I went looking for a list of YouTube URL hacks so I could send a link to a video and have it start at a particular time. I ended up coming across a couple of great posts that have some neat tricks. 10 YouTube URL Tricks You Should Know About 10 Useful YouTube URL Tips and Tricks My favorite two: View high quality videos: Add "&fmt=18" for stereo 480 x 270 resolution or "&fmt=22" for stereo 1280x720 resolution. Start at a specific time: Add...

That headline sounds a little foreboding, but this is important: If you are expanding your storage at home, be careful of choosing WD Green drives - only certain model numbers are good. A while ago I upgraded my Windows Home Server storage with an eSATA port multiplier and some 1TB WD Green drives. A few months later I added more storage in the form of a 2TB WD Green drive. During this time, I had installed PerfectDisk on the Windows Home Server and was using that to defrag my drives. When running it, I'd get all sorts of...

I've been having some trouble with my Windows Home Server involving some potentially misbehaving hardware when put under load. This really only manifests itself when I run PerfectDisk to defrag it, but I'm gathering it's really a hardware or driver issue and not PerfectDisk's fault. When you defrag the server will entirely hang up until you reboot it. Occasionally I'll get file conflicts or lose my backup database. Not great. Anyway, I have a lot of data stored on that Windows Home Server - terabytes of DVD rips (from discs I own) - and with the problems I'm having,...

A couple of weeks back I blogged about setting up my Onkyo TX-NR3007 receiver. Now that I've had it for a couple of weeks (even if I was out one of those weeks), what have I learned? A lot, actually, but not all of it is directly related to the Onkyo TX-NR3007. Some is just "modern home theater" stuff, but since I learned it while messing with this receiver I figured it's as good a place as any to put it. Electrical relays are annoying. I stepped up from a low-to-mid-range Yamaha receiver bought a little...

This weekend I took Saturday from about 11:00a to 7:00p installing and configuring my new Onkyo TX-NR3007 receiver. This replaces a Yamaha receiver I had from probably 10 years ago from The Good Guys (a now-defunct consumer electronics store that used to be everywhere locally). The primary driver for the upgrade is that I have a Bose Acoustimass 16 speaker kit that will support 6.1 surround, but the Yamaha receiver only has 5.1 outputs... so there's a speaker that's been sitting idle in a cabinet for a few years, yearning to break free. This Onkyo supports 9.2...

The folks over at Tested.com have created a nice guide to show you how to rip your DVDs to play on any device. Basically they walk you through the preferred settings in Handbrake for each device and explain what each device supports. To me, it looks like you'll end up with a different copy of the movie for just about every device. It also won't work for my purposes since part of the goal of my media center/DVD library is to use the library as a backup for the discs in case they go bad; recompressing, removing the extras/menus,...

Busy weekend this weekend, but got a lot done and had some fun, so it was one of the better ones. Saturday my mom came over early and went with me to my 24th (and, ostensibly, final) laser hair removal treatment. (I'll blog that in a couple of weeks after I see the results.) We tooled around town most of the rest of the morning, got some lunch, and headed back home. In the afternoon my dad and grandpa came over and my dad helped me wire up some Cat-6 from my office to my living room. I...

Two nights ago I did the full network reset again after having more trouble with Netflix streaming. That's the second time in a week, and even after I reset it, things didn't really get better. Then I had an epiphany and tested it out... and I think I'm onto something. When you get online with the Xbox 360, it's usually like this: Turn on Xbox 360. Sign in with profile. Dashboard refreshes and you're logged in. About 10 seconds later an alert pops up telling you...

I have Netflix and it's pretty awesome, but sometimes there are just problems getting the streaming to work well. Before I get your hopes up, I don't have an answer for this. It's more a description of the problem and some of the things I've tried. I have, attached to our main TV: A Playstation 3. An Xbox 360. A Windows 7 Media Center PC. All of these have been rigged up to Netflix streaming. Upstairs I have an Xbox 360, a Windows 7 Media Center PC, and a Wii. (I'll be blogging the...

Back in June 2009 I picked up a copy of PerfectDisk for Windows Home Server as a solution for defragmenting the system. At the time I hadn't expanded things too far storage-wise, but since then I've increased my storage capacity to nearly 8TB. Between June and December 2009, I noticed I would get reasonably frequent (roughly weekly) health warnings on my system drive. Running a "repair" on the drive would return things to normal. I prepared myself for it to fail, researching how to recover, replace the system disk, etc. In the meantime, I decided to stop running PerfectDisk...

Great post by Media Center MVP Pete Stagman on how he handles ripping and playing Blu-ray discs with Media Center and Windows Home Server. Doesn't sound too different from how I have my Media Center stuff set up except he's using MyMovies to list the titles and I'm using the built-in Media Center movie library.

I found I was running out of space with all of my DVDs and such, even after adding an eSATA port multiplier and a few 1TB drives. I only have one drive slot left, and while at first I thought I'd fill it, I realized that doesn't leave me much wiggle room in the event of a real emergency where I need to do some fancy drive swapping. As such, I decided to replace one of the 500GB drives with a 2TB drive. The 500GB drive I took out will stand ready as a replacement for the system drive should...

I got a Creative Vado HD camera for Christmas from Jenn and have been messing around a bit with it. I like the recording quality, but I found in Windows Vista you have to install an H.264 codec in order to get the videos to play in Windows Media Player. (In Windows 7 they provide an H.264 codec for Windows Media Player so you don't have to install anything else.) While playback is fine and dandy, I'm not really interested in editing the videos I take with the camera in the simplistic editor they provide. I suppose if I...

A few days ago I was listening to some music on my iPod and noticed that a couple of tracks had metadata filed as "Firstname Lastname," which is not how I file my music. I think I picked them up off AmazonMP3, and it kind of irritated me that I had to fix it, so I tweeted: Wondering why so many folks file their music "Firstname Lastname" instead of "Lastname, Firstname." That actually brought a lot of responses (more than some questions I have where I actually really need to know the answer). I...

In both Vista and Windows 7, when running at full 1920 x 1080 resolution, I found that I would occasionally see a one or two pixel "line" along the right side of my TV when playing video. It looked like some sort of artifact left from the menu I was just using to select the video, but I couldn't tell. I started down the road of trying to figure out if I needed to tweak some overscan setting or something when I posted to The Green Button forums to see if anyone else saw this. Turns out there's a...