Aviary is a suite of powerful creative applications that you can use right in your web browser.
Photo-editing, logos, web templates, filters, color palettes, screen capture & more

aviary.com

www.videohelp.com

For tutorials and help on how to encode rip convert adjust any movie file to just about anything else. check out http://www.videohelp.com/guides

Movie & TV Scrapers

TVixie
Movie GUI Creator
Media Companion
YAMJ (Yet Another Movie Jukebox)
YAMMM (Yet Another Media Meta Manager)
My Movies
Ember Media Manager
Media Browser
Code Scout
Meta
Salami's Movie Organizer

Renamers

EpNamer
TVRenamer

Movie & TV Cover art links

The TV Database - TV Shows
The Internet Movie Database - Movies & TV shows
The Movie Database - Movies
International Movie Poster Awards - Movies
Movie Poster Database - Movies

MP3 Taggers

Tag&Rename
MediaMonkey
MusicBrainz Picard
Windows Media Player

Media Analyser

MediaInfo

Ember Media Manager Downloads
EMM_r1046_BETA_FULL_x86.zip

EMM_r1046_BETA_FULL_x64.zip


If your steadily collecting video files and movies or using a media centre to organise your movie collection then you might want to get into Ember Media Manager.

Ember MM is an application based around organising / collecting information, fanart and posters for all your movies.

Scraping data from a few different locations you can choose the movie covers you want to use to represent the movies in your collection. Use this tool to organise your movies, then use something XBMC/Media Portal/Windows MCE to view your library.

But it seems best paired with kryp2nite and Imagino’s lovely media flagging mods, the latest Aeon Auriga skin, and you have yourself a media centre geek’s wet dream.

Enjoy

These items I picked after reading reviews and taking into consideration other opinions.
These items are the best in the fields with a moderate budget in mind.

Speakers - $7000
Front - 2 x B&W 683
Centre - B&W HTM62
Sub - B&W ASW610XP
Surround - 2 x B&W DS3
B&W website


Receiver - $6195
Integra DTR 9.9 ( high end onkyo)
Integra website


Disc Player -$1000
Oppo BDP - 83 blu-ray disc player
Oppo website


Considering the price of the items, a budget version setup might be to buy only the front two speakers and possibley a simpler ONKYO reciever and a basic blu-ray player. Getting only some of the speakers and buying the rest of the set later is a sure way to make sure you have a qaulity setup from the get go.

Below is an excerpt from the article located here to assist in playing full 1080p content on your throw away pc with that basic graphics card.

• Download Media Player Classic Home Cinema (GPU accelerated) - click here.
• Download and install the latest Direct X - click here
• Make sure your graphics card drivers are up-to date.

Start Media Player Classic,

First go to OPTIONS, and in the first field labeled PLAYER you might want to check 'launch files in Full screen'.

Then go to the field Playback > OUTPUT. Here we need to our Direct Show preference, and this is the most important task for you to setup.

Windows XP users, select Overlay Mixer, VMR7, VMR9 or VMR9 renderless
Windows Vista users, select EVR or EVR custom renderer

We have Windows Vista 32-bit installed, we select EVR Custom Preset, highlighted in bold that really should be your preference. Feel free to fool around with some of the other settings.

Small note, after each Direct Show change is is wise to select apply and then exit the program. Then startup again, that way for sure the new setting will be activated.

Sound - Go to Internal Filters. This can be a bit of a culprit. If you playback audio through the PC soundcard (multichannel) analog over speakers, you might just want to leave things as they are. I however use a SPDIF coaxal pass-through, the automatically selected embedded audio filters for DTS and AC3 where not properly in sync. I disabled them and just used a free to download software AC3 filter.

Your choice of course. Don't be afraid to play around with it. If it works fine, don't fool around with these settings.

Next to the DTS and AC3 settings I've highlighted Matroska. Matroska is the MKV / x.264 file container format we want to have accelerated. We strongly recommend you to check the Matroska flag, so that the internal filter will be used, key to x.264 GPU acceleration.

After a restart you should be all go with 1080p video running from your GPU.

Go to Play > Shader > Combine.

I advise you to select and combine the following shaders:

• Sharpen Complex or Edgde sharpen
• 16-235 -> 1-255 (will give you a nice dark screen)
• optionally de-interlace: but most movies are de-interlaced already

Now, enable your shaders to tweak your image further.

During playback you can press CTRL+P to enable and disable the pixel shaders.

Media Player Classic Home Cinema

Download site(s):
Download from author site (6.6MB) Download from mirror (direct link) (6.6MB) Download latest beta version here (6.6MB) Supported operating system(s): Windows Download old versions







HD content on your PC? things to try...

Which output filter are you using in media player classic? View -> Options -> Playback -> Output. Try Overlay Mixer. The the graphics card setup applet make sure Video Acceleration is set to full (max) and Write Combining is enabled. From the Display Properties dialog select the Settings Tab, Advanced button, then the Troubleshot tab. You'll have to reboot after changing these.

More information and other downloads:
Download Media Player Classic Home Cinema 64 bit version here

Media Portal is an application that I used for a long while. Great and for the most part a BETTER alternative to Windows Media Center Edition. Feature Rich and growing everyday there is not much that this Media Center Software doesn't do. I recommend you jump to there website for a free download of this open source application.


Below is the text from their main page.

MediaPortal turns your PC / TV into a very advanced MediaCenter / HTPC. Our software allows you to listen to your favorite music & radio, watch and store your videos and DVDs, view, schedule and record live TV as a digital video recorder and much much more. You get MediaPortal as Open Source software. This means you can help in developing MediaPortal or tweak it for your own needs with lots of innovating plugins from our great community.

• Media Portal 1.0.1 Final Download
• Media Portal 2 Preview Download - This preview is not yet complete, so be warned.
• Plugins and Extensions
  

DVDFab HD Decrypter

A nice DVDripping tool. Id use this or DVDshrink to get the job done. DVDshrink is simple and efficient but cant always circumvent the copyright protection like DVDFab decrypter can.

Download : http://www.dvdfab.com/free.htm

http://dtvforum.info/

TV and AV Forum in Australia - A Great source of information regarding Digital TV and all things relating.

Not much more to be said really, except that if you own a TV and you use it then you should have a read of this forum.

http://www.cdcovers.cc/



an oldy but has always come up good when Ive need covers for any DVD's or CD's.

This is a little step through to remind me of how to download videos from the wixi.com web application for viewing at a later date.

1. observe where the website is saving your flash temporary files.
2. more often that not it would be in "C:\Documents and Settings\geekfreak\Local Settings\Temp"
3. run HOBOCOPY and copy the fla***.tmp somewhere safe. Its the .tmp file thats so big it stands out above the rest, not hard to miss.
4. Tip : wait for the video to finish loading before copying. other wise you wont get the whole video.
5. rename the file from fla****.tmp to robocop.flv
6. play your movie in a supporting flash video player like videolan or whichever you prefer.

http://www.orbitdownloader.com/

Orbit Downloader, leader of download manager revolution, is devoted to new generation web (web2.0) downloading, such as video/music/streaming media from Myspace, YouTube, Imeem, Pandora, Rapidshare, support RTMP. And to make general downloading easier and faster.

• Download e-mail and forum attachments with great speed!
• Grab Pro - Download Youtube no failure
• More Efficient mirrors selection algorithm and faster download sources!
• Maximum possible download speed, up to the fastest download manager!
• Download social music and video include Youtube, Pandora, Myspace easily
• Support all streaming media protocol include RTMP/ MMS/ RTSP
• Support all popular browsers include Firefox 3

Three New sites that have been brewing and are still in testing phase


http://www.fotonauts.com/

a Wikipedia of pictures - But it does more than that. It adds data from Wikipedia, Google Maps, and other places to photo albums and then publishes those albums as Web pages with one click of a button.

You can add photos from your desktop or the various existing photo-sharing services such as Flickr and Picasa or add Creative Commons photos taken by other people to each album. There is also a social element in that you can follow other “fotonauts” or specific Web albums via an event stream.

http://www.gazopa.com

Gazopa uses proprietary image analytics technology to extract information such as color and shape from images. It then identifies similar pictures from a pool of about 50 million different images found around the web.

Gazopa’s big idea is to render keywords obsolete when it comes to image search. Instead of typing search terms, Gazopa’s visual engine lets users upload their own images or right-click on ones found on any webpage.


http://www.videosurf.com/

Searching video - you might want to search for a scene in a particular show. You can drill down to the show, and then are presented with thumbnails of all of the characters, left to right at the top of the screen by level of importance. By clicking on a character, you get all the scenes in which that character appears, as well as related scenes.

Social MEDI CENTRE file sharing web application.

http://main.wixi.com/

Create an account now. Any users that sign up by October 1 will get unlimited storage for life, while members joining after that date will need to pay $5 a month for the privilege (though they will still be able to get a free account with a 3GB limit).

below is the sign up page - get to work!
http://wixi.com/signup/signup_wixi_first.php

NIVEUS Media Center : hardware for your living room.
One of the better completely built systems that for viewing your content in your living rooms or anywhere else within network distance.

http://www.niveusmedia.com

Within a typical setup you can have

• a media server with blue ray support
• 200 disc carousel changer ( only CD and DVD support) and you can daisy chain them so if you have 1000 discs your covered.
• a storage server with the option of 2 or 4 terabyte.
  
• media extenders
  
• and to top it off is the remote control which is a PC based application.
  

The nice thing about the remote is that you can load it onto say a touchscreen palmtop device running XP (or vista) and that then becomes your nice large fully functional multi zone interface, connecting you via wifi, you can control every aspect of your content sending it to any particular zone that you have setup. Full control of everything everywhere.
You could have multiples of these hand held devices which can also act as media viewing/listening devices.

Note : a point to make also is that it will also control your already running microsoft media center PC and any Microsoft media centre extenders out there. so you can integrate it into your already existing setup.

Typically if you wanted an all in one device that was setup and running perfectly and you had the money to burn then this would be it. You COULD build it yourself at a fraction of the price but then hey you'd be building it yourself and it would prolly break!

There are other systems that will do pretty much similar tasks such as the SONOS, although I dont think the they are as versatile or as scalable as the Niveus.

Boxee is a Media Centre PC Alternative.

http://boxee.tv




at the moment theres only support for MAC and LINUX users. with windows support coming in the soon. Seriously speaking if you want a media centre PC then linux is the bext platform. you can run a seriously lite version of linux on an old PC with minimal hardware specs, then use this application to source all your media from another PC.

BOXEE is a social media center. with boxee you can play videos, music and pictures from your PC or from the Internet. you can also share with your friends what albums you're listening to, what movies and TV shows you're watching, send recommendations and more.

boxee is designed to work with a remote control (it looks great on a big screen TV), but you can also control it using your keyboard.

once installed boxee will start scanning your local Movies, Music and Pictures folders automatically. boxee will attempt to bring artwork, reviews, cast, etc. for your media, so browsing your library becomes more useful and fun than looking at a list of files.

boxee is based on the best media center on the planet, xbmc.

Great app to manage your media store in your home and across the web. Basically, Add your home and Internet media, Organize it, tag it and create playlists then Access it from your TV and mobile devices.

BEST THING ABOUT IT : ITS FREE!

http://tversity.com/

Application Download

What does it do? store all your video music media on your pc, run it through this app, link this app to the "internet" then in step four you should be able to see your music and video on your iphone.

Typically if your pc is on a network.. then ALL ( most ) networked devices should be able to access your music/video.

Note from the website reads :

“TVersity is on the cutting edge of media aggregation software, G4 has always been at the forefront of the new media space. The network was one of the first to offer free video podcasts and we currently serve more than 16 million podcasts per month. G4 viewers are the perfect demographic for TVersity - they are early adopters who want their media easily accessible and totally transportable to all of their favorite devices. TVersity works extremely well with the Xbox 360™, PS3™ and PSP® gaming platforms, which makes it an even better fit for G4’s gamer audience.”