WhimsyLand

I found another hundred CDs or more that I had not put in my Sony 300-CD changer.  I used 4 of our Vista machines to start ripping again (Windows Media Player 11 on Vista is faster and smarter than the XP version 9).  As the day wore on, I decided to cull some of the most objectionable CDs that I didn't know I owned.  Oh, I kept Spice Girls, but I axed Milli Vanilli.  The CDDB lookup worked remarkably well, even on CD's that are getting close to 30 years old (Cars, Simply Red, UB40, et al.).

There were also some CDs that were not recognized:  RLJ's The Sermon on Exposition Boulevard, for example.  The last CD burned?  Green Day's American Idiot.

Once I had the USB drive filled up with CDs, I ran Windows Media Player's Library function.  I really didn't intend to play anything off the drive, as it was going upstairs to be attached to the little WD TV gadget.  However, by invoking WMP, I found that it placed album art thumbnail JPG's in each folder.  I hoped that would be enough for the WD TV to display album covers instead of folder titles.

I had to rearrange the cabling a bit.  My Sony Bravia LCD has 4 HDMI inputs, and my Denon has 2 (I wished it were the other way around).  Now, I've got the WD TV plugged into one HDMI socket on the Denon as a "DVD Player".  The monitor out HDMI goes the Sony LCD.  Now, I've got a Blu-Ray player and Direct TV satellite receiver with HDMI outs, but only one HDMI input left on the Denon.  I could use conventional RCA jacks from one of them, or just plug Direct TV directly into the Sony (which has its own built-in speakers).  Too bad there isn't such thing as an HDMI hub/switch, like there is for Ethernet and USB.

The only downside so far is that the WD TV can't play DRM'd content, such as that which you download from iTunes.  However, Apple is lobbying for DRM removal, so who knows, it may be do-able soon.

OK, it's still a bit of a mess, but here's where I am.  On the bottom shelf is the Denon and satellite receiver.  The small unit on the second shelf, beneath the Sony TV, is the WD TV.  The top unit is the Blu-Ray (the box on the left is HD-Radio, which I haven't installed yet).  The screen is showing Music Folder mode, so I can see CD's organized by artists.  Next step is to get album art working.

Meanwhile, I bought AnyDVDHD and CopyDVD from the folks at SlySoft, which cost about $100 (the units are in Euros when you check out).  AnyDVDHD reads and plays on your PC just about anything, including Blu-Ray. CopyDVD leverages ANyDVDHD and then lets you copy off the DVD, including or excluding just about anything (do you want the trailers?  Do you want to get rid of the FBI warning?).  I quickly tried Lethal Weapon (I), and directed CopyDVD to just decode the whole mess of VOB files into one directory, preserving just about everything on the DVD (without conversion to AVI or MP4, for example).  Then, I dropped the decoded folder (which, by the way was stripped of all protection, including "region" protection) onto the WD TV USB drive.  I plugged the latter back into the small WD TV and voila!  It started playing just as if it were a DVD.  Next step is to transfer over a Blu-Ray and see what happens.
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While I was at Best Buy (those guys love me), I also picked up a Western Digital World Book.  It's actually just a small Network Attached Storage device, and for under $200 (which included a terabyte of storage), it seemed like a good deal.  I also bought an extra terabyte USB drive, as it accepts one additonal external drive (actually more than one, if you use a USB hub). 

It was very easy to set up.  I just plugged it into our GigE Ethernet switch and loaded the WD Discovery program off the installation CD.  That permitted me to configure it.  It comes up as a Windows-recognized network drive as soon as you set the workgroup or domain, and you can also turn on its ability to be an FTP or NFS server.  All of this is through a web interface, so I was actually configuring it from a system across the room. 

Within 10 minutes, our domain controller had recognized the new system and broadcast the fact to the other systems in our shop.  At that point, I could just click on Network (Neighborhood) and see it.  Because I had configured all the shared folders as public and read/write to all, every system in our office could use it.

I set aside one terabyte for server backup.  The backed up locations spanned 3 separate servers and  included our Project directory (which contains everything important about a project), our FTP site (which I lost last year and had to painfully put back together), the WebSites directory (including WhimsySpeaks, which I lost a couple of years ago and had to salvage), and a half-dozen other important folders.

To do the backup, I used Argentum Backup, which is a simple but effective daily backup program that costs about $20 in quantity 3, and doesn't complain when it has to backup a Windows Server 2003 system (like almost all of the others do).

Short of a fire that burns the whole house and office down, I'm good for backup for now.  Except for Dima's private stash of project files that he keeps on his own workstation, but I'll harass him tomorrow about that.

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Time to go make myself a codburger, although I'm tempted to make something out of Julia's French cookbook.