Play Divx Movies on your Xbox 360
One of the flaws of the Xbox 360 is the inablity to playback divx movies on it. Microsoft might have left it out intenionally to push their own wmv format or avoid that the Xbox 360 would be used as the universal media center like the orginal Xbox with the (unofficial) Xbox media center was able to do.
How to Download Songs from Myspace
It seems that someone found out a way to create download links to the mp3 files that one can listen to on the profile pages of the bands that have a myspace website. The script to decode the myspace url and extract the mp3 links is working well and uses Ajax for ease of use.
Record MP3 Streams with Screamer Radio
I recommended Phonostar some days ago to record mp3 streams of more than 4000 radio stations which had the big disadvantage that it would not add the real filename, title and artist but use a generic name for the saved mp3 stream. Screamer Radio on the other hand uses the meta data that is sent by some radio stations to add those information to the name of the saved mp3 file which makes it easier to get an overview over all downloads.
Record more than 4000 internet radio stations
If you are looking for an easy way to record internet radio stations look no further. Phonostar is a free radio player and recorder that comes preconfigured with more than 4000 radio stations. Phonostar tries to automatically determine the audio source that can be used to record songs and loads the interface afterwards. Top stations are selected and a double-click starts the playback of that station. Please note that all top stations seem to be in German, conduct a search for English stations.
Discover more than 2000 free music albums on Jamendo
Jamendo is a music service that tries a different distribution model for music albums. Instead of paying money to download and listen to music you download the music for free and pay or donate money later directly to the artist who created the music. You may either donate money using paypal or visit the artists website to purchase music directly to support them even further and receive CDs that are send to your location.
Visualize Her Winamp Plugin
Sexy Girl, Dancing to music that you like ? What can be better ? The Visualize Her plugin for winamp adds the visualization of a pretty exotic barely clothed dancer to the list of your winamp visualizations. Once installed and activated you see her dancing to the music that is currently playing. The moves are of course limited because, hej, this is not the real thing, hehe.
FineTune a Pandora like Music website
If you do now Pandora you feel right at home when entering the FineTune website. Guests may use only part of the streaming radio services offered at the website but it is good enough for a rough overview of what FineTune has to offer. Just enter an artists name in the search field and FineTune will search for the artist that you have entered and related artists and start with the playback of songs that the search found.
Riaa is sueing Allofmp3
Ding Ding Ding, welcome the the next round in this amazing fight. In the right corner we have the underdog, a Russian mp3 website that offers what customers apparently want: MP3 files without DRM, variable bitrate at low costs. Did I mention that this is a perfectly legal company under Russian law ? In the opposite corner the RIAA, a institution living in the past, trying to hold of progress by sueing its customers and denying them what they really want.
Add Features to your MP3 Player
If you are currently unhappy with the features of your mp3 player you might want to take a look at the open source rockbox firmware which adds lots of functionality to your mp3 player including iPods, iRiver and Archos models. A firmware update is of course something that should only be done with extreme precaution because it will void the warranty. Take a look at some of the features that can be added:
Large List of Podcasts that teach you something
There are not many people I know that do not have a mp3 player. Many use the player exclusively for music and probably never heard of the term podcasts before. The best way to explain podcasts is to compare them to radio shows. Some hosts talk about certain topics, you listen to jingles, to music sometimes that is played during breaks.
Watch TV over Internet with Sopcast
There were lately some rumors about tvu player, the program that I normally use to watch tv over internet. The website was not reachable and everything seemed to go down the hill. I decided to take some precautions and test other tv streaming programs to see if any could reach the quality of the tvu player.
Another site that offers TV streams for free
Wow those sites seem to popup like nothing else at the moment. Everton from connected internet was writing about streamick and I decided to add an article of my own to give you an alternative to all those other streaming sites out there. Streamick offers more than 300 tv channels to choose from including BBC One, ESPN Starsports, CNN & several other news channels.
Watch hundreds of full tv shows, cartoons and anime
TV Links is a site I never heard about before. It has a big listing of many of the most popular tv shows, cartoon & anime series. The site lists the name of the shows and the number of seasons that they link to on their main page. If you click on a link a page with all links to all episodes that are available will load and all that is left to do is click on one of the links to be taken to a website that hosts the movie.
Watch Arrested Development on MSN
The first five episodes of the tv series Arrested Development have been released on MSN and can be viewed directly from the browser. As suspected the site only supports Internet Explorer and Media Player. If you are using a different browser or movie player it will ask you to download those programs from Microsoft and use them to view the show. This if of course a big drawback but fans will surely go the extra mile for this series.
Join multiple video files into one
Websites sometimes split movies into smaller parts to make it easier for users with low bandwidth access to the internet to download the movies without facing problems like timeouts. Once downloaded it is rather tiresome to view such a movie because you have to click on each part which naturally means a short pause between the last and the next movie.
Southpark Nintendo Wii Episode
What is going on in Southpark ? After the highly successful World of Warcraft Episode the producers published a second episode that is centered around entertainment technology. Cartman longs for the Nintendo Wii and can't wait the three weeks until it will be released in the United States. He comes to the conclusion that deep freezing himself is the only solution which reduces the wait time. The plan goes terribly wrong.. but see for yourself.
Windows Media Player 11 Download
Yesterday Microsoft released the new Windows media player 11 silently it seems. You can download the (final ?) version of the Media Player at the official Media Player homepage. This version is only usuable with Windows XP so everyone with a different system won't be able to use this new version. Guidelines for common actions like installing the player, codec information and playing / burning files can be found in the faq entries of Media Player 11.
Create Automatic iTunes Playlists with the Filter
One of the blogs that I'm regularly visiting is Connected Internet created by my friend Everton Blair. He writes mainly about the same topics that I write about (with a slight British touch) and once in a while I find a interesting story that I would like to write about at ghacks as well. He discovered a automatic playlist generator for iTunes called The Filter.
A catalog for your movies
I have a large collection of movies both off-line and on my computer and it is sometimes hard to keep the overview of everything that is in my possession. It happened more than once that I bought a movie that I already own which is rather dumb because there are ways to prevent this from happening.
Open Pandora Application
Open Pandora is a freeware application that adds features to Pandora, the famous music service that finds new music of similar taste for you. Pandora itself is designed to function in your browser making it rather uncomfortable to listen to the music. Enter Open Pandora:
How to easily save multimedia streams
Don't you hate it when you visit a website, see an interesting movie stream and can't find a way to dowload it to view it again later ? Most websites hide their streaming content urls using javascript or other scripting languages and it is almost impossible to detect the url of the stream manually. Thankfully mouser coded the tool url snooper which does this work for us.
Make Love, not Warcraft
Soutpark goes World of Warcraft - many people think this is the best Soutpark episode ever. You watch our southpark heroes play characters on the alliance side of world of warcraft which confirms again that only kids are playing alliance in wow, hehe. It's the complete episode so rejoice and take your time to watch it, a must see for everyone who is playing world of warcraft.
The industry fights some unnecessary battles
I watched the movie Crank last saturday in a cinema near my hometown, it was a great movie but something that happened before the film really annoyed the hell out of me. Why the hell are they showing clips that it is illegal to record the movie with cams and that you will face jail time for it before the movie starts ? How likely is it that someone who has the intention to record the movie is actually in there ? How much more likely is it that many visitors who paid lots of money to watch the movie are pretty annoyed by this message ?
Songbird the ultimate Media Player ?
Songbird is a relatively new open source media player that is build from Mozilla and aims to revolutionize the media player market the same way firefox did to the browser market. Songbird is currently available in revision 0.2 "test flight" and runs on Windows 2000+, Linux and Mac just like firefox. Songbird comes with pretty much the same functionality as iTunes and more, due to the fact that it is based on the same core as firefox you can easily use songbird to browse between websites of radio stations, podcasts and blogs. Which means you play the songs and at the same time read what they have written in the same program.
Juice a Podcast Receiver
Many people are using RSS feeds and feel acustomed to them but shy away from podcasts. I'am not sure why this is the case but tools like Juice Receiver could close this obvious gap. Podcasts are like radio shows, the only difference that they are not broadcasted but available as downloads mostly in mp3 format. The variety of themes excells those of radio shows in my opinion although tech podcasts are more common than, lets say, podcasts for women.
How to stream videos on a LAN or Internet
Quadmaster posted a nice guide to streaming video in lan on the techenclave website. All you need is the great media player VLC (video lan client), in a recent poll 36% of all voters on ghacks voted for vlc as the best media player. You need to assign local IP addresses if you have not done so allready, for sake of simplicity I assume the main pc that streams the content has a IP of 192.168.0.1 and the first client pc that recieves the stream has the IP 192.168.0.2.
New Versions of Real and Quicktime Alternative
Apple Quicktime and Realmedias Realplayer are typical heavyweight programs that install themselves in ways that could influence the speed of your system. Both add parts of their suit to be run at system startup and load slowly nevertheless. It is also great if you distrust big companies and are looking for freeware alternatives to those big media suits.
Record and Download European TV online
Onlinetvrecorder.com is a completly legal service that allows you to record European tv shows online and download them later to view them on your computer. The main focus is on German tv but you also find Belgian, Swiss and some English stations like CNN. All you have to do is register at the website which offers a German and an English interface for its users. After creating the account you are free to create new recordings using the EPG schedule, a EPG search or a manual mode.
Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD comparision
Do you know about the differences between Blue-Ray and HD-DVD ? I mean, the real differences, not the technical mumbo jumbo that has no meaning in real life. With the releases of Training Day, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Rumor has it on Blue-Ray and HD-DVd the guys at High Def Digest were able to compare the two formats directly. All three reviews analyze the video and audio quality, the depth of supplemental content, the overall ease of use and menu navigation.
Public Domain Movies
When a work's copyright or patent restrictions expire, it enters the public domain and may be used by anyone for any purpose. All the movies, concerts, documentations and animations on the free movies website are public domain. The site holds currently 93 movies and 85 documentaries plus additional animations and concert videos.
Super the ultimate video converter
I have been recieving an email lately asking for a freeware utility that would be able to convert most known video formats into each other. When I saw the webpage for Super the first time I was reminded of that email and thought it was a big coincidence that I found such a converter that fast. The tool stands out for several reasons, first it is freeware which is always good, second it does not require that you install the needed codecs - it has all codecs on board.
Best Audio Cd Ripper CDex
When I bought my first mp3 player years ago I had to somehow transfer the music from my cd collection to my computer. I was lucky enough to find CDex pretty fast and I stick with it since then. It offers everything that I demand from an CD ripper, it´s fast, it checks CDDB for album and title information and is able to save the music in many formats including mp3 and wav. All you need is the program itself and the dll lame_enc.dll which you can download from rarewares.
Howto copy Blu-Ray and HD-DVD movies
Well well well. The industry tried their best to make the new competing high definition formats blue-ray and hd-dvd as secure as possible so that no one would be able to view them with insecure hardware or would be able to copy the movies. The files themselves are protected by AACS which stands for Advanced Access Content System. HDCP (High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection) makes sure that high definition playback is only available if the output device (television, monitor) is HDCP capable, if not the movie will be downsampled to 960x540p.
Google Video Hidden Categories
Have you ever uploaded a movie to Google Video ? You can chose one of 38 categories like sports or business for the movie. Now, when you visit the Google Video page again you only have the option to click on a few categories on the top. There is no option to search most of the 38 categories: Until now.
Bsplayer 2.0 out
The multimedia player Bsplayer has been released as version 2.0 today. I was using previous versions of bsplayer and was really satisfied with it. It had some minor problems and I made the switch to VLC media player and plan on using that one even though the new version of bsplayer has been released.
Fabchannel Online Concert Archive
Fabchannel is offering a big online archive of concerts that took place either in Paradiso or Melkwegs. Both of which seem to be dutch clubs / concert halls. The archive consists of more than 50 concerts covering genres like Hip Hop, Rock, Metal and Pop. You are able to watch concerts of bands like Simple Minds, The Gathering and Wir sind Helden for instance.
How to boycott the Music Industry and still enjoy music
The Music Industry (from now on only called MI) is putting a lot of pressure on the consumers. They release copy protected media but fail to realise that this is a punishment for the people who buy music. Even if you don´t download music from the internet you most likely know sources where to get that music for free, without DRM and in high quality. The commercial pirates as well don´t care about copy protection.
Worldcup Preparations
The football worldcup is starting today and it surely is going to be the biggest sports event of this year. We all know that some companies are going to stream the worldcup live on the internet for their countrymen. If you are not that tech savy and still want to view the cup online your best bet is to download a software called pplive. I suggest the stable version but experienced users could use the beta version as well.
How to view the football worldcup online
Some tv stations, like the BBC in Britain, will provide their fellow countrymen with an opportunity to watch the football world cup 2006 in germany live in a streamed version from their webpages. They said on their webpage that "The service will be available to UK broadband users and will mirror terrestrial and interactive coverage." I assume it is free of charge but maybe my loyal British readers could enlight me how they plan on streaming the content.
Winamp Tweak Guide
The guys over at techspot published a large article on tweaking winamp. They focus input and output plugins but cover other areas as well. The recommended Shibatch mpg123 input plugin for instance offers better audio quality and more features than the default nullsoft mpeg decoder.
