Music and Video

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.

Streams of popular TV Series

Am I the only one who is seeing a massive increase in websites that offer streams of tv series for free ? I´am not sure about the legality and to be honest: I don´t want to know. If they want to offer free tv episodes of popular series like 24, Prison Break or Desperate Housewives - so be it.

Save Pandora.com MP3s with 3tunes

A visitor of my site recommended this little application in a comment and I decided to give it a try and see how well it works. 3tunes is relativly stable considering the fact that it is still in alpha development stage. All you need is to download the file which is only about 20k in size and head to the pandora website. Once the first song starts playing you double click the 3tunes executable and it automatically shows the song which is currently played.

Listen to Pandora in Winamp

Pandora is a online service that finds similar music to an artist, album or genre that you specify and which creates your unique radio station that plays the related titles. Unfortunatly it´s only available on their website and not in music players like winamp. Until now, that is.

View thousands of tv shows and episodes online

Yes, this is even better than the website that offered about 700 shows. Actually the 700 show website used content from guba.com as a source for their shows, but guba offers more of them. All videos belong to one of eight categories (cartoons, comedy, documentary, drama, foreign, miscellanous, music videos and sports).

Watch over 700 Tv Episodes online

This seems to be the watch Tv Online day, it´s crazy how all those sites pop up at the same day. Peekvid.com offers more than 700 episodes of well know tv series like 24, Buffy, Desperate Housewives, Family Guy aso for free. You can view them online or even download them to your pc. I´am not sure if this site will be online much longer but enjoy it will it´s there.

Watch 70 TV Stations for free

Channelchooser lets you view more than 70 Tv stations fore free using your favorite web browser. All you need to do is visit their website and click on one of the channels displayed there. You find all sorts of tv stations there, for example Music stations, Cartoon Tv, Game Network, Poker TV and even Adult channels.

Guide to Electronic Music

Ok ok, I know that many people hate electronic music but the design of the guide to electronic music is great. You see various genres like house, trance and techno on the left side. Clicking a genre leads to a roadmap of subgenres starting in the 70s ending today. You recieve a description of the selected (sub)genre and see the development process over the years. Now, clicking on a subgenre leads to a short article about it and various tracks that let you experience the genre.

VLC Media Player review

Don´t you hate all the different video and audio formats, all those codes and tools you need to play them all ? The VLC media player is able to play many formats including (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX) as well as DVD, (S)VCD and various streaming types. The player is available for various systems including windows, macintosh and linux. It can also act as a server and send streams through the network, with optional support for audio and video.

Access free music albums with Jamendo

Jamendo is a community website that lets you discover a growing collection of currently 1010 free music albums released under Creative Commons using latest p2p technology.That´s right, you are free to download everything using bittorrent. But that´s not all Jamendo is about. They have a very active community that reviews albums, rates and tags them and offers personal recommendations.

Cbreak Remove Commercials from Avi Files

More and more people use their computer to record tv shows by simply installing a tv card into it and connecting the computer to the tv signal. The only problem they are now facing is that everything will be recorded and everything includedes those unnecessary commercials. The freeware application cbreak helps you to remove those commercials from the recored avi files.

Pandora The Music Genome Project

Until now I´ve heard a lot about the music service pandora offers but I never happened to test the service myself. Well, I tried it today and have to say that the concept itself is fantastic. You tell them a song or artist that you like and the service tries to find similar artists using characteristics of the artist or song. So, if you enter The Beatles for instance you will be connected to a radio that plays music that offers the same characteristics as the Beatles.

Cuttermaran video editing freeware

Stationripper Record Internet Radio Streams

Screamer Radio

Streamer Radio is an all in one internet radio tool that lets you listen to and record audio streams of your favorite internet radio stations. It´s highly configurable and works with shoutcast.com and icecast.org mp3 streams, icecasts ogg vorbis streams and even windows media audio streaming. Works great, is free, what more do you want ?

Archive.org Moving Image Archive

PC TV Programs – Watch TV Programs on PC

Great the next match of my favorite sports team will not be shown on free tv. Actually it will not be shown at all in my country, except for satellite of course. If you encounter situations like this one and always thought there would be no other solution than to watch boring live tickers on internet sites, then you?ve come to the right place.

I will describe three freeware programs that let you connect to channels that stream tv and especially live sports events. This includes all major european football (soccer) leagues, champions league, uefa cup, espn, wrestling, national team matches, boxing matches and much more.

Ascii Movies

Never thought this would be possible but it seems it is. The following site offers movies scenes in ascii format. Movies include Lord of the Rings, Spiderman, the Matrix and lots more. Detail level is amazing and you can select font size as well ranging from 1 to 12. My 1024*768 was not big enough for the large numbers but the movies look great even in a small size like 2.

Free Music List (audio download and streaming)

I wrote an article about living without the music industry a month ago. In this article I added some good sites that offered free musik downloads. Lots of people replied to this article and added more sites that they used to get free music. Free, meaning free of charges and free to download without breaking the law.

Free music on the web

Gina over at lifehackers.com posted a nice article about places where one can find free music on the internet. The categories include google, of course, amazon, mp3 blogs and del.icio.us.

How the music industry should react

The outrage from the internet community about Sonys "rootkit" cds is still fresh and spreading like fire on the internet. I always thought that a business should try to please it customers in the first hand, because thats what makes the customers come back.

Its obvious that the music industry has a image problem, especially when someone asks the internet community. My article takes a look at possible solutions for the music industry. How should they react and what should they avoid in the future ?

How to live without the music industry feedback

The article created a lot of feedback, mostly positive on the subject and I would like to take the opportunity to thank everyone for their comments and present your thoughts in this new article.

Most visitors agreed that the decision of the RIAA to turn on its customers badly damaged their image and unfortunatly that of musicians as well. It seems to a lot that they don´t care as much about the music than they care about profits.

How to live without the Music Industry

We read it in the news everyday. The major music industry players like Sony BMG or EMI are reporting losses all over the place and blame it solely on internet pirates. Internet pirates are actually a very good excuse for bad times. Hard facts do not exist and no one is able to check on the numbers the MI provides for losses due to internet pirates.

They don´t seem to realize that they criminalize their own customers with measures like copy protected cd´s and rootkit software installed on customers pc.

How to save real audio files to hard disk

Yesterday I´ve written a short tutorial about streamripping and one of the questions that occured was if its possible to rip real audio music as well. Today i present a guide on how to rip the real audio format.