If you have a large music collection like me, you suddenly realize what a pain it isto cart your library around so you can listen to your tunes at work or on the go.  I have an 60gb iPod full of stuff, but that’s only about 1/6 of my music. Not only does it take me forever to move that many songs on to an iPod, it even takes longer for me to whittle down the songlist to make sure the essential stuff gets on there.  The end result is that my iPod song list never gets changed and it is hopelessly out of date.  It’s also a pretty big pain to find the music I’m looking for using the iPod’s user interface.

A couple of my old work colleagues started their own company several months back and now they are finally coming out of stealth mode with their new free web service, Jukefly.com, which lets you listen to your music from anywhere that you have an internet connection.  At this point, I basically have an iTunes style user interface built into my web browser, and I can play any of my songs at work as if I were on my computer at home.  

What’s cool about Jukefly is that instead of uploading your music to a server, you simply download a small app that sits on your home computer and communicates with their service. There is no uploading of music or messy configuration and with your music just stored in single location, all you music and playlists are always in sync with the service. Within minutes of signing up, I had access to all my songs and could play them on any computer that has an internet connection.    It’s really handy, and even at this early stage of development, it seems to work seamlessly.

It also has some cool social features that I think will be cool as the site grows.  While you are playing any tune on your computer, you can comment on the song or artist, or see what others have said about it.  It also lets you see other users who have that song and browse their collections to see what other music they have that may be interesting. You can also make other people your “friends” similiar to other social websites, and by doing so, you can play their “shared” playlists.

I think Jukefly has a lot of potential over other music sites I’ve encountered.  I like the idea of having one repository for all my music, playlists, etc. so things are always in sync, and from what they’ve said, they’ll have an open api available in the near future which I think will potentially make it something like the flickr equivalent for music when it comes to widgets.  Potentially, developers could create widgets for facebook and the like that compare and contrast music libraries, playing patterns, etc.

You can check it out here. 

Once a person makes the leap and buys a high def television, they quickly come to the realization that standard definition video content looks ugly in comparison.   Providers of connected media players are all now trying to fill the void in their product lines by adding players that support high def content.  The Pinnacle ShowCenter 250HD is one of these players, and at a sub-$200 price point, it’s an attractive product. 

The 250HD supports a ton of video formats including WMV (including DRM), MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, XviD and can support up to a 1080i resolution.  It also has a nice selection of inputs including digital audio so it can accompany your home theatre setup rather easy.  The only input missing, which many people will miss, is HDMI but with other products in this price category such as the Netgear EVA700, this is par for the course. 

 The first thing I noticed about the product when I cracked open the box was how small it was.  It’s a bit bigger than a Nintendo Wii, but not by much and I appreciated the look of the box in my home theatre setup.   The one negative is the remote which feels pretty cheap and cheesy.  Many computer peripheral companies trying to enter the home entertainment market underestimate the value users place on the remote and it’s safe to say that Pinnacle didn’t spend much R & D to come up with something fancy.  It’s functional and gets the job done, but I think they added it in without much thought of how and where it would be used.

If you have a Windows PC with Window Media Player 10 or above, setup is a snap and I had streaming video within a couple minutes.  The user interface is functional but not revolutionary but it gets you to your content quickly without a lot of hoopla.  I threw a good set of video content at the 250HD, and for most formats, it handled it well.  I noticed some choppy audio in some of my 1080i wmv movie files, but by and large, it handled my video library well.  The one sore spot for me was AC3 audio, which it didn’t handle at all for me, at least using the standard stereo audio cables (it may very well support it through digital audio although the documentation on the Pinnacle website was spotty).

All in all, the ShowCenter 250HD is a good product, and at the sub $200 price point, it competes well against other products in the market. If you have a lot of video content on your PC server and want to throw up a lot of pixels on your big screen at a little price, the 250HD is worth considering.

HTPCNews has an excellent in-depth review of NVidia’s MCE DualTV dual tuner which works with MCE, Sage, Yahoo, and BeyondTV. Here’s the money quote:

NVIDIA’s DualTV MCE has been a long time coming. It generally lives up to the hype: good noise reduction and comb filtering plus ISF certification all in a dual-tuner. Because of these factors the DualTV is now the analog tuner in my MCE 2005 HTPC.

Hat Tip: Build Your Own PVR

Engadget posted a review of the Akimbo device and service.

I think the sweetspot for Akimbo is the MCE plug-in, as well as building ties to other DVRs and set-top box, since when you add the cost for the hardware, it’s a pretty big hurdle for most consumers to jump for better video on demand.

TivoBlog.com has posted the second part of their Sonic MyDVD review. After a minor installation snafu, they were really pleased with the results.

eHomeUpgrade has a three part review of an interesting product called VideoVault which manages collections of DVD videos on your computer. The product will store DVD data on your hard drive, keep it in a searcheable database, and then export it out back as a DVD or transcoded into another format for use on a portable device.

Sounds like a handy piece of software for videophiles.

Along with many others, I waited in line patiently Thursday to purchase the new Playstation Portable (PSP), and thankfully with the many units on the shelf at the local Bestbuy, I didn’t have to wait too long. Like others in line, I was eager to try out some of the new game titles, but I also was very eager to try out the Videora founder, Sajeeth Cherian’s latest software project, PSP Video 9, a freeware software product that makes it easy to move video on to the PSP. While the PSP is cool product for gaming, PSP Video 9 also makes the PSP a good product for viewing videos.

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With the thousands of people who publish video from around the world using BitTorrent and RSS, wouldn’t be nice if there was an application as simple to use as Tivo for monitoring and downloading shows? Videora, developed by Sajeeth Cherian, a university student at Carleton University, is just such an application, and he did a great job simplifying the complex process of finding and downloading video content.

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Do you need to build a file server on a shoe string budget? If you have an old PC (we’re talking original Pentium old) lying around with an ethernet card, then NasLite+, the new offering from ServerElements.com, may be the best way to build a a big file server for very little money. I’ve used the original, free, NASLite for quite a while now, and having tried NASLite+, it is well worth the $24.95.

Both NASLite and NASLite+ seem to do the impossible of reading big new drives that weren’t originally supported in the hardware. The software bypasses the computer’s bios and reads the drives directly, making it easy to build up to a terrabyte server on that antique sitting in the corner of your office. NASLite and NASLite+ contain both operating system and server software, so you basically insert the CD (for NASLite+) or floppy (NASlite), reboot and the PC magically turns into a dedicated, monitor-optional, file server.

NASLite+ appears to work with any old PC (486 DX or higher) with an IDE interface, any old graphics card, an ethernet card, a CDROM and a working floppy drive. Typically that means you can connect up to 3 hard drives to it (all four if your PC Bios can boot to another interface like SCSI, FIREWIRE, or USB). It also supports most popular 10Mbit, 100Mbit, and GigaBit ethernet cards, so it can keep up with the speed of your home network. For building a big file server with an old PC that already has these components, it’s as simple as installing a couple of big IDE hard drives.

NASLite+ is well worth the upgrade price in my opinion. The original NASLite took some finagling to create the floppy properly on a Windows machine and made you choose one of a variety of server protocols (SMB, NFS, FTP, HTTP) and network card speeds (Gigabit, 100Mbit, 10Mbit). Install is a snap with NASLite+ and it runs all four protocols simultaneously. An even more important reason to upgrade to NASLite+ is the speed, literally 4X faster on my home network.

Upgrading from NASLite to NASLite+ was trivial, and more importantly, all my data remained intact. I ran into a slight glitch with a new unformatted drive that I added to the PC, but a new version of NASLite+ (v1.1) has already been released that fixes the problem in its tracks. To set up a NASLite+ server software, you simply create a CD from the downloaded ISO, boot your server with the CD, follow a few quick configuration screens to setup an administration password, the IP settings, configure each disk, and within a few minutes the system is up and running.

Once NASLite+ has been set up, you can disconnect the monitor from your file server and connect and manage the server remotely. Via telnet, you can access all the administration functions from another computer. Additionally, it has a nice web interface built in, so you can check on the server using a web browser. To aid running the server without a monitor, NASLite+ also plays a particular beep sequence through the built-in PC speaker during boot if everything is functioning normally, and a more ominous beep if something is amiss (NASLite will also monitor each drive if they support S.M.A.R.T).

NASLite has been rock solid in my basement, running for months at a time without having to reboot. In the three weeks I’ve tried NASLite+, it’s been just as dependable. As host to our family’s DVR, MP3, and video library, it has gotten a pretty good workout, and I’m happy to report no wife annoyance, the true test for a married geekster like myself.

Like all products, there are a couple of features that could add value to NASLite+ in the future. For instance, there are virtually no security features included like password protection, so while it works fine for the home environment, you might not want to archive your corporate financial data on a NASLite+ server. Using the SMB protocol (for Windows users), there is a 4Gig individual file size limit, which one can bump into if you are saving large video files. It would be nice to support additional IDE and Fireware cards, allowing someone to add more than the four original IDE drives for storage (you can boot off of a firewire device, but you cannot use a firewire drive as part of your storage). If you don’t have any another bios boot options (eg a SCSI or USB bootable bios), your server can only serve up three hard drives with the CDROM booting NASLite+.

I raved about the original NASLite last fall, but NASLite+, with its superior performance and easier setup, is an even better product. If you have an old computer sitting around doing nothing, it’s the most economical way to build a home file server and there’s a certain satisfaction in making that trusty old Pentium PC useful again after years of neglect.

Peter Near’s Blog has a great review of the Creative Zen Media Player. He’s put it through its paces and has some very good real world observations on how it works for a daily road warrior.