DVD jukebox

I have finally given up the ghost on the mountains of DVDs littering the house, and wanted to find some way to get them into storage without losing the ability to play them. I have looked at commercial DV jukeboxes (ouch - seriously expensive) and could of course just stream them from the PC - but then I have to have the PC on all the time, consuming energy etc just in case I want to watch a DVD. I thought about building a media PC, but know that if it isn't quiet I would be seriously miffed and don't really want a piece of kit that big in the living room.

After about six months of searching, I found what I wanted - the Popcorn Hour. Now, this is a great little box that you buy from the US that is little bigger than a hard disc caddy. It hooks up to a PC and can play back almost all fomrs of media. Okay, so no biggies so far except that it can play back ISO files in the raw - so no need to mount a DVD file first. Can you see where this is going? It is HD compliant and can take any reasonable size hard disc, so I can put say 1TB of DVD ISOs on the hard drive and watch my movies from there. Excellent.

Now, the user interface that comes with the Popcorn Hour is a little clunky. This thing works in Linux - a completely foreign language to me - literally and metaphorically - but it is not to some very very nice people who have built the most fantastic front end for the Popcorn Hour (and indeed other so called Networked Media Tanks). This gives you a fantastic custom built front end with the look and feel of something costing a lot of money. The software is very user friendly - it is called My Lil Movie Jukebox - and has an avid fan base and user forum. Look it up. Try the demo - it is way cool.

So, I bought the Popcorn Hour, put in the hard disc and got to encoding DVDs. So far I have removed about 100 DVDs from the shelves in the study, consigning them to the loft. The Popcorn Hour lives under the TV, is programmed into the universal remote and is just brilliant. Okay, it is NOT a consumer device per se (no plug and play Western Digital here) and you need a little bit of patience and the willingness to read the forum, but you get something that it worth its weight in gold to the avid AV enthusiast without a big budget.

For those wondering, the software I have used for DVD to ISO files is Slysoft AnyDVD, the movie database is managed by Movie Collector and you also need a neat little driver for the PC to enable it to read the Linux drives as if they were a PC drive.

Sonos Whole House Music Player

I have been thinking for a while about how to get our music streamed around the house without ripping up all the floorboards etc and went into our local Sevenoaks HiFi for advice. They showed me the Sonos system and I was blown away to put it mildly!

The Sonos uses your existing music files and streams them wirelessly around your house to a series of Zoneplayers. The Zoneplayer can be amplified (so you just plug in speakers to make it work), un-amplified (so you plug it into an existing audio set up), or even better a one stop box much like a Bose box that has speakers and all. One mains plug and you are up and running.

You can pay about £200 for the dedicated Sonos controller, but what really swung it for me is the App to run the thing which I can put on any Touch or iPhone - brilliant!

Setting it up was a breeze - you plug one Zoneplayer into your computer router, and wire up the others where you want them around the house. After loading the software onto your computer, you point the Sonos software at your music and away you go.

The neat part of it is also that you can keep you music on a NAS and it will play it from there, so no need to have the main PC running in the house, just the NAS. It is also format free, so will play iTunes, Widows or whatever.