Last month we looked at converting a boring beige box into a whisper-quiet lounge room companion. Now we’ll tackle configuring the media centre interface (MCE) and playing your favourite video files.

MCE is built into Windows 7 Home Premium, Professional and Ultimate. You can use it to play CDs and DVDs, as well as music and video files. MCE also lets you watch and record free-to-air television if you add a TV tuner card or USB dongle.

After you’ve run MCE’s initial set-up wizard, in the main menu go down to Tasks and choose Settings. Under General you can set MCE to start automatically with Windows and always stay on top. Go into Visual and Sound Effects to kill off the annoying ping as you navigate the menus. Enable Optimisation to force the MCE interface to restart once a day to improve stability.

Thankfully an MPEG-2 codec is pre-installed with MCE versions of Windows 7, so you don’t need to install separate software to watch DVDs and free-to-air TV. It doesn’t offer native Blu-ray support, but most Blu-ray drives come bundled with Blu-ray playback software, some of which offer MCE integration.

If you encounter stuttering when watching live TV, you could have digital reception issues or perhaps your tuner card is overheating. If you only experience stuttering when watching something you recorded earlier, perhaps while recording something else, then you should consider dropping in a second hard drive just for storing your recordings. If you’re recording to an external drive, you might need the performance boost of USB3 or eSATA.

When it comes to scheduling recordings, MCE can extract the Electronic Program Guide from the digital TV signal. You still might consider a third-party EPG service such as IceTV, which offers extra features such as scheduling your recordings via a web browser or your mobile phone.

MCE also makes a great DVD jukebox. If you rip your DVD collection to the hard drive as .vob files, MCE still lets you navigate the menus and access the extra features. You can add the folder containing your DVD collection to MCE by dipping into Settings, Media Libraries and Movies. MCE’s Movie Library doesn’t always display your DVD collection by default, but you can fix this by editing the registry. You can also install plug-ins such as My Movies for Windows Media Center, which downloads cover art and other metadata.

If you’re downloading video files from the internet, you’ll want to install a codec pack to extend MCE’s format support. Shark007’s Codec Packs are a one-stop-shop codec packs for MCE, with versions available for Windows 7 and Vista/XP. Format support includes DivX, Xvid, MKV, QuickTime, RealMedia and MPEG-2 as well as DirectVobSub for handling subtitles and AC3Filter for playing AC3 and DTS soundtracks.

With MCE configured, next time we’ll wrap up with a look at controlling your media centre from the couch.

Computers don’t have to be boring beige boxes which stay hidden away in the study. These days you’ll find a range of sleek home theatre PC cases, designed to look at home alongside your television and run whisper quiet.

If you’re not looking to build a new computer from scratch, you can give your existing PC a lounge room-friendly makeover. If your primary concern is noise, swap out noisy case fans for quiet alternatives from the likes of Antec, Zalman and Acousti.

Remember, fans are for cooling and heat is the mortal enemy of PC stability. Silent fans tend to be larger so they can spin slower but still move a large volume of air. Look for variable speed control and take extra care if you’re putting your computer inside an AV cabinet with limited airflow.

Silencing your computer and managing heat is a matter of trial and error, particularly if you’re using a cramped desktop case rather than a roomy tower case. With your case fans muted you might find that the fan on your CPU, power supply or graphics card is now the loudest component. Switching to a quiet or fanless heatsink for your CPU is the next most economical move, after which you might consider a silent power supply.

Keeping the heat down lets the remaining fans in your PC run slower and thus quieter. Tying down loose cables helps improve airflow, as does removing the covers over unused PCI slots. Vibration is another source of noise, so use rubber washers to install the fans, hard drive and optical drive.

Next consider how you’ll connect to your television. Many new processors feature an integrated graphics chip with built in MPEG2/4 hardware decoding, which is important for smooth playback. If you’re looking at Intel’s Sandy Bridge chips, opt for HD 3000 graphics (rather than HD 2000) and a motherboard with an HDMI output.

If you need to add a graphics card for the hardware decoding, AV outputs and extra grunt, you don’t need as much grunt as a high-end gaming machine. Opt for mid-range graphics card with a heat sink rather than a fan, but keep in mind the heat sink might cover the adjacent PCIe slot. Many graphics cards come with AV adaptors for connecting to component, composite and s-video inputs on your television.

If you want to watch and record free-to-air television you’ll need a digital TV tuner. Opt for dual high-def tuners so you can record two shows at once and watch all the new channels (you can downscale them to standard-def if you don’t own a high-def television). Assuming you have a spare motherboard slot, internal TV tuners generally feature stronger tuners than USB sticks. Try to get the tuner as far away from your other components as possible, to avoid interference and heat issues which can cause reception problems.

With the hardware in place, next time we’ll look at configuring the software on your media centre PC.

The 3G Home Zone contains what’s known as a femtocell; a device designed to bridge the gap between fixed line (ADSL or Cable broadband, in other words) and mobile services. Optus isn’t the only femtocell carrier on the market; Vodafone have a similar offering, but at this stage it’s only open to business customers rather than consumers.

The prospect of improving your home mobile (both 3G broadband and call) quality is an appealing one, but there are some catches. The 3G Home Zone is offered on a 24 month contract term, which is a very long time in the life of mobile devices. There’s an associated cost as well; if you’re on a $59 or better tariff with Optus the 3G Home Zone costs $5 per month, while those on lower tariffs will pay $15 per month. That extra payment isn’t without some additional compensation, as it also comes with unlimited national calls bundled in with the 3G Home Zone femtocell, but only for a single Optus mobile handset; you can nominate up to 12 connected Optus phones, but only one of them will get free calls. Given the number of plans that come with either stupendously large caps or unlimited calls anyway, that’s not much of a deal.

The other trap is the data one. A femtocell works by leveraging an additional data connection; in this case it’s your home broadband. You’ll need a minimum speed of around 1Mbps for it to work at all, and all the time it is working, it’s also chewing through your data allocation from your ISP. Surprisingly, even if you’re with Optus for home broadband, they’ll still count the 3G Home Zone’s data usage against your data cap. In other words, you’re using your money and your broadband to supplement Optus’ network coverage. Optus has stated that they’ll continue to work to improve the network overall, and that femtocells are a solution in small locations and where home construction impedes any mobile signal. There’s perhaps a market there, but I can’t help but think that the carriers offering femtocells need to make them more appealing to end customers, either by lowering pricing — as you’ll still be using their services and generating revenue anyway — or offering better bundled terms.

How do you connect them all up within your home? There’s a couple of choices, but they’re not always all that well understood. Here’s a basic primer to your connection choices once you’ve got an Internet connection (of any type) into your home:

Cabled Ethernet:
Pros: Speed. With up to 1GBps (potential), there’s nothing to match having an actual cabled connection to each room that you need access from. In terms of sustained speed, nothing even comes close.
Cons: Physical cables are a pain, and the cost of retro-fitting and cabling your home can be quite high. Anyone building should consider basic Ethernet cabling as a must-have, however.

HomePlug/Powerline:
Pros: Easy installation. Powerline sits in the mid-ground between Cabled and Wireless Internet, using your existing power infrastructure to deliver a cabled connection to your devices. Plug one end in near your router or modem, and the other near your device, and you’re usually good to go. At around $200 for a pair of plugs, it’s much less expensive than Ethernet cabling
Cons: Not all plugs are cross compatible, and some don’t work well (if at all) on powerboards and across power phases in your home or office. Many of the plugs are large and unwieldy, which makes them take over many points all by themselves. Often the only way to work out if Powerline products will work for you is to plug them in and see.

WiFi:
Pros: Ubiquity. WiFi is all over most notebooks, many games consoles and is often available as an add-on for ‘Internet-Ready’ televisions. There’s no unsightly wires to trip over, installation costs are typically very low, and most wireless routers (you probably got one from your ISP) can accommodate more wireless gadgets than you’ll ever own.
Cons: Access can be highly variable depending on a number of environmental factors that can leave some houses with WiFi ‘black spots’. Despite the highly promoted speed numbers on the boxes of most WiFi routers, real world speeds are typically a lot slower than their wired siblings. This is less of an issue for Web surfers and emailers, but for watching online video or playing games it can quickly hobble even the fastest connection.

Formats come and formats go — it’s somewhat hard to buy a cassette tape outside of roadside truck stops, for example — but will the rise of eBooks put paid to the format they’re supplanting, namely the printed book? Amazon certainly seems to think so, and to give them credit, they’ve got some impressive stats to back that up. The company is already one of the world’s leading book sellers, and it recently announced that sales of Kindle eBooks had overtaken its sales of both hardcover and print books combined. For every 100 physical books sold, Amazon’s stating (http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1565581&highlight=)  that it sells 105 Kindle eBooks.

Impressive figures, and I’ll admit that I’ve been doing a bit more Kindle (and iBook and Kobo) reading than print reading of late, but that’s largely been due to some (but not all) digital books that I’ve been after being cheaper in digital format. That’s not a given, and that in itself is a barrier to adoption; most consumers, no matter the economics of the argument, will baulk at paying more for a digital eBook with minimal transmission costs than they will a physical book. There’s still also the challenge of lending. If I want to lend my mate a book I’ve enjoyed, I simply pass it to him. For him to borrow a Kindle book, I’ve got to pass him the entire Kindle, or authorise my account on his device — at which point I’ve got to trust he won’t start buying books on my credit card!

What do you think? Are print books likely to go the way of the LP, assigned simply to dusty specialist stores?

It didn’t sell well. Technology-improved versions of gadgets haven’t typically set the world on fire, largely because the costs have generally been high — why would you spend seventeen thousand dollars on a low-rent PC tacked onto a fridge when you could spend a couple of thousand on a large fridge and the same on a laptop — and feature sets haven’t exactly enhanced the experience of using the device. I may be a fan of social networking services such as Twitter and Facebook, but that doesn’t mean I need to update my status while I’m grabbing some milk.

Oddly enough, LG’s having another crack at the Internet Fridge concept again, with models announced at this year’s CES trade show back in January, but that was a minor concept next to the next big thing to get a tech makeover, that being the concept of “Smart” TVs. Most of the major TV vendors have a Smart TV platform now, offering up social networking, light internet browsing, some games and access to catch-up TV services from the ABC and Channel 7. There’s support for developers to make TV-specific applications, but as yet there’s no central standard for those applications, which means the features and apps available on one manufacturer’s TVs may not be available on the other.

The Smart TV concept probably has more legs than the Internet Connected Fridge, Wireless Toaster or MixMaster-With-Inbuilt Fax (not that those last two actually exist) simply because they’ve largely been priced at the same kinds of price points we’re used to seeing TVs priced at, so you’re not spending too much extra for those features. More critically they’re better because the features they offer make a certain amount of sense. When I’m watching TV and want to check something, the option to quickly bring up a web page makes sense. With the addition of a camera, the opportunity to hook up a video Skype call with the entire family sitting on the couch makes sense. If there’s a brief pause for some advertising, I’d probably rather while the time away with a quick ad-hoc game than being told why I should buy this year’s rustbucket. You get the idea.

It’s early days for the Smart TV concept. What do you think? Will your next TV purchase be a Smart TV, or will the concept go colder than the Internet Fridge?

The Flip, in case you’re not familiar with it, is, or should I say was, a pocket sized video camera with one particular redeeming function. It had one big red shiny button on it, used for recording and stopping recording. Yeah, that does sound rather simple, but then simple is the entire point.

The Flip did have other buttons, depending in the model, and a flip-out USB plug that meant you could never lose the cable. That’s where it got it’s name from, although plenty of Flip users tended to carry around a USB extension cable, as the flip-out USB connector is pretty short, and on some PCs that can make it a pain to plug in.

Since the decision to cull the Flip, there’s been plenty of online speculation about what ‘killed’ the Flip brand. Frankly, Cisco killed the Flip brand by deciding that it was so, and presumably there’s some tasty patents (or similar intellectual property) behind the brand, otherwise the smart thing to do would have been to try to sell the Flip business to other interested parties. There’s certainly a number of Flip competitors in the marketplace, some of which stand out for waterproofing features, dual screens (so you can film yourself while watching yourself) and even 3D compatibility. Somebody, somewhere would have offered Cisco money for it, but by declaring the brand dead, any such deal dies along with it.

The other line of contention here is that consumers don’t actually want dedicated pocket camcorders any more. Why would that be so? Simply put, because many smartphones offer video recording facilities. In the higher end smartphones, they’re even capable of high definition recording. I can see the appeal there, although I’m yet to find a smartphone that I’m truly happy to shoot video with. This has less to do with the quality of the lenses — by the time you get down to a lens that small there’s all sorts of compromises you’re already making — and more to do with the fact that smartphone batteries generally struggle to get through an entire day’s work as it is. Adding video recording to its list of tasks is a quick way to a flat battery in my experience.

It also makes me wonder how (and whether) people shoot video with small devices. Anyone with a full camcorder in a public place is quite obvious, but I don’t see too many folks doing that. Plenty of people take snapshots with pocket cameras and indeed with mobile phones, but how many people actually shoot video of where they are instead?

Tech devices use power — that much is quite obvious — but over time the amount of work that’s been put into power conservation has been considerable. Today’s laptops and desktops are more power efficient than ever before, but this is mostly so that vendors can talk up the battery life figures of systems.  With (at the time of writing) Earth Hour fast approaching, the subject of sensible power usage is at the forefront. The actual power and CO2 savings of Earth Hour are debatable (especially if you do things like light lots of candles to mitigate the loss of light), but it’s what you do with the knowledge gained going forwards that could make a difference.

If you’re not of a mind to be worried about the effect of power usage on the planet, you should at least see that the use of power when it’s not needed is an unnecessary drain on your own personal resources, namely the money that’s in your wallet. Power prices have risen in recent years, and it’s unlikely they’ll become any cheaper any time soon.

Belkin recently sent me a number of review samples from its Conserve range, including the Conserve Insight, a plug-in power meter. Belkin’s not alone in this field — many hardware stores will sell this type of simple power meter, and if you’re really keen, it’s possible to have whole-of-house (or office) meters installed as well.

The Conserve Insight is  a chunky standard pass-through plug with a meter attached, and the claim that it’ll help you work out your real energy costs by plugging your devices into it. This obviously isn’t limited to IT-style technology power metering, but for the purposes of experimentation, I used it to measure power draw in my office, which connects up surge protected power boards to a single wall socket plug. The idea with the Insight is pretty simple; as you plug in any electricity drawing device, the display shows the choice of cost, watts or CO2 production for that device. The cost and C02 production costs can be varied if you’ve got access to that kind of information; your power bill should certainly at least show you the kW/hr cost you’re paying.

With nothing plugged in, not surprisingly the cost and power draw were negligible. A single power board with a backup drive and a couple of attached chargers saw it spring up to between $26-$60 per annum. Belkin’s claim is that over time the Insight will “average out” your usage based on actual full power draw, which is reasonable enough; many devices draw a lot of power in the startup phase but less in operation, and some more efficient IT devices have very low hibernation power draw. Adding a second power board running some speakers and an office TV on standby saw it stick resolutely just above $60, but no longer down in the $20 range at all. Plugging in a PC, however, saw the figure jump very quickly up to $295, and a second PC saw that hop up to a scary $610 per annum. That fluctuated quite a bit, but again most PCs are pretty power hungry when they’re first starting up, and over a short while things settled down a touch.

Those are annual figures for cost, although I later worked out its inbuilt charging rate was a little lower than the price I actually pay; a 20% premium or so over those figures is more in line with actual usage.

The Insight (or any similar plug in charger) won’t save you a single cent or a single square centimetre of the planet without actually acting on the information you give it. In my case, that involved wandering around the thick layers of dusty cables to spot those things I could easily leave unplugged until absolutely needed, even if it seemed like they weren’t on or might only have a minor amount of standby power usage. Devices you’ll constantly be firing up and down might not need to apply, but it’s quite likely in the average office or home there are mobile phone chargers sitting around doing little but heating the room gently, speakers that aren’t doing much speaking to speak of and even laptops lying dormant waiting for your command. There’s a convenience to having a laptop spring to life at your command, but is it equal to the convenience of having air you can breathe or more money in your wallet at the end of the year?

Not so much in terms of processing power, although that can be quite handy, but definitely in terms of actual juice to run your computer or smartphone. Despite years of incremental advancements in battery technology, and the promise that fuel cells are “just around the corner” for longer than anybody wants to admit, most systems struggle to get through a full day without wanting to be connected to the mains. It gets worse the older any system gets, as batteries gracefully (and sometimes not so gracefully) degrade, giving you less and less time to get your computing tasks done.

There’s not that much you can do about battery degradation aside from purchasing new batteries when they go from “functional” to “able to hold less than a minute’s charge”, but there’s plenty of things you can do to make the battery you’ve got now last longer in actual usage. Here’s some quick tips:

1) Dim the screen

Brighter screens are easier to see, especially in bright sunlight, but they’re also a real power hog. If you’re able to use your system with a slightly less ambient display, you’ll be able to use it a whole lot longer.

2) Turn off unnecessary networks

For laptops, this means not having WiFi actually on if you’re not connected to the internet; even searching for nearby networks (most of which are likely to be locked down anyway) will kill your battery quite quickly. It’s even more true for smartphone users; drop Bluetooth if you’re not using it all, WiFi likewise, and if you really want to eke out a little bit more power before you reach a wall socket, drop your phone down from 3G to GSM. You’ll sacrifice network availability this way, but it’s the simplest way to get a smartphone that might only last half a day to last two or more.

3) Remove optical discs from drives

It shouldn’t be a surprise to note that mechanical moving parts use power, and optical drives can be a particular nuisance here. If you’ve got a CD, DVD or Blu-Ray disc in your notebook drive, it’ll spin up every time the operating system thinks there’s a chance you’ll need it, in order to maximise the speed at which you can use it. This, naturally enough, uses power, but it’s also not particularly good for the disc, which is going to bounce around in your notebook while you move around.

4) Don’t forget the power saving utilities!

These vary from vendor to vendor, but most of them will offer a power-saving profile on top of Windows’ inbuilt power saving utilities. The inbuilt Windows Power utility is good, but if your notebook vendor offers a specific utility, why wouldn’t you use it? It’s more likely to be specifically fine-tuned to the hardware you’ve got in your system. Many of the fixes they implement will be tips such as screen dimming, but it’s a simple way to set up power saving, and perhaps tweak settings like hard drive spin down time to your best advantage.

5) Switch off when practical

This tip is a touch more variable depending on your needs. Most notebooks will hibernate if you close the lid, only drawing a trickle of power. This is great when your meeting finishes and you just want to get going, because you don’t have to sit through lengthy shutdown processes, and when you next need it, operating system permitting, it should boot up in seconds. Still, a trickle of power is still a trickle of power, and if you’ve got more time than power, switching off will use exactly no power at all.

A recently released application from the ABC might make the couch potato stereotype an obsolete historical oddity, offering TV in a mobile format. Sure, it’s not exactly a trip to the gym, but you’ve got to start somewhere, and TV addiction is a tough thing to beat.

For years, one of the promises of mobile television has been that it’ll be not only mobile but watchable and engaging, but for years all we’ve had is tiny little grainy screens and high data charges, making mobile TV rather off-putting. Most of the solutions have relied either on heavily compressed data or specific mobile broadcasting solutions that have so far failed to really take off.

ABC’s led the field in IP-based TV solutions with its Web-based iView catchup TV service, and last week launched an iPad version of the iView service. iPhone and Android versions are likely additions, although no timeline is promised. The application itself delivers smooth video playback across the iPad’s screen, and even on a moderate broadband connection I hit no real playback problems. The range of programs is naturally limited to the stuff that the ABC broadcasts, but there’s a wide library to pick from.

Unlike many of the stabs at mobile television of years gone past, the iView service simply uses the same internet protocols as your other internet applications (which is why it’s IPTV), so as long as your net connection stays up, so does your stream of Bananas In Pyjamas, or whatever suits your tastes. IPTV is slowly making its way worldwide as a way to deliver television services, especially as the quality of our internet connections improves. The UK equivalent of the ABC, the BBC, has announced plans to bring its iPlayer (which uses a similar technology platform to iView) to international viewers sometime next year on a subscription basis.

There are some catches for what we’ve got right now. The iView iPad application won’t run over 3G as yet, so you’re still stuck using it only in places where you have WiFi. Like many coffee shops, McDonald’s and your own home or office. Where, the thought strikes me, you’re normally sitting down and not getting all that fit.

Perhaps the couch potato isn’t quite dead yet.