Home Entertainment Center

  There are additions to my speaker setup. A couple of Cerwin Vega HUD 203's are acting as Surround Side speakers. I screwed two open backed bookcase speakers together to use as a Surround Center speaker. Taken together with the Polk Audio subwoofer, that makes a Surround Sound 5.1 arrangement. The avr I'm using is an advanced and sophisiticated unit. I suspect the avr is fairly typical of the genre. I've had to do a lot of readng and studying of the owner's manual, with occasional trial and error changes to test for effect. In fact the software is a tweaker's dream. But can be a user nightmare. It seems that "Pure Direct" is the only mode of several that will play all the speakers without any modification of the sound. Another uses modifications tweaked by me in the setup program. All others are specialized, and not for the person who wants the real experience, as the movie director intended it. There are 'test' files in abundance on the web, espe...

    I decided to take a closer look at the idea of media metadata and have, for the last year, been working to acquire and install quality metadata in the few thousand movies in the library.    This required studying the nature of metadata, especially in regard to videos. Once I understood metadata, I chose to use the Matroska container format and proceeded to convert all movies that were not already in Matroska format. The major reason I chose Matroska was because of the extensive metadata capabilities therein. After I finished converting to Matroska, I began gathering tools and writing programming scripts to acquire, modify, and insert the data.    The movies are done. I'm now writing a simplified script to process incoming movies semi-automatically. That script is about done. The languages used are Python and Bash.    The metadata includes title, year, cast, director, plot description and some other things. An image is included that serves as a...