Onlydarksets

I’ve been backing up the kids’ DVDs with Handbrake, but the UI for entering chapter lists is less than friendly.  However, if you add the conversion to the queue instead of encoding immediately, you can export the command line to a batch file, which lets you then specify the text file of your choice for [...]

I got a Creative Vado HD for Christmas, and, for what it is, it’s great.  It’s compact, takes decent video at high resolution (720p), and it is easy to use. However, I recently tried playing back some of the videos on the SageTV HD-100 extender (doesn’t this thing seem to be at the root of [...]

Up until now, every Blu-ray disc I own has had the movie contained in a single, humungous M2TS file (usually 20-25GB).  Today I encountered a disc that has a bunch of smaller M2TS files.  This is, apparently, called a “seamless branching” Blu-Ray disc.  In order to play it back from the hard drive via the [...]

I finally got around to rebuilding my HTPC (does anyone call them that anymore?) yesterday, so now I need to set my sights on getting file conversions working again.  I’m pretty set on using DTb for file monitoring and processing control.  For transcoding, I was going to use VLC (or possibly Handbrake), but I might [...]

On my SageTV HD-100, it was taking 3-5 seconds to scroll through each page of videos or music.  Turns out there are three things required to fix this: Turn on hardware caching in sage.properties (enable_hardware_scaling_cache=true) Reduce the User Input Timeout (Settings | Customize | Inactivity Timeout and OSD AutoHide | Configure) Enable album art caching [...]

I have a ton of archived TV shows recorded in Vista Media Center that I processed with DVRMSToolbox (i.e., removed commercials, converted to WMV, and copied over all of the metadata), but they didn’t fit in well in Sage’s “Videos” structure.  After converting a few shows using SageMC, I realized that you can have pretty [...]

I picked up a Blu-ray drive for the Sage server and a couple of BR discs.  I don’t use the Sage server as a client – I have a HD-100 extender for viewing (with a HD-200 in the pipeline).  Since I don’t have a stand-alone player, the only way to watch the movies I have [...]

Long Zheng posted a link on his blog to a Microsoft-produced retrospective of the last decade of Media Center versions (also posted by Brent at GeekTonic, which reminded me to write on this).  It’s time for Microsoft to uncouple Media Center from the OS. I jumped ship from Vista Media Center almost 6 months ago, and [...]

I posted a method for converting SageTV files to iPod/iPhone compliant files a while back, but a number of the files weren’t converting properly.  I also had problems with mencoder cutting commercials out of the files.  So, I retooled the approach, and I am now getting 100% success, using the approach outlined below. NOTE: Several [...]

Just came across Badaboom Media Converter, which appears to be a cheaper alternative to TMPGEnc Xpress for DVD/Blu-Ray/video conversions – with three major caveats: It requires a CUDA-enabled Nvidia GPU (TMPGEnc also supports CUDA, but does not require it) It only outputs to H.264 (TMPGEnc outputs to almost anything) No batch mode (TMPGEnc does) So, if you [...]