MP5 Video Player

Due to a limited budget, I have to look for good tech deals on the cheap. I would love to get an iPod Touch, but they are up there in price and I can’t justify spending that much. Therefore, I purchased an MP5 video player off eBay with some extra holiday money. It came from Hong Kong and was supposed to be able to play a variety of different ‘web’ formats. For under $40 I decided I didn’t have much to lose.

The first unit I received was defective and couldn’t really play anything. The replacement player they sent is awesome. It is an 8GB unit (expandable to 12GB with SD card), can display 260K of color, has a screen resolution of 400×240 at 3”, and fits perfectly in my palm. While it does play a variety of video formats, you have to be very careful of what codecs the video uses as well as the bitrate.

I became educated very quickly on how these two items work together. Just to make things simple, I now run all my video through the viDrop (wickly awesome and free) conversion program and use a modified ‘Generic Rockchip 400×240 High’ preset configuration. It re-encodes the video at the proper resolution using the XVID codec, mirrors the video’s original FPS, and uses a bitrate of 600.

A good thing to remember when re-encoding for this player – always try to use original video with a higher resolution and higher bitrate than what your end product will have (it will look way better after conversion than going the other direction).

So far the video has ranged from very good to stunning. While I mostly use my player to watch Revision3 shows when I take walks at work, it also plays MP3 files, can display text, has a voice recorder, has a radio tuner, and can be used as a picture viewer.

Motherboard Shocker

At the end of summer my house got a nice jolt of electricity from some nearby lightning. The surge made its way to my Foxconn P35A motherboard and it started to fail. It would shut down at odd times (not a heat issue) and was hard to bring back to life. It finally died a short time ago and I found another Foxconn mobo that fit my needs – the 45GMX.

During the process of problem solving the failing motherboard issue, I acquired a dual core E2200 processor. I decided to stick that in the new motherboard and completed the surgery last night. Everything went great and when I powered the system up, all I had to do was put the driver CD in the tray and everything loaded back up as normal. Thank the stars I didn’t have to do an OS reinstall!

I read the 45GMX has some good overclocking potential. With the great luck I had with the P35A  in this area, I can’t wait to start tinkering with the BIOS.

Audible.com Disappointment

I listen to a lot of netcasts while driving and love my Sansa MP3 player. I have wanted to try Audible.com for a while to see what all the hype is about and got my chance today. They were offering a free Jules Verne audio book, so I said what the heck. I ran through their download manager setup and had the .aa file in my possession. It sounded great on the PC, but since I wanted to listen in my car I added my Sansa MP3 player (because it was supposed to be a supported) as an active device.

After many attempts (i.e. USB plugging, unplugging, and software restarts), the Audible manager couldn’t stay connected to my MP3 player (but my PC could) long enough to transfer the file over. I tried a second (generic) backup MP3 player I carry (not supported by Audible) and that didn’t work either. After some Googling I discovered that it is an extreme pain to circumnavigate the Audible DRM (to convert .aa files to MP3 manually/legally), so I gave up and deleted the Audible junk from my PC. I think I will try a competitor to see if they have a better structure/support for MP3 playback.

Crazy Busy Update #6

I finally completed my ethics course and have a little bit of free time before jumping into my final class. If I didn’t finish my story about my work computer, I will sum it up now… After a bunch of searching and tinkering, I discovered that it was Windows Explorer that was having issues. I installed IE7 and that corrected everything – what a sweet simple fix.

I am happy to report that my DVD LCD overhead projector is working as planned and it is awesome. Since I have young children, I have done a lot of testing with their videos. It is pretty neat to watch Blues Clues on an 83″ screen in the basement. What is even better is that the projector is capable of going bigger – I am hoping to get it to the 100″ mark. I will have to hook the Wii up to it and rock out with Guitar Hero!

Crazy Busy Update #5

I am still here… I think. Life has been chaotic lately. Demanding school work, regular work, and a pair of sick children can make your head spin. Everything is slowly smoothing out – yea! I am still bouncing around the world of tech as well. I found a great Mac-like dock for Windows called RocketDock and it works awesome. I have been slowly working on my home projector unit and have it almost complete – just in time for football season! The case is fabricated and the internal air flow system has been figured out. I am going to give it a test run shortly. If it works as planned, a paint job will soon follow and then it will be put into full time service for the family (will post pics when I get a chance).

Wireless Music with Bluetooth

I hate wires! I think most techies do. Since I don’t have a lot of space on my desk for speakers, I wanted to find a way to listen to music and games with minimal wiring fuss. I purchased wireless headphones off eBay, but the base station, along with the headphones themselves, had batteries to monitor and replace. I also noticed that the headphones dropped some of the intense sound effects from games. That was just not acceptable.

I then found an article on how to hook up a bluetooth headset/earpiece to a PC with a bluetooth dongle (I love that word). I had and extra earpiece and dongle in my tech storage box, so I decided to give it a shot. It was rather painless to set up and it fit my need perfectly. While the sound quality isn’t astonishing, it is decent enough for my online activities. It also doesn’t drop out like the wireless headset did.

Crazy Busy Update #2

Another crazy busy weekend came and went. I didn’t get any big tech projects done, but I took a few steps in a couple different areas. For my DIY projector I was able to disassemble the LCD monitor, test the overhead projector, and test the screen on the projector unit. These early tests were extremely promising!

I did run into a few design snags, but a little brainstorming helped me get through them. I bought an LCD screen that is about three inches to long for the overhead glass (it is a wide screen unit off eBay). At first I thought this would be a problem, but after I pulled the monitor apart it turned out not to be such an issue. One of the main interface circuit boards has to lay about 2.5 inches into the left side of the screen (underneath it). This is perfect as that side was going to get left off anyway. When I hook the TV adapter up, I will just run the program in a window and move it so it fits on the right side of the screen – problem solved.

Next was determining the best way to mount the remaining LCD circuit boards on the overhead. With the extra hang over of the screen I found that a 2×4 attached to the side of the projector unit with constructive adhesive worked well. I will use some standard hot glue to mount the boards to the 2×4 and I should be good to go.

HD-DVD Player Below $200

I just saw some exciting news come up in the blogosphere. It would be really cool if it was legit too – which it looks like it might be. It appears that Wal-Mart will be offering the Toshiba A2 HD-DVD player for under $200. Engadget reports that the units will be on sale nationwide on November 3rd starting with 18 machines per store.

Pics or its not real – right? The Engadget blog post does include an image that looks like the units are in a Wal-Mart store. If this is true then the HD-DVD format might see a jump in sales and take some ground from Blue-ray. It certainly is looking more attractive to me. I am sure time will tell if this tale is true as we move into November.

Canon PowerShot A560

If you are in the market for a nice budget camera then you might want to check out the Canon PowerShot A560. My family just purchased this unit and it does a great job. The pictures look fantastic at the 7.1 megapixel resolution (especially compared to my old 2 megapixel camera). The zoom works perfectly and the video comes out smooth and clean.

I read the review on this camera over at CNET and it stood up well to their testing. They noted that there was some issues with artifacts, but I have yet to see even a hint of this. They also noted that the camera isn’t to good for those with shaky hands and I can attest that this is true. Overall I am impressed with the quality and ease of use. So, if you have a steady hand and are on a budget – give the PowerShot A560 a spin.

Down Again Up Again

I have learned a bunch about system maintenance in the past few weeks due to a lot of unplanned repair work on my PC cluster. My website went down because my webserver’s power supply failed. This was a very bad coincidence because at the same time two of my other machines lost their power supplies as well. That left me with only one out of four functioning computers to work with.

On top of the three power supplies going bad, one of my mobo’s fried. What a stretch! I am back up now and better than ever. My virtualization of the website didn’t pan out as planned, but I got lucky and found a super easy way to administer it (and back it up) in Windows XP. I don’t think I will ever be exclusive to Windows or Linux. Using both seems to be the way to go.