Day: February 11, 2010

OK, so Windows Media Center wtv files are huge. One hour? About 3GB. Didn’t take long for recordings of my Wonder Woman’s shows (well, and Chuck for me–nerd fantasies, ya know *heh*) to get above 200GB, so I needed a good way to archive ’em, and no, eating up storage on my external drives was not the answer.

Sure, it’s convenient for my Wonder Woman to be able to click a link I put on her desktop and simply open the files from my computer, but… that’s a lot of space to sit there just being used to store TV shows.

So, enter Free Studio Manager 4.3.5.73 (yes, it’s that particular iteration *heh*).

Now, I’ve tried a fair bunch of video conversion/DVD writer apps and all of them have their shortcomings. Free Studio Manager is no exception. It’s slow. OTOH, it’s free and it also has a ton of features. A ton. Converts nearly any video format to be burned to a playable DVD. Video to flash. Video to mp3, jpg, iPod, PSP, iPhone. Video dubbing, flip and roate and a few more lil features.

But wait, there’s more. 🙂 Youtube uploads/downloads. Converts many audio formats and burns music and data CDs DVDs. A real workhorse of a media suite. Free.

Now, I’ve multi-scanned the thing both before and after installation and nothing I’ve sicced on it has found any malware or other weird behavior from it, so my only (minor, petty, nit-picking) gripe is that video conversion is sooooo sloooooowww. Oh, and it throws “Disk Burning” errors if I allow it to convert a video and burn it to disk immediately, but since it’s not yet made a coaster with one of those errors, I’m not fashed by that. And, it’s not really a lot slower than others I’ve tried, well, except for Format Factory, which is pretty darned fast but just screws up too often for my taste–still worth every penny of its price (it’s free) but not for me.

So, reclaiming some hard drive storage and burning through a few DVDRs. Fine, as long as she can pop ’em in her DVD drive and watch ’em that way.

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ADDENDUM: Oh, yeh, have to remember two things.

1. The weird WMC “wtv” file format. *sheesh!* MUST right-click on any recordings and choose “convert to dvr-ms” in Windows Explorer before using ANY free video conversion/DVD writing tool I’ve found. and
2. Some shows have expiration dates on them noted in DRM files that WMC builds when recording. Unless you store them in a different format that loses the WMC DRM info, they’ll not play. So, it behooves any of us using WMC to convert early and often… Just archiving the wtv files is NOT good enough!

…spamming buzzards.

Twitter has always seemed like (and grown more and more to seem like) the ultimate dumbing down of already PDD (pretty darned dumb) social networking services, but it’s been surpassed in asininity by Google Buzz in Buzz’s first outing! Dennis Howlett’s take in a recent ZDNet post pretty much firmed up my own reservations:

Despite the claim to help me: ‘to start conversations about the things you find interesting,’ it does nothing of the sort. Instead, it adds in any ’stuff’ that people it has decided I am following put into their Buzz (a bit like Twitter) along with any other accounts that Google has linked via their profiles such as Flickr, Twitter, Google Reader, assorted blogs….the list goes on. In other words it is aggregating a pile of stuff and lobbing it over the wall into my GMail.

A MUCH worse tale of woe is here. A good cautionary tale affirming my decision to board the Buzz train only after (and only IF) it proved itself.

Now, I’d already been annoyed enough at GMail’s activation of a chat “feature” that resulted in spam chat being flung my way (until I found the link at the very bottom of a GMail page that let me turn chat OFF), so I wasn’t looking forward to being spammed by Buzz in a similar–or worse!–manner. First time GMail had a notice about Buzz, I hit the bottom of the page looking for an OFF switch. *phew!* There it was.

All better now.

*heh*

…the browser, that is. In no particular order of importance. And just a few. Making an exhaustive list would simply ruin my day.

–Google’s invasive tracking, etc. But, I’ve tried Iron–Chrome absent Google’s privacy invasion crap–and it is no better in all other aspects of browser use

–The overly-dumbed-down interface. Really. Where are all the power features?

• Zooming is awful
• No “fit to page”
• “extensions” required for essential features like mouse gestures. Stupid.
• no easy way to “granularize” (organize in depth) bookmarks–have to use the stupid Tools>Bookmark Manager or know the CTRL+SHIFT+B keystroke combo and that’s after using CTRL+D to make the bookmark first! Dumb.

Lotsa other gripes, but all along usability and customizability lines. Sure, it’s pretty fast on page loads, but having to waste a bunch of time just getting things to load almost right for viewing almost the way I prefer is enough to garner it a big thumbs down for me. It’s fine, I suppose, for Great Aunt Sadie who’s just going to click links and has no idea things could be markedly better, but I really can’t stand the piece of crap.

YMMV.