thespicelands.com

After making this post, I didn’t like how much of the webpage it took up given the respect that Erin’s post should have. I’ve remove it for now and repost sometime later. The election is a long way out and the post should wait.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. If you are seeing this from facebook or some other site, click on the link to watch the video on our site.

Home Theater PC – MythTV (revisited)

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In this video, I do a more indepth overview of using MythTV as a Tivo-like digital video recorder. This is the setup that Erin, Tru, and I use to manage all of our tv recordings. Unlike my previous video on MythTV, this one goes a little more in depth and goes over the $80 MediaMVP boxes that you can connect to any tv and stream your recordings. You will want to use the custom mvmpc firmware to be able to use it as a mythfrontend. You can have one MythTV box to do all your recordings and just get these $80 set top boxes for each of your TV’s. This allows you to use any old garage sale PC to do your recordings, reducing the overall cost.

Note; there are *2 videos* this week. Don’t forget to check out the webcam video below.

I found a neat website called mediachest.com. Basically, you publish your list of DVD’s, CD’s, books. Others can find your list and ask to borrow stuff from you. Also, you can search your area for books, dvd’s, cd’s that you are interested in. Here is my DVD collection (really small).

I made this image for those people who are curious. It shows how the much higher the resolution is for HDTV versus standard DVD. All sizes are relative. HDTV resultion is much higher than most people set their monitors to.

First, look at the small blue square. That is standard DVD’s resolution. Now look at the purple. That is HDTV! Thats much better right? Well, the light blue is the resolution of our projector. It’s only slightly better than a DVD so when we watch our HDTV content it has to be shrunk quite a bit. Lastely, the light purple square is the size that we resize the recorded HDTV shows to. It saves us lots of disk space and, as you can see, is still wider than our screen so we still get optimum resolution for us to view.

Enjoy!

Erin has a sore throat! We find out today (12PM) whether it is strep or not. I have no idea what the ramifications on the baby might be if it is. In any event, pray for her and the baby to get well.

In other news, our HDTV card came in. We can now watch and record HDTV off of an antenna so we can cancel cable!

Michael

We went to our friend Sean’s house on Friday to watch a movie. He had already informed us that he had a pretty nice projector and screen instead of a tv, but we had no idea what we were in store for. His setup was better than high definition, and bigger than any tv we’d ever seen! The white screen onto which the projector projected was one hundred inches of pure delight. The projector itself was exceptional, and the picture it created was just like the movies. In fact, the experience was better: there was no stadium seating to worry about and free concessions for everyone!

I saw two articles right next two each other on CNN and thought it was quite ironic. One article shines a bad light on a software company that makes software that allows you to copy DVDs. They spin the article as if there is no legitimate reason for copying a DVD. Right under that article is an article that talks about the short life span’s of DVD’s and how they deteriorate in only 5 years! Sounds like a good reason to back up your movies to me.