It should come as no surprise I spent a lot of time in front of a computer. One of the things that can drive me completely insane is the silence with just the hard drive clicking or fans whirring. Because of this, I always have some music playing in the background – even if it’s barely audible, it only needs to cut through the monotone silence of a quiet office environment. Do you suffer the same problem?

One of the side-effects of the continual music playback is how to handle the situation when you get up and leave the area, either for a few moments or an unknown length of time. It becomes a problem with your office door now open and broadcasting your musical tastes to the rest of the office. Your lone choice is to simply pause your media player and then resume when you are back at your desk area.

Mute on Lock is a handy utility in the scenario above, which I believe fits many people’s environments. The free portable software is rather no frills in it’s feature set – you’ve probably assumed the utility will mute the audio output when the PC is locked; you’d be correct with that assumption! In addition to the auto mute on lock, the application also provides keyboard shortcuts that can be used to toggle between mute and unmute. This is useful because, unfortunately, the software can’t unmute automatically when you return to your PC; a situation I assume because the Windows API doesn’t allow for this type of hook.

One thing that is important to note, Mute on Lock under Vista and Win 7 must be run in Windows XP Compatibility mode. Ask yourself how often this feature actually solved an issue for you with other applications? It’s not often but it’s the case here! Unsure how to do this? Right-click on the executable file and select Properties. Under the Compatibility tab, check the box titled Run this program in compatibility mode for and then set it to Windows XP.

Download Mute on Lock

Let’s face it, few people actually admit to using and enjoying the iTunes application – especially on Windows. We all remain attached to it however because it’s the easiest way to access Apple’s App Store and conversely, the simplest way to get content onto your iPhone, iPod, or iPad. The iTunes application straddles this fictitious line where it’s barely tolerable enough to keep us attached but not complete garbage where we’d start looking for an alternative. There are many media library managers that can sync with Apple’s devices but few ultimately make that switch away from iTunes, myself included.

Apple provides the ability to browse the content of their iTunes store through a web browser. The experience is ironically much better than their efforts through the iTunes application directly. However, it is not long before a few clicks within their web-based store initiates the launching of iTunes – generally with no prompts or warning. Actually, the warning sign might be a sudden grinding and thrashing of your hard drive! That was a cheap shot by a blogger who tries to remain neutral ..

Annoying isn’t it? You should know it’s quite easy to neuter this feature in Firefox and Chrome, however.

Navigate to Tools-> Options within Firefox.

Click on the Applications tab and search for iTunes in the search box. Click the drop-down under the Actions header and choose Always ask. This will prevent Firefox from opening iTunes automatically.

Google Chrome is equally straight-forward. In the address bar of Chrome type about:plugins.

Scroll through the listings looking for a plugin titled iTunes Application Detector. Disable this plugin by following the Disable link.

It’s at this point that the plug-in functionality described above is currently limited to the developer channel of Chrome. If you’d like to switch the channel you are following in Chrome, likely the Stable, download and run the Google Chrome Channel Changer.

It will be nice when the day arrives that content providers produce their media in all the popular formats. As it stands, your computer is generally very flexible in media playback – assuming you have all the necessary codecs installed. But problems arise when you wish to take that content off your PC and onto another device for enjoyment. The iPod has it’s necessary specifications; likewise the Sony PSP shares a similar situation. If you wish to rip your newly purchased DVD for portable pleasure you will quickly be accustomed to the myriad of options available to you. Quite frankly, there is no shortage of video encoders that convert from one standard to another. Some are better than others, but at the end of the day they all perform basically the same; and to that – they all share one thing in common. They are rather slow!

DamnVid is another free video encoder that provides most of what you are expecting; it’s simply re-encodes content for playback on other devices. That doesn’t make it unique, nor does that fact it is available for Windows, OS X, and Linux – freely. What makes DamnVid damn unique is it’s ability to re-encode content as it is being downloaded from the Internet. I’m a sucker for efficiency and this streamlines the entire process. During the re-encoding process while downloading doesn’t make the entire process suddenly complete 50% faster but it certainly lends itself to a set and forget mantra.

The conversion process can be kick-started by supply the URLs to the  content to DamnVid and the queuing system takes care of the rest. Furthering the trend of efficiency, the software monitors the operating system’s clipboard for URLs and automatically injecting them into the queue for conversion. DamnVid utilizes the popular FFmpeg library for it’s processing and includes a number of the most popular encoding profiles.

Broadband comes in all shapes and sizes; a tool like DamnVid should measurably change your experience on slower connections since the bits can be reformed as they trickle down – a clever solution to a problem many likely didn’t know they had.

Download DamnVid

You are probably loosely aware of the concept of sharing files or printers from one computer to another, over the local network. After all, it’s a pretty common scenario even on the home front. What you may not be familiar with is sharing other types of resources – like sound perhaps.

The concept of sharing audio between multiple computers isn’t directly comparable to the logistics of sharing a printer. In the situation of sharing a printer, there exists one printer and more than one computer. Sharing sound is a bit different; you aren’t actually sharing a physical device like a printer, or in this case a sound card, rather you are sharing the audio stream. It’s rather similar to broadcasting a radio station. This problem is of a limited scope but it’s quite well defined and most definitely fits someone’s problem definition.

SpeakerShare is a free Windows and Apple application that can accomplish the sharing of one audio stream across a local network. Putting it bluntly, SpeakerShare can use one computer’s sound output and play it through speakers connected to a remote computer. Has that got your head racing with ideas now?

Sharing is accomplished using Apple’s Bonjour service which is installed alongside iTunes – or separately if you are not an iTunes user. A common client/server architecture is followed which allows for one server to handle multiple clients, or speaker sets as the case may be. Installation and set up is a snap; download and install on the server and each client, configuring the role of each though the interface. That’s it! The lone drawback is the stream is buffered a second or so which results in some lag – an annoying problem if the server and clients are in the same listening circle.

Download SpeakerShare

YouTube has long be a great time waster no matter where your general interests lie but if I’m being honest, it wasn’t until the last few years that I felt any of the content was worth saving after the initial viewing. Things have certainly changed for me and perhaps it correlates with YouTube streaming high-definition content at resolutions up to 1080p. There is a ton of great content with amazing clarity and as the file size continues to increase it is within reason that one would want to save the stream locally to your hard drive for later re-viewings.

I use XBMC as my media center on my HDTV religiously – all my media is stored on a central server and exported to XBMC. One of the nice features of XBMC is the ability to stream movie trailers from YouTube or IMDB for any of the movies in your collection – without any configuration on your part. Unfortunately, as of now XBMC does not stream the 720p movie trailers that are often found out there. However, it can play the trailers from the local file system on the assumption they are titled correctly and reside in the same folder as the movie they depict. Thus I needed a way to download and save YouTube 720p trailers manually.

Youtube Downloader HD is a free Windows application that fits my need perfectly. Now, there are literally dozens of ways to save video streams from all the Internet content sites. There are lots of applications as well as browser plugins or clever javascript snippets but at the end of the day Youtube Downloader HD has to be the best. First, it’s a single executable and as such, is portable. The interface is just a single screen that provides all the necessary options in the fore-front. Usability is as simple as pasting the YouTube video URL into the application, selecting the video quality you wish to download, and the local folder with which to save it in. What more could you ask for?

Yesterday I wrote about encapsulating a video with a media player in order to guarantee easy playback for a less savvy computer user. Codecs are a necessary evil and historically not the easiest to install – though it has gotten better. An improperly installed or configured codec can really cause some havoc on a system; at best the video just won’t play and at worst, well it’s not pretty.

Codecs can get installed any number of ways, either directly by you or indirectly by being installed along side a separate piece of software. Therefor, a Windows install over time will accumulate dozens of audio and video codecs. In a perfect Microsoft world, everything continues to hum along nicely. Reality is, these codecs can stomp all over each other and simply make for a painful video experience. As it’s not always easily traceable as to when your situation went from good to worse, recovering is challenging.

Codec Sniper is a free Windows utility that lists all the installed audio and video codecs on the computer. Codecs are broken down and organized by classes, either DirectShow, Audio, or Video and most importantly, status. The binary status of either broken or ok quickly lets you know whether everything is on the up and up. Through the interface listing, broken codecs can quickly be removed – perhaps too quickly if you aren’t careful.

A general warning, Codec Sniper is not entirely a universal solution – you are going to have to get your hands dirty. For example, ideally you already know that the problematic video playback file is encoded in MP4. Using Codec Sniper to identify all the MP4 codecs and looking for any listed as broken is a great first step in solving your problem.

Sharing videos with your friends and family is rarely a straightforward process, at least initially. Assuming you’ve tackled the problem of actually getting the video into their hands, it still seems like most of the time playback is problematic. Almost always the ultimate problem is the computer lacks the necessary Video Codec or the plugin necessary to commence viewing. There are a few ways around this problem, each with their positives and negatives.

Uploading the video to a site specializing in video sharing and playback, like Youtube, is typically the most straightforward – assuming you meet all the requirements of the particular video hosting site. Large videos are a problem, for example. All of these sites utilize Flash to handle playback from within the browser. The assumption being that the computer in question has Flash installed, which is actually pretty safe to assume. But, using this method requires an Internet connection for playback and it is not always easy to save a copy of the video for remembrance sake – which also can lead you back into the catch-22 we are trying to solve!

Another option is to download and install a media player that can handle playback of a very wide range of codec types. Media players like the free VLC are quite popular – if only because they are light, fast, and just work with whatever is thrown at them. However, downloading and installing another program can be a bit intimidating for some, even if it only has to occur once and then they are set for all future instances.

It is then in this situation where we turn to the final option – including the video and the media player in a single executable file that can be played back with a simple double-click. Make Instant Player is a wrapper for the cross-platform MPlayer that does just that. Essentially, Make Instant Player encapsulates MPlayer and your video file in question into a single file. Configuration and usage is straight forward once installed. Pass Make Instant Player your source video file and a location to save the created output and that’s basically it. Further options are available for if you’d like to keep the video atop all windows on playback, or loop the video continuously, just to name a few. All in all, it’s quite logical in it’s usage.

Make Instant Player ensures you can send videos to your grandmother and know you won’t get a troublesome support call soon thereafter. That’s worth something isn’t it?

Reluctantly, I’m a card carrying member of the iTunes User Group. iTunes is an example of a piece of software that works just well enough that you don’t actively go out looking for an alternative. Very few would argue that iTunes is the best music library manager available yet; some would go as far to say it’s one of the worst. As an iPhone user, I feel more or less tied to iTunes as I’m sure many others do. While iTunes is not the only media player that can sync with your iPhone or iPod, the entire experience isn’t horrible enough for me to seek an alternative. Sure, iTunes is horribly slow and bloated but at the end of the day, it just works and sometimes that’s just enough to keep users locked in.

One of the lacking features of iTunes is it’s support of global keyboard shortcuts, simply it doesn’t have any. If I wanted to pause the playback of a tune I generally have two options: use the mini-player so that I have quick  access to pause/play or restore the iTunes application window by clicking on it’s icon in the tray. That’s borderline unacceptable, but still not taking me to the tipping point in my iTunes usage.

CD Art Display, a free Windows application, is designed to work with your media player and display album cover art of the currently playing song on your desktop, like a widget if you will. In addition to album art, you also get the title, artist, album, and basic playback controls. Here’s where it becomes compelling for me. The playback controls can be bounded to keyboard shortcuts and provide some functionality lacking in native iTunes. You are even able to rate songs right from the desktop, again by keyboard shortcuts if you wanted. CD Art Display is not limited to iTunes; it supports WinAmp, Foobar, and Windows Media Player too. Lastly, if the track contains no album art you may use the embedded browser to search for artwork.

CD Art Display takes about 5MB of system memory which is a small price to pay for all the additional functionality it provides.

Were you aware that it is possible for iTunes to use multiple libraries under the same computer account? I wasn’t – but then again, I never had a reason until lately. iTunes creates and stores it’s library database in your user profile folder so it makes sense that one profile = one iTunes library. This proves not to be the case, it is possible to tell iTunes to use a different library upon launch but it is in no way obvious for some reason.

There are many reasons why multiple iTunes libraries would be welcome. If you share a computer and profile with someone else, you may have radically different musical tastes. As one who obsesses over properly tagged and organized music, I wouldn’t want to see the other person’s pop music infiltrate my play lists. Even if you don’t share a computer with someone you may still have a reason to wish for multiple libraries. Perhaps you could have a different library that hosts all your Christmas music. Sure, it is possible to use tags and smart play lists to filter out those tunes in July, but why add that extra layer if you can keep them cleanly separated?

Whatever you reasons may be, it’s actually quite easy to create and use a second library. Ready? All you need to do is hold down the Shift key as you launch iTunes. iTunes will present a dialog that allows you to choose or create a new library. Every subsequent launch will use the library of the previous session – so if you want to switch to the first library just hold down Shift again.

HD-Trailers is a site that came across my radar the other day as I continued my quest for the perfect 10-foot UI experience via XBMC Media Center. Utilizing the Aeon Stark theme atop XBMC provides a fantastic experience and presentation to my media content. I am very particular with my media; everything is fully tagged and sorted. TV Shows are organized by show and then season, and every movie video has an associated high-resolution poster which is then, in turn, used throughout the media center theme.  Aeon Stark provides the ability to play a movie trailer associated with whatever movie you are currently browsing in your collection. Unfortunately, one of the few things XBMC does not do for you automatically is actually acquiring the trailer.

HD-Trailers is a portal site that allows you to browse and search for trailers and teasers for new and old movies alike. If you are a movie buff and enjoy high quality trailers you are probably already aware that Apple hosts a good deal of them off their Quicktime Movie section. However, it’s not the easiest site to navigate or even download the trailers when you find them. HD-Trailers provides that interface however, both to Apple and Yahoo’s websites.

Once the movie you are looking for is found, you are provided the option to download the trailer in 480/720/1080p as well as formats compatible with the iPod and PS3. Best of all, this is all free without any registration necessary. The site merely provides a collection of links to trailer locations elsewhere on the Internet.

With HD-Trailers I can continue to feed my OCD over my media content with full high-def trailers!