and it will leave you with a long term stink that you'll have trouble removing.

Come to daddy...

You may have heard the big announcement in the past week. It's an exciting time in the life of any family, but especially in ours. We've endured so much over the past few years, and this is just another example of the best things coming to those who wait. Erin can hardly contain her excitement, so I thought I'd better announce it.

That's right. There's a new iPod.

Now I'm guessing that you might have thought I was talking about the new iPod with the snappy iPhone interface. But this doesn't interest me in the least. What I want is the new iPod Classic with a whopping 160 GB of space. My current iPod, which I dearly love, holds 60 GB, but I have 90 GB of music in my collection. Plus I'd love to have ALL of my music plus a pile of movies for my plane rides to China. This new bad boy can hold 40,000 songs or 200 hours of video. That should cover it.

Normally I would have expected much wailing and gnashing of teeth from Erin when I presented my "plan to purchase within 6 hours" to her. But she was aware that she would be the recipient of my current iPod, which thrills her no end. Finally a place to hold every musical soundtrack and Backstreet Boys CD ever released. (The harddrive may crash itself on purpose when she starts loading that stuff.)

So we raced to the local Apple store yesterday to plunk out the cash for a new iPod, and I got rejected like a Trekkie on prom night. Apparently the 160 GB models are due in later this week. I'm probably going to have to make a quick run (?!?) to China in the next couple of weeks, so hopefully they'll have them before I leave.

40,000 songs. 200 hours of video. Every Beach Boys and R.E.M. track ever laid to tape PLUS every episode of the Twilight Zone. Does life get any better?

I need my tunes

With last year's purchase of the iPod, I do almost 100% of my music listening on the iPod rather than CDs. This almost immediately created a bit of a dilemma for listening in the car. My car has a CD player and cassette deck, so I've been using a cassette adaptor (remember when we needed these for CDs?) Erin's previous car had only a CD player, so I purchased this little gadget to broadcast the iPod on the FM band, but this has never worked well in Indy. We've got scads of little stations which block out the iPod, and on the highway, everytime you pass a truck you hear something by Merle Haggard, and everytime you pass a kid under 21 you hear the previously described "backin' my thang up" genre. Apparently everyone has one of these FM modulators these days.

Now that we've purchased Big Whitey (aka our Kia minivan), I have been struggling with how to correct this life and death situation, since this is the car in which we'll be taking our long road trips to exotic locales like Bedford and Gatlinburg. I did my research, and discovered this little head unit from Sony. For us geeks, this thing has several nifty features. It has a USB jack on the front so you can play MP3s from a USB jump drive, it has an auxillary line in jack so you can run anything with a headphone plug into it, and most importantly, it has an iPod cable so you can control the iPod directly from the head unit. Oh joy.

So I rolled Big Whitey into a local installation shop to have this thing installed. You should have seen all the installers jump to get a chance to pimp my Kia. They offered me some spinny rims and 22s, but I politely declined. After 30 minutes of ripping and tearing on my brand new dash, it was done. We jumped in the van and immediately hooked the iPod up. (Well, we hooked the iPod up after a chorus of "everything else on the dash is gray but that thing is black." Grr.) It played flawlessly. Beautiful. I was listening to a song by The Beach Boys and decided to use the Sony to jump to a track by The Who. I pressed "Skip Artist" and waited. About three seconds later, it went to The Beatles. I pressed it again. About three seconds later, it went to Big Star. Oy vey. I have over 300 artists on my iPod, so I could conceivably go from the first artist to the last by pressing "Skip Artist" 300 times over the course of 15 minutes. This is easier said than done at 80 mph.

The moral of this story is that doing your research doesn't always uncover these little implementation difficulties. All of the sites online say this is the best player to use with an iPod, but obviously this is a technology that still needs some work. Plus, I figure Apple will change the cable I need for the next generation of iPod leaving me with a big, black, useless cable extending from my dash in a few months. (I'm sure that won't happen, honey. Just kidding...) In the mean time, this solution works great if you're just listening to a mix on the iPod, and if you want to jump around between artists a lot, you can always use the auxillary line in with the headphone jack. It just don't sound as purty.

Oh yeah, one other funny part of the story. The installer forgot to connect my antenna to the new headend, so I only got the three strongest stations in Indy. After ripping my new dash apart a second time, it all works much better.

Sometimes being a geek is tough...

The Horrors of Social Interaction

On Sunday, our church and another local church had a combined Easter service at Clowes Hall. This is the one opportunity each year for all 800+ people who usually attend one of our three services on a given Sunday to all be in the same room at the same time. Pastries and coffee were available, and people were invited to mingle for an hour or so prior to the service. Now this is sort of a nightmare for yours truly, because if I know one thing about myself, it's that I'm a fairly crappy mingler (is this really a word?). My usual approach might be to show up about 15 minutes prior to the service and mingle briefly before nervously heading for the cheap seats. In this instance, Erin had to be present an hour early since she was one of the scheduled toddler teachers for the morning. (Teacher is probably a loose term, in this case. She spent two hours cleaning refuse from the tails other people's offspring; not a job I will volunteer for without coersion.) This left me with few options, so I began circling. What I discovered is that the best guy to mingle with at such an event is the guy shelling out the pastries. Not only is he always available, but he's providing me something with which to stuff my face, leaving me inable to converse without crumb spewage. So I repeatedly circled back to his table, each time pretending I'd never seen his selections before, choosily grabbing whatever I hadn't already sampled. (Now I know at least one of the elders from our church reads this, so he can contact me later to verify just how much I really ate and bill me appropriately.) Luckily after several pounds of danish, my sister and brother-in-law arrived, providing me with someone safe with which to converse.

All of this got me to thinking about a prior awkward mingling experience. When I was in middle and high school, I was a frequent user of local BBS's around Indianapolis. That sentence hopelessly dates me, and for those not in the know, BBS's (Bulletin Board Systems) were a precusor to the Internet. User's used their home computer to dial over the phone into someone else's computer, where programs and e-mail could be exchanged with other users of that BBS. There were dozens of BBS's in the area, and occasionally, some brilliant computer nerd would get the idea to have a BBS BBQ, allowing for the BBS users around town to meet face to face with other, previously faceless, BBS users they might "know" from around town. There were several flaws with this plan.

First off, computer users are, by defintion, not socially adept or compatible creatures. They sit around at night staring at dimly lit computer screens, praying it will someday lead to a chance encounter with a member of the opposite sex. (The "opposite" part of that sentence frequently backfires, given the anonymity involved in BBS usage.)

Second, one of the primary tennets of BBS usage was that you had to continually pick fights with the other users, just to keep the "conversations" going online. (This frequently involved a lot of profanity, often from middle school students masquerading as adults.) This brings up the third problem.

Much like the Internet today, you frequently were misled regarding the age and/or gender of the people you were dealing with. This can create an ugly scenario during a face to face introduction. You thought you'd been chatting with 25 year old Mary when actually it was 52 year old Marvin. And finally, the ratio of actual males to actual females on BBS's was approximately 1000 to 1.

All of this should be creating an image in your mind of a group of men of varying age (and perhaps one unfortunate looking woman) hanging around a strangers house on a weekend, none having ever met before, none having any real understanding of social cues, all having stayed up until approximately 4:30am the night prior fiddling around on the BBSs, all now trying to mingle in an impossibly awkward situation.

For whatever reason, I subjected my buddy Eric to one of these things while we were in high school. I have no idea, really, what we were thinking. We both had girlfriends, and all our presence at such an event could do was degrade our already damaged social status, ensuring that those girls would most assuredly ditch us if they found out we had attended such an affair. I don't think we stayed long, but through some break in logic and the space-time continuum, after seeing this gathering of Indy's most rabid computer users, I still decided to go into Computer Engineering. What I guess I failed to understand at the time was that this meeting was a glimpse into the future, as it looked very similar to virtually all of my undergraduate engineering classes -- with a slightly better male to female ratio. Yet another brilliant decision by yours truly.

(For those who've read this far, there will be more pictures of Grant up soon. I'm well aware that me rambling is only a distraction from the real reason for you checking our blog. The only immediate Grant update is that following our lovely Easter service at church and Easter dinner with the grandparents, around 8:30pm last night, Grant decided to attempt to wake the dead on his own for approximately an hour. The boy has lungs. He was his usual, cheery self following a bath to remove the beads of sweat he was soaked with while screaming his head off. Ah, parenting...)

Happy Mothers Day! / Who Gives A Rip

This weekend Erin and I celebrated Mother's Day with our two favorite mothers. Saturday night was dinner at the Old Spaghetti Factory with my mom (it's one of her favorites), followed by some intense competition at Pop-A-Shot and Skee Ball with my sister and brother-in-law at Jillian's. Let it be declared that despite her collegiate basketball skills, I can still take my wife on any day at Pop-A-Shot. For Mother's Day, we got my mom an assortment of things for her kitchen, including some sponges and dish towels. My, what great gift givers, you're probably thinking -- every mother longs for a new sponge on their designated holiday! This gift was born out of my mom's love of old sponges and towels. When I was growing up, we moved more frequently than my mom replaced the sponge at our kitchen sink. If you went to wipe down the countertop with it, it would try to crawl away from you. Now in her defense, she did run it through the dishwasher frequently (on second thought, I'm not really sure that's in her defense) so it wasn't quite the petri-sponge that it might have been otherwise. Last week Erin saw something on the TV talking about how you'd be wiser to dine off the seat of the toilets in your house rather than keep a sponge at your kitchen sink for more than a week, so we got her sponges. Similarly, dish towels in our house were only tossed once you could count the number of threads left in the towel, so we got her some towels, too. I love you, mom, and we fully expect you to use those sponges before the end of the summer.

Yesterday we celebrated with Erin's parents, sister, and nieces by going to church with them and then heading to the Original Pancake House. While similarly named, this restaruant bares little resemblence to a traditional IHOP. For one thing, you never have to say things like, "I'll have the 'Two Moons Over My Hammy' with a side of 'Rooti Tooti Fresh and Fruity.'" Man does that place annoy me. In any case, this pancake place serves pretty much massive quantities of food, including these weird egg-dome omelettes. Afterward we went to Costco with Erin's folks, and since we were all so full from lunch, we only tried one of each sample offered. It was a delightful trip. Happy Mother's Day, Deb and Deanna! And also, Happy Mother's Day-to-be to my lovely wife Erin whose child is being surrogately carried by the Chinese government. Touching.

The other big achievement this weekend was the completion of my massive iTunes CD ripping project. I started ripping all of my CDs into iTunes sometime around Thanksgiving, and I'm finally finished (I'm actually a handful of discs from being finished, and I haven't touched Erin's collection, but it still feels like I'm finished). In the end, I have ended up with about 70 GB of MP3s, which covers about 1400 CDs. I have more than a month of continuous music available now. Wee! Based on the final song counts, it would appear that my favorite groups are the Beach Boys, the Everly Brothers, the Kinks, R.E.M., and XTC. Sounds about right. A few people have asked, so here are some of the technical details of the project. (In other words, most of you can stop reading here and skip to the last paragraph.)

First off, I realize that I could easily just toss the CD in the drive and let iTunes import it. This has a couple of issues for me. First off, ripping this way on my PC leaves lots of little pops and clicks in the resulting tracks, which drive me batty. So I decided early on that I would use Exact Audio Copy in Secure Mode to insure that the resulting track would be identical to the original. I configured EAC per this website, which was very helpful. The only downside of using this method is that the ripping is at approximately 1/3 the speed of a normal rip, so the project immediately takes much longer than normal. Next, I considered whether to use iTunes to encode the resulting WAV files into a compressed format, such as MP3. Since I was already ripping outside of iTunes, I shopped around for external compressors and decided after much reading at HydrogenAudio that I would use the free MP3 encoder called LAME. (LAME is available for download here. I used the 3.97 beta 2 version.) I wanted to stick to MP3s because we own another older RCA LYRA that really only works with MP3, and I wanted to be able to use the resulting files on this player or my new iPod. Once I decided to use LAME, I made a couple of test discs with various tracks at various quality levels. My goal was to find a compression level where I couldn't hear a difference from the original track, yet the tracks were small enough to use on my older LYRA as well. I ended up using the "V 4" setting in LAME. I couldn't hear any difference using my burnt up ears between "V 2" which is the standard mode for LAME and "V 4" which is the medium mode. The resulting files using "V 4" are significantly smaller, so that's the mode I used. Here's a link to a page discussing LAME and all it's options. My command line for LAME within EAC was as follows:

-V 4 --vbr-new --add-id3v2 --ignore-tag-errors --pad-id3v2 --ta "%a" --tt "%t" --tl "%g" --ty "%y" --tn "%n" %s %d

This pretty much boils down to "rip it in V4 quality and tag the MP3 with the artist, track title, album name, album year, and track number." I ripped to a temp directory, then imported the resulting files into iTunes, allowing it to manage my library, so it copied the tracks in, and I deleted my original file. Once the file was in iTunes, I used this little iTunes Art Importer to add the album art to each file. Basically this program looks the CD up at Amazon.com and grabs the art from their listing. Very slick. For anyone that's looking, I used a version of the program available at this link, which is not listed on the website. This version is much newer and contains many features that the advertised version does not. It doesn't appear that the author is supporting this thing any more, which is a shame since it's such a cool piece of software. In any case, once the album art was inserted, the process is pretty much complete. I'm going to make a full backup of the library to DVD (I've been making incremental backups all along following my little hard drive disaster, but I still want to make a full backup as well.) Additionally I've been backing everything up to a second hard drive (the replacement drive from said disaster). All this backing up (actually the whole project) has my wife thinking I'm looney, but after six months of work, I'm not about to lose any of this because of a hard drive crash. I'd lose my mind (or what's left of it).

After it's all said and done, the resulting tracks sound great, and I can't imagine needing any other electronic copy of all my music. I realize that purists would have ripped everything to a non-compressed format, just in case something better than MP3 comes along later, but I just didn't have the space to do this, and buying a bunch of hard drives wasn't really an option (I love you, dear.) The beauty of this project is that now my lovely wife will be able to enjoy all her favorite Hüsker Dü and Pavement records while driving to Hilton Head in a couple of weeks. That Erin sure does love her post-punk college rock.

Bret

Geek Alert

I've added support for RSS and Atom web feeds to our little blog. If that sentence sounded like "I added support for absolutely nothing I care about" in your head, then ignore this post. For the curious, read this description of RSS and web feeds. You may notice that I've added buttons to the right side of the page (down below the links to our church and what not) for adding us to Yahoo, Google, AOL, etc. Basically those button will add this page to your Yahoo, Google, etc front page, and you'll be alerted whenever new content is added to this blog. So you don't have to check us every day (as I'm sure so many of you do.) Many news sites (CNN, Fox News, etc) feature RSS feeds that will "push" the news to you throughout the day, so you don't have to continually check their page. Many sites are using the new orange icon below. If you click on it, it will take you to the feed for that site.


It's a cool technology that I was able to add with minimal effort. So for the two of you who will use it...enjoy!

Bret

There's Another Woman--or something like that

So, on Sunday, it happened. I had worried about this day for months, and on Sunday, it came to fruition. Nothing could prepare me for the reality, and even now, days later, I'm reeling from the fallout.

Simply put, Bret purchased an IPOD. Yes, a 60G IPOD. He has been ripping CDs for months in anticipation, and just a few days ago, he brought home the box that officially labeled him a music lover of the 21st century.

Now, why do I have a problem with said IPOD? Why wouldn't I want my husband, an avid music fan, to have such a toy?

Because... I never see him. He stashes himself away into a deep and dark corner of our home, and he rocks himself into R.E.M oblivion. Some women might not complain about a less-than-present spouse, but he's never missing in one of those moments. He's missing when someone needs to take out the trash, clean a toilet, or answer the phone.

The saddest part about this whole adventure is that this new fangled IPOD doesn't even hold all of Bret's music. Bret has over 45 DAYS of consecutive listening, and while this IPOD can make a dent in his collection, it is still lacking. Now, if you know anyone in the Hawkins family like I do, you know what this means. This new IPOD, which in my female terms costs about the same as FIFTEEN pairs of shoes, is only good until an even bigger one is placed on the market. Then, the cycle begins. Bret will want the new IPOD because it will hold all of his music (and then some). But, then it holds "and then some," and he'll need to buy more music. Then, of course, the newest IPOD will be unable to hold all of his new music. And it just keeps going.

I guess I have to come to terms with the fact that my husband is an audiophile. Now, I just need to figure out how to make him a garbage toting, toilet cleaning, answering phone kind of audiophile.

What's a girl to do when she loves a boy?

Hard Drive Blues

Just before Thanksgiving I started converting my music library to MP3s, with the eventual goal being the purchase of an iPod. There were several issues with this plan. First off, I have a lot of CDs. Second, the 60GB iPod is really, REALLY expensive, in my opinion. And third, this whole thing requires me to purchase an Apple product, which is simply against my principles. But I forged ahead, ripping CDs night and day through the holidays. This ritual continued right up to Sunday night.

I'm about 80% finished with the whole task. And then I saw it. While ripping an excellent Sloan CD, my screen froze, and my 6 month old hard drive started making a repetitive sound. There was no response to keys, so I did what I had to do -- I slammed the power switch. When I rebooted, for a second I thought things were fine. The drive showed up in the BIOS, but then I got it -- "No valid boot.ini." This was followed by a black screen and that same repetitive noise. I frantically scrambled to find my hard drive diagnostic disc from Seagate. I ran the tests -- hardware failure. I try all the tricks I know, but nothing even will recognize the drive. It won't boot, I can't access it from a boot disc, nothing. Luckily the drive had a 5 year warranty, so a replacement is on the way. In the mean time, I bought a really big new replacement drive, and I'll use the other drive as a backup. I had all my email and our documents backed up from about 3 months ago, so luckily the losses weren't huge. I should probably have seen this coming. My friend Eric had a similar experience a few months ago. I helped him through his crisis without considering that maybe it was a sign. :)

Oh, and about all those MP3s I was making? I have a 14 DVD backup made one week prior to the crash. Had I not had the backup, I might have been inclined to stop listening to music and using computers in any way, shape, or form. At least for a while.

Moral -- Make backups. Always. New drives fail. Seagate warranty = good.

Bret