VHS tapes are not used as much as they used to be since the development of newer formats such as DVD’s, but many people still have them in their homes as they were often used to store family memories.

The Video Home System (VHS < who would of guessed) is still a very useful format. Many Radio stations use VHS for their pre recorded shows and the majority of recording studios which haven’t gone to hard drive recordings, still use S-VHS format to record their musicians.

The drawback of VHS is that the tapes can stick or break altogether. Sadly, this happens to the most watched videos, which you probably want to see again.

This article will look at how to repair a video. With the help of images in this article, you will be able to dissect one and put it back together. I wrote this article after repairing a video from when I was on TV at the age of 5, which I will finally be able to show my wife. The video has not been playable for many years.

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Many TV stations lift the volume of their ads to ridiculous levels. I wouldn’t mind ads if they were the same volume as the movie, but the stations have taken it too far, requiring watchers to fiddle with their remotes each time an ad break comes along.

If you have a Digital Video Recorder or Home Theatre PC, you may like to consider removing the ads from your recorded shows. This will save you time when you watch old recordings, and save you from the volume hikes.

I have played with a number of ad removal programs in the past, with limited to no success. It is not an easy task for any programmer to write software which will remove ads flawlessly. For it to be done well, it should look like it was easy.

Lifextender is a program which will remove ads from your recordings. I was sceptical when I first downloaded it, but then after recording a few shows and running Lifextender over them, I was really impressed. It worked! There was no manual work or switching between programs required. It looked after it all.

Lifextender sits in the tasktray or can be run manually. You can set it to scan your recorded shows at set times of the day or it can process them once the recording is complete. There are a whole heap of options available to you, but the default settings will suit most needs. I can’t understand why it is still in alpha phase of development. I came across no problems.

Lifextender can run as a Media Center plugin or as a stand-alone application. I have set it to run at 2:00am in the morning so that the processing doesn’t interfere with my general computer use.

Lifextender is available for free from Lifextender.com.

There once was a time that we had to use a PC speaker to hear sound effects in games. Some games even offered small digitised voice effects, which we were impressed with at the time. The next stage was adlib soundcards which could handle midi sounds. They were still fairly weak, but they were a huge improvement on what we were once used to.

Since that time, soundcards have evolved into a very important feature in any computer. The sound quality which comes out of even the cheapest cards is good enough to listen to music or to watch a movie. Why not take full advantage of this technology and hook it up to your sound system to get your MP3’s pumping.

Current PC speakers on the market sound quite good, but they will never be able to recreate the awesome sound you can get out of your main sound system. It shouldn’t cost you more than a few dollars to setup. Even if you don’t want to set this up for permanent use, it is worth keeping in mind for parties as it will be appreciated by your guests. I haven’t bothered with PC speakers for years as it is easier for me to connect my computer to my sound system.

This article will show you how to connect your computers soundcard to your sound system. I have already written an article explaining “How-to: Connect your PC to your television and stereo”, but I placed a large emphasis on the video side of things and many of the comments are related to audio. This article will only cover audio. I hope you will be amazed how easy it is.

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Med’s Movie Manager is a free utility that lets you catalog your movie collection easily. This is a new version that has been released over the last couple of days. 

Once you add a film, you can see the DVD cover, cast, plot, rating and much more. You are only limited by the data available at IMDB. If you don’t like the data, you are able to edit any aspect of it.

MeD’s Movie Manager also lets you add movies that are on your computer. You can set it to scan a selected folder for films, and then you can proceed through the usual IMDB hookup.

It took me around 2 hours to input 380 disks movies into the catalog. I listed all my DVD’s as plain text (imported from Ant’s Movie Catalog) and then MeD’s Movie Manager scanned IMDB to fill out all the available information for each film. It was a little repetitive, but that is the way it has to be to get good results.

While it doesn’t look as flash as some of the commercial options, you can change the “Look and Feel” of the program in so many ways. There are more themes and appearance options than I cared to count.

There is also great import and export functionality, allowing you to easily transfer the list to a mobile phone, so that you know what you own while you are shopping.

MeD’s Movie Manager runs on any system that is supported by Java Standard Edition. This includes Windows, Mac and Linux. I had it running in Vista without any problems at all.

There are many movie catalog programs available, but there are not many which are free. I have also had a go at using Ant’s Movie Catalog and found that to be quite good. There is not much between them as they both have their strong points.

MeD’s Movie Manager is available for free from SourceForge.

Watching a film on a small screen is never ideal, but it is a good way to pass some time if that is your will.

DivX has become a very popular video format for movies and online videos. Most full length DVD backups are converted to DivX as the file size can be fairly small in comparison to other formats, and it still plays the video in reasonably high quality video and audio.

DivX has released their player to the public for free, only this time it is for mobile devices.

The player itself is very simple and efficient. I installed it on my Windows Mobile device and copied a few Vodcasts onto my phone. The DivX player handled them without any problems. My Ipaq rw6828 is aging a little but still was not troubled by the videos I tested. It is lightweight and it played the videos in full screen mode.

DivX recommends that your device runs at 200Mhz or faster. If your device struggles, the DivX player will drop frames to recover. This is not likely to be picked up by your eyes very easily.

DivX Mobile Player is available for a bunch of Symbian and Windows Mobile devices. This is a great program for showing off how powerful these devices are. You never know, but you may find a time that playing a movie on your phone is a worthwhile thing to do. I wish I had this on long trips in the past. You can only play so much Kevtris.

DivX Mobile Player is available for free from DivX.