Home Entertainment Center

  I've updated my home network. All the drives, niine in all, are shared over the home network. This will allow me to sit on my couch and edit videos without having to move the video file around from drive to drive. I can also run the media center laptop and play movies on theat computer's screen, from the couch. In order to set up sharing on the Microsoft Windows based network, several steps have to be followed. Go into the Network and Sharing Center in the Control Panel. On the left side go into Media streaming options. Choose 'Local Network' if your drives appear in the drop-down list, 'All Networks' if they're there there. Choose 'Allow All'. Go back Go into 'Advanced Sharing Settings'. I set everything to on except 'Password Protected Sharing'. The encryption method is trivial if you're offliine most of the time. If your network is on 24/7, the 128-bit encryption is recommended. Right-click on each drive and setup 'Sharin...

  I have added two pieces of software: the Apple and PC apps of "Remote Mouse" and the iPhone "Roku Remote" app. I have the Roku remote but the phone app can make things easier. The remote mouse is exactly that. I can open and close any app accessible from the desktop, as long as I have good visual acuity and can read the screen from the couch six-seven feet away..

 This summer I found a Lenovo Ideapad Flex 4 in practically new condition and for a low price. The PC has a touch screen. Plex and Jellyfin have been installed. A minimum amount of other software has been installed to minmize the system bandwidth. The eight drives are attached through a usb3 hub and a usb2 sub hub. Six usb2 drives in the Belkin powered hub. That hub and two Seagate 3.5" drives in the Anker hub,, along with the HDMI Splitter for a total of four inputs to the Anker hub. A Western Digital 5Tb MyPassport usb3 drive ('Zeus')  is plugged directly into a PC port. A change: The 5TB drive is usb3. The Belkin hub and the drives connected to the hub, are usb2. I'm removing the Belkin hub from the Anker and adding the 5TB 'Zeus.' The Belkin will go directly into a usb2 port on the PC.

 Recently, I installed and began using a Roku HD with my system. An HDMI splitter will allow me to record streams from the Roku in 1080p resolutioin. OBS Studio as the recorder.  The HDMI splitter input is the HDMI output from the Roku and the USB output from the splitter is fed to a USB3 computer port. No HDMI splitter output is needed. I've successfully recorded the fourth season of The Morning Show and the first season of Chief of War. The principle is based on the Sony Betamax ruling and is similar to the use of VHS recorders to record TV programs in the last century,.  I haven't been able to get the splitter to work with a blue-ray player yet. I suspect the year of manufacture of the player is important. .

  I had hoped to improve my laptop video viewing experience with the addition of a couple og HP computer speakers. The wiring of the speakers has proved to be a nuisance. They don't fit in to the overall system. They would be great if I had a desktop in a fixed and permanent position, but I move my laptop around and don't want to haul the speakers around too.  I dumped them.  Maybe a couple of bluetooth speakers. The wifi headphones turned out to be dicey. I got my money back from the eBay seller. I can run the phones once I remove the circuitboard from the pplastic housing. Then recharging batteries becomes a nuisance. Dumping the speakers and, provisionally, the headphones. Bluetooth is probably the way to go.

  There is now a set of USB powered speakers for watching movies on my laptop.   Until my power station is up to par, I occasionally watch movies, television on my laptop's 1080p screen. The audio has, unfortunately, not been adequate.   The VLC player has a feature that allows cranking the volume up to 200%. That helps.   I recently replaced my decaying Sennheiser headphones with a new-old Sennheiser RS 65 wireless headphone set. The plastic in the wire of the old set had dried out, become brittle, and was cracking every couple of inches.   The new phones are nice but suffer from inadequate audio. Useable but could be better.   Previously, I had connected an Alesis me-230 stereo equalizer to the audio network in my entertainment system. This allowed me to watch movies on the big screen with audio that had been adjusted to compensate for my hearing loss.   The headphones came with a transmitter-charger. The transmitter has a phono cable to plug into th...