In my continued research into how best to go about digitizing my movie collection and making it more accessible than it currently is (binders full of DVDs aren’t too accessible) I’m reconsidering my position on storing the movie as ISO and might now just copy the VIDEO_TS folders to a drive instead. (I like DVD Decrypter for this.)

It turns out that both MediaPortal and My Movies for Media Center will support ISO playback using Daemon Tools, but ISO doesn’t work for Media Center Extenders like the Xbox 360. Ideally you’d just store one copy of the movie, but with ISO not working, saving ISO would mean having to save two versions of it - the ISO and a MCE-compatible version. Talk about space usage.

My Movies has a document talking about which format to store movies in (they recommend VIDEO_TS over ISO) and the Xbox 360 as a media extender. Turns out Transcode360 can handle VIDEO_TS now, too, so from a “lossless” standpoint, it may be that VIDEO_TS is the way to go.

You can even burn VIDEO_TS to a watchable DVD later, which was my original notion of saving the ISO - so if the original DVD gets corrupted or scratched, I can re-create it. The only thing I don’t know is how the various audio tracks (commentary, etc.) and extras (menus, behind-the-scenes videos) live on via VIDEO_TS and/or manifest on the Media Center Extender.

Neither my wife nor I have our iPods directly integrated through a line-in to the car. I have a tape deck adapter; Jenn uses a radio transmitter. For those in Jenn’s place, there’s a site that helps you find unused frequencies in your area. Here’s the list of unused frequencies in my zip code.

For one reason or another, I occasionally need to run Internet Explorer from the command line - maybe a script, maybe a shortcut, whatever. Good luck finding documentation on the available command line arguments for it, though, and iexplore doesn’t respond to “/?” or anything.

Luckily, PeteL runs them down for us.

After posting about several clipboard management software packages I’d tried that didn’t quite meet my needs, I got some great comments from readers and tried out a few suggested packages.

I finally ended up with ClipX - it does everything I was hoping for.

• You can right-click on the tray icon and select a clip, making it the active clip on the clipboard but not automatically pasting anything into any application.
• You can use an alternate “paste” key to have the menu of clips pop up right in the application you’re working in and select the clip to make active and paste - no confusing out-of-application experience.
• The interface is minimal - there’s no giant explorer window to deal with. The biggest it gets is the “clip management” window that lists out the current set of clips and lets you edit or delete them, but even that is basically just a big listbox.
• It’s got a plugin SDK and a few interesting plugins ready for download.
• There are configuration options, but not so many it’s overwhelming and every one of them makes sense.

Installed and loving it so far.

Here’s the interface working inline - hit the “alternate paste” key (by default Ctrl-Shift-V) to bring this up and select a clip to paste in…

And here’s the tray menu where you can just select the clip to make active without actually having to paste anything…

I’m digging it. Check it out.

More a reminder for me than anything… last week I was having a hell of a time getting my Pocket PC to sync up. I’m not sure what happened - one second it was working, then it disconnected and wouldn’t reconnect again. Rebooted and no luck. I ended up figuring that something weird happened to the drivers (it kept registering as an “unknown device”).

But where do you get the USB drivers for Pocket PC?

This is what I ended up using and it seems to support a load of models (including my ViewSonic V37). Now I’m back in business.