Time to stop using DVD:s

Since I already have my music on a computer using CD:s pretty much only as a way to purchase DRM free digital music and for backup purposes I've been thinking about doing the same for video. When we couldn't watch a DVD the other day because of a faulty disc I decided that it was time to take the plunge.

The price and sizes of hard disks have been somewhat prohibitive before, but now a 500G Seagate FreeAgent USB drive was only 950 SEK (~150 USD). I can store about 100 DVD:s for a cost of 10 SEK per DVD. The only thing that's left now is the tedious process of ripping all a selection of my DVD:s.

I'm using the free DVDFab HD decrypter to rip the entire DVD, and then DVD Shrink to remove all unnecessary stuff (extra material, foreign language tracks, FBI warnings, etc.). In the end I have a ripped copy that is instantaneously available, without annoying ads and warnings. As an added bonus I don't need AnyDVD to slow down my DVD drive in order to keep it quiet.

An introduced inconvenience is that the first time I want to watch a movie I first need to rip it and wait 30 minutes for the process to finish before I can watch it. But for me its definitely worth it.

On a side note I got a 250 GB MyBook exactly a year ago for 50 SEK more, proving Kryder right.

Streaming music to the iPod touch, part 2

As I just told you I was looking at different solutions for streaming music to the iPod touch. Now I've tried out webot and simplifymedia and unfortunately none meets my requirements. Webot felt slow and sluggish, and I don't like that you stream via a server on the internet. Simplify's UI was utter crap - you were only shown an alphatebized list of your songs, which is totally useless when you have a large library.

What now? I'm still hoping that slimserver will be the method in the future, but for now I've installed apache on my machine to serve up my music. I had some problems with my local firewall, but once I got around that everything is working smoothly. I will probably try to add Apache::MP3 later to get a better way of navigating my files (demo), but I have my music collection in pretty good order so just navigating the directory structure is good enough.

I haven't bothered to make a separate post about the latest Apple announcments, mostly because I was underwhelmed by the Macbook Air, unimpressed with Apple TV 2.0, and irritated about paying $20 for a couple of iPod touch applications that you get for free if you buy the touch now.

Streaming music to the iPod touch

I'm still looking for a way to stream music to my iPod touch. The contenders are:

• SimplifyMedia (found through touchtip)
• weBot (which I found through jkOnTheRun)
• orb
• DOT.TUNES
• SlimServer - if bug 6266 is fixed (feel free to vote if you have an account) - found at Oliver Bruchez's blog

My main choice would be slimserver since I already have that up and running on my computer for the SqueezeBox. I've tried orb and was not impressed - it was very resource heavy and slowed my machine down to a crawl. Besides the stupid name, DOT.TUNES is not free.

Which leaves SimplifyMedia and weBot. From what I've read SimplifyMedia might be the way to go, but I'll have to try it out first. I got some orb vibes (i.e. slow and heavy web application) from the weBot screenshots and it seems to transcode music to an 128k stream, but it might be a good service. There's just something about having to sign in to a web site to access my music locally (my main use case is to access my music library on my computer from my iPod touch when I'm at home) that irks me.

I'll let you know if I find a solution I'm happy with.

iPod touch and SqueezeBox

As promised here is an update on using iPeng for controlling the SqueezeBox: its excellent! It was kind of iffy to scroll on some pages (you needed to use two fingers) and I couldn't find search functionality but other than that it was great. Apparently iPeng 0.2 has added search support so things are looking even better (haven't tried it yet but will soon).

If you have a Squeezebox and an iPod touch/iPhone its a must. There's no reason to wait, go ahead and install it now.