That’s right, it’s Friday, and I’m cleaning out my bookmarks again. This week, I found some links to some really terrific free utilities. 4 of them assist in managing and accessing your Media, and 1 of them is just plain handy. Hope you enjoy them.

TvVersity - Would you like to get all of that tasty media that just sits around on your computer, and put it on your TV? If you have any of the devices on this page, then you can do just that for free.

TvVersity supports generic UPnP / DLNA devices, which is actually a pretty popular set of protocols supported by lots of devices. XBox 360, PS3, and many, many others. I just heard about this software package this morning, on Tekzilla, so I haven’t had time to check it out. I’m anxious to try it out and see if it works with my Popcorn Hour. The software is free for home / non-commercial use.

KillBox - Ever try to delete a file, and some unknown program has it open? Killbox is a freeware utility that will end the process of any program that has a particular file open. Very handy. Don’t try it with explorer.exe though.

CDex - Converting your CDs into MP3s? Want to convert your audio book CD into one big MP3? CDEX is not only free, and powerful, but open source as well. I especially love that I can rip an entire CD into one file. It’s not the prettiest thing in the world, but it works terrifically.

Mp3Tag - Do you have any MP3s that you didn’t rip correctly, now all of the tags are missing, Mp3Tag is a great tool to help you get your MP3 meta information, the ID3 tags, in order. Did I mention it’s free?

DVDShrink - If you’re trying to make backups of the movies that you already legally own, then DVD Shrink is a very handy utility. It will take the original DVD, or the files that were already ripped, and allow you to select / deselect various content, subtitles, extra audio tracks, to be compressed.

It will then calculate how much it needs to compress your video to fit on a standard 4.7G blank DVD. I personally like to create .ISO files that I can copy to my Popcorn Hour.

Have any free stuff that you can’t live without? Let me know, post it in the comments.

Posted in Multimedia, free stuff, Utilities No Comments »

I’m so excited! Why you ask? Only because I finally received my invitation to buy Popcorn Hour!

Way back in February, I did a little drive by linking, and mentioned Popcorn Hour. Popcorn Hour is a standalone video player, that can play video files from a number of sources. It can play files that you store on a local hard drive, files shared by other computers in the house, and even videos on youtube.

All in all, this is a sweet little device. You don’t have to have a hard drive to operate it, and without a drive, it sells for $179.

There has been such a demand for the player, that it became an invite only system. I signed up a month or so ago, and Monday I received my invitation to buy it.

When I initially signed up, I wasn’t sure if I was going to want to buy it or not, but recently I’ve ran into some frustrations when trying to get some video files on DVD to watch on my television. That has been such a pain, that even my wife is all for buying it.

So I went ahead and ordered it. (W00t!)

I won’t receive mine until sometime in April, but you can be sure I’ll let you know what I think of it.

Posted in Multimedia, TV, Tech, Movies, Internet TV 2 Comments »