iPod Nano 1G Recall

Happy New Year to all!

I happened to be floating on HotUKDeals and noticed a deal for a 6G iPod Nano 8Gb in Green for £69.99 in HMV. I’m generally keeping an eye open for another Nano since the “repair” i did on a used Nano 5G from eBay went bad… I use a Nano in the car to drive my Alpine IDA-X305 Stereo since I swapped out from the iPhone (Android phones do not work on USB). “Nevasleep” posted that he had recently got a 8Gb 6G Nano in return for his 1G Nano. Fantastic!

My wife got a 2Gb 1G Nano for christmas many moons ago, and has been sat in a box waiting to go on eBay or to a car boot sale… It just happens that hanging onto this has paid off! Apple announced a recall on the 11th November due to a risk of the battery overheating as the device ages. What a great opportunity to get a replacement device which we can sell as unused… Getting a 6G Nano instead is even better. I’ve logged the serial number on Apple’s website and it’s showing eligible, so now waiting for the box.

Hoping that in about 6 weeks we could get a 6G Nano to either keep or sell!

Media Centre Rebuild

What is it with “Wonderful” Windows that means you have to rebuild it every so often to get the best out of it?

The Media Centre PC has been getting a bit fussy over recent months, what with slower boot times, and some compatibility issues with some applications which meant my machine was crashing when opening movies / Blu-Rays and some other oddities which frequent hangs…

So I have just finished rebuilding the machine, and was a day long slog to get it back to how it was prior – Even now there are things outstanding but I will get there with those eventually… However the new Sky Broadband came into it’s own as Windows Updates *yawn* downloaded very quick! Just wish I did not have to reboot 15 times to then find more updates! Thanks Microsoft :0(

I thought this would be a good opportunity to jot down the software I have on the Media Centre, so others can see what I use to manage my media, and other useful applications to make accessing that information as efficient as possible!

• AirMouse – A handy iDevice app which allows remote control of the mouse or keyboard, for those moments where I need to input information a bit quicker! Also handy when the wife won’t give up the remote! ;0)
• CoreAVC – H.264 / HD Video decoder which is very efficient and has great quality – A simple install of this gives me all the codecs I need on my system
• CrashPlan - A fantastic online (or offline, or friend) backup tool which handles all my backups for the media centre, by sending my treasured data to their secure datacentres, and the larger information to a nearline 1tb HDD. Great product which I would highly recommend to anyone wishing to protect their data.
• PowerDVD 10 – An obvious for anyone who wishes to play DVDs or Blu-Rays within Media Centre – Although this is not working at the moment, so stay tuned on if this will stay!
• DVDFab - Awesome application to convert DVDs or Blu-Rays to a number of formats, works great however is on the expensive side.
• My Movies - An awesome, truly fantastic application which collates your Movie collection (and now TV Series) and collects all the necessary Metadata to store in a DB. You can loan out films, categorize and list all your movies, and have a great Media Centre Interface to scroll through. Another useful feature here is the parental controls – Meaning the 12+ films are hidden from my son unless a PIN is provided.
• Orb – Another very good media application which transcodes my media on the fly and across the Internet to our iDevices. Meaning I can watch my movie collection anywhere in the world, listen to music, and access photos etc.
• SlySoft AnyDVD - If you are into placing your movie collections on your computer rather than keeping them on discs, this is a great app to circumvent the protection on Blu-Ray and DVDs to allow copying. It runs in the background automatically removing protection – also has an added feature of being able to bypass warning text (FBI warning) etc. for discs placed in – taking you directly to the menu. Highly recommended for backup purposes!

The Move to Android

I really must post things sooner when I am experimenting or trying new things out! For my sake in documenting what I have done, and to share my experiences and learnings with others! Hmm… Although what IT person likes doing documentation! ;0)

My mobile contract came up for renewal last month, finally at the end of being sucked into O2 for 2 years to get an iPhone! I’ve loved my iPhone experience and I am surprised it came along so quick! Seems like it was only yesterday I got it, and eagerly awaited jailbreaking it to unlock it’s potential! 2 years on and it’s showing it’s age, however still a great device…

Looking around the market, I was unsure what to do. Firstly and a must do, was to jump ship from O2 and their somewhat awful network (i’ve had countless patchy signal points, and sloooowwww 3G) to someone more reliable… I was looking at 3 as had a great experience with using a pre-paid SIM in my iPad, with the 3G service being super fast, stable, and available in my little village!

So I thought of two things… Keep the iPhone a little longer as nothing is wrong with it, move to 3 with a rolling contract, and take out another contract when the time is right (iPhone 5 / 4GS ?), or go try the many other offerings out there, and if I don’t like it sell the phone, keeping the contract for my iPhone…

For some reason, I really wanted to try out what else is out there, and having heard about some new Android device claiming to be the fastest and lightest out there, I took the plunge… So, i’ve now a contract on 3 with a Samsung Galaxy S II smartphone!

Bless my wife for putting up with the frustrations over the preceeding weeks… As I battled between this and my iPhone, and the woes Android was giving me!

I learnt quickly why Apple put up that walled garden, and the experience you get with apps on the iPhone, that is just not there and polished as much on the Android… But it could do so much more! Argh the confusion!

Suffice to say I have now got the Android to kind of how I would like it, and have stuck with it… My iPhone is being retired…

I’ll try and get more on my experience when I’ve some more time to write about it…

Dead Netgear Router

I woke up Thursday morning to find I had no Internet… I know iDevices can be tempermental at times but a reboot did not fix! After checking my Netgear (DG834G V2) router running OpenWRT I found it was dead! Seems it’s 7+ year life had got the better of it as unplugging cables and replacing power made no difference, plugging a spare router I had lying around did however…

The annoying part about the router’s death was the fact that I had never really taken much of a backup. As I cobbled it together over a number of weeks, I had not since gone back and backed up that configuration I had made. Whilst I can remember some things, I had also not bothered documenting what I had done, therefore any new venture would mean starting from scratch!

A quick search around on the Internet found that the spare router I had (Linksys WAG354G) was also compatible with OpenWRT (after some tweaking) and was based on the same architecture as the Netgear. So I decided to get to work with getting OpenWRT installed on this little box replace the fallen Netgear.

Before I get into the details, I guess I should provide some detail as to what OpenWRT is and why I chose this platform from the many available for embedded devices.

OpenWRT is a cut down Linux Distribution for embedded / low power devices. It allows you to create a customizable platform expandable with packages and drivers for use in multiple applications. Whilst it’s main use is for routing and Wireless Access, It is one of the few platforms which also has some support for DSL modems – Most only tend to support Ethernet based routing.  This allows me to build a device with the features and customization I want. In fact the router now includes VPN Connectivity, a webpage to WOL my PC, and SNMP Monitoring for analysis.

Building from scratch was a pain, but a fun challenge to get working again. The fact that both devices ran the same architecture was helpful.

More to come on the build on the pages section…

LLU Me Up!

I know it’s been a while, but I got some exciting news through the post recently…

I occasionally (perhaps twice a year) check the status of my local exchange on SamKnows, just hoping that someone would come in and provide an LLU (Local Loop Unbundling) service. This means that I can take advantage of higher speeds, and lower costs because the provider has a presence in the exchange, rather than going through BT’s network (in turn them getting a cut of my bill…)

I got a letter through from TalkTalk stating that high speed broadband was available in my area – I dismissed it as a circular at first, but then noted it was addressed to me, so must have been legit… I went across to SamKnows again, checked my exchange in Henfield and sure enough there was two new LLU providers in my area! I now have the choice of TalkTalk or Sky.

Convincing the wife was not a problem as it was about to knock over £10 off my telephone / broadband bill, however I was careful to consider if it was worth moving, and the service I would expect to get from the above providers.

TalkTalk are considered to be low cost, so I had reservations on the speed I would get across their network, and with the news reporting that they are the most complained about ISP (apparently down to the Tiscali integration) I was somewhat reluctant, however Sky have mixed reviews too…

I thought about it and decided it was worth a try with Sky. The exchange being recently upgraded will not be over-subscribed as yet, so performance should not be an issue, I also get a larger download limit. I have got an activation date of 12th May so look forward to getting higher speeds after this date!

Will get some further stats soon.

Blu-Ray Backups

I wanted to get another post in before the year is out, and this time it has been something which I have been trying to get to grips with over the past couple weeks!

So what I have been trying to do is backup some Blu-Ray movies I got for christmas to my Media Center HDD. There is so much confusion out there right now on the best way to do this! And I can be quite fussy with how I encode!

Firstly, the best app I use for being able to get the data off the disk in the first place is AnyDVD HD. This is an awesome application which automatically removes the encryption, and can allow direct access to the disk. It also has a very handy option of skipping all the ad clutter (Grr Disney…) and taking you directly to the root menu! Nice.

So there are loads of different pieces of software out there which kind of do a job. My requirements are something that’s relatively easy to use, I don’t need to know every tiny detail about the encoding! I just want something that looks and sounds good. If I have 1080p content, I want to retain that resolution, and I also like to keep the original audio source, as for the bitrate I am happy to drop this a bit, as I am far away enough from the TV not to notice the pixelation.

First, to trim the fat off the content, and get what I want, a pretty good piece of software out there is MakeMKV. This is currently a free beta software (see the forum for the latest keys) and allows me to select just the content I want – which is generally just the main movie, the primary HD audio track, and no subtitles etc. This then rips from a Blu-Ray disk resulting in a single MKV file at full quality! These are still pretty big (although smaller than the entire disk) so I still need to compress this down to something more manageable. I quite like the MKV container format, as each file can contain multiple streams of video, audio or subtitles, and you can change between these.

For compression, I have used and like (for simplicity’s sake) UncropMKV. This is a nice and simple application which I can open the MKV file MakeMKV just produced, and alter the bitrate setting to compress the video further. It does not give you an estimated file size, so you may want to experiment to get what you want. I typically halve the bitrate and it’s still fine for my needs… This piece takes a while, so sometimes best leaving this overnight. Once complete, you get a second MKV file in the same folder with -uncropped appended – This is your new compressed version.

This generally gives me enough flexibility to get the main Blu-Ray content onto my PC, Sometimes I would transcode to support the numerous devices I have, which thats a different story for another day!

So you may look at that and think, well that’s not exactely easy to use? Yes – correct and I have been seeking something which is easier and works well, but unfortunately does not fill all my requirements!

Three other pieces of software I came across to assist with this are:

Ripbot - This is a pretty good piece of software, but I found getting things to encode and how I liked tedious and slow… It took ages to process content to rip, and takes some time… Not ideal for any batch processing.

AVS Video Converter - Lovely basic, easy to use piece of software, output some fantastic results, but had 1 fatal flaw in my requirements… I could not encode and keep the original audio source, it was insistent on dropping this to MP3!! Such as shame as this was a very tidy piece of software which was well priced. It also offered conversion directly to a wide range of devices such as xbox, PS3, PMP, iDevices etc.

DVDFab - Have used this software in the past for trying out DVD ripping, and wanted to see how it fares for Blu-Ray, a good well stacked application with lots of features! Unfortunately it did not decode the content correctly to start with, but I think this was down to the codec being used, I switched to CoreAVC and I think this is fixed now (yet to test). However the biggest shame with this feature rich piece of software was that the developer wants a fortune for it!! £150-200. I cannot justify spending that much money on saving a couple of clicks. Shame.

Let me know if you have any questions around the process, and any successes you have had with alternative software!

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Welcome

Welcome to OS Help!

This is a personal blog to share all things computing / OS Related, tid-bits I find along the way, and useful information!

Here’s hoping that this site becomes full of useful information to share with the world!

Jason