My Own Little Media Empire

Those of you whom have been with my blog a while know how much of a media
freak I am. I love movies, tv, music, books and games. I really enjoy
storytelling and I wanted to share with you how my setup at home works. I
shall start with a listing of everything you need to be as cool as me if you
use a Mac, which in hindsight makes me horribly uncool in some folks eyes.

- Flip4Mac - Software from Microsoft that allows the playing of Windows
Media audio and video to play on a Mac.
- Connect360 - Indexes iTunes and iPhoto content and shares it for the
XBox 360, cost is $20.
- iMac
- XBox 360
- Miro - "A free, open source Internet TV and video player that can
automatically download videos from RSS-based channels"

Now that we have our list, here is what I did with all of this.

1. First let me start off by saying that I am not really sure why
Flip4Mac needs to be installed, I already had it anyways and then on the
Connect360 website it said I needed it for Windows Media. So if you do not
have it already, go ahead and install it. (I understand why I need it on my
Mac, just not why I need it in conjunction with Connect360).
2. I hooked up my XBox 360 to my network, I went wired as I heard that it
works better than wireless and also because my router sits next to the spot
where the XBox would sit.
3. I purchased and installed Connect360 for $20 on to my iMac.
4. Configure the Connect360 to read the location of all of your video
files, it will index anything in subdirectories as well and it grabs
everything in iTunes automatically so you do not have to point this to where
iTunes saves everything, it can be an external hard drive where you save
your videos.
5. At this point you could be done, you could walk away and use your XBox
and be content. However, I am not satisfied... that is simply not "geeky"
enough for me.
6. Subscribe to a bunch of video podcasts via iTunes and you will have
new content hit whenever there is an update.
7. Now Install Miro on the iMac.
8. Surf to TVRSS.Net and look up your favorite show.
9. Copy the feed URL for that show.
10. Go into Miro and "Add Channel" and paste the feed into the software.
11. Go into Miro Preferences and tell it to save the videos to the same
folder where your other videos reside.
12. Tell Miro to start whenever your profile is logged in.

I realize that I could take those feeds and install them into other
programs, however I like Miro's ability to delete items after x number of
days. This way if I like something I can go into Miro later and tell it to
save it for me and if I don't care for something then I can let it naturally
expire and delete itself.

You have the files you have saved, ripped, leached or procured and you also
have new content automatically being downloaded from Miro and iTunes via RSS
feeds. Tons of content comes directly to you now. The only downside to all
of this is that anything encoded with Apple's DRM will not play and to Apple
I say "Booooo". However I have tons of free content and anything else I need
I will transcode from various sources... and *cough*NetFlix*cough* for
everything else. Using a combination of MacTheRipper and VisualHub which
will transcode just about anything.

What is Transcode? From Wikipedia "*Transcoding* is the direct
digital-to-digital conversion from one (usually
lossy)
codec to another. It involves
decoding/decompressing the original data to a raw intermediate format (i.e.
PCM for audio or
YUVfor video), in a way that mimics
standard playback of the lossy content, and
then re-encoding this into the target format. The simplest way to do
transcoding is to decode a bitstream into YUV format using a compatible
decoder and then encode the data using an encoder of a different standard. A
better way to transcode is to change the bitstream format from one standard
to another without its undergoing the complete decoding and encoding
process. Many algorithms exist to achieve this."