The best Vodcast (Video Podcast) software I have used was Democracy Player. It was easy enough to use and it looked great. I could subscribe to Vodcasts, and the Democracy Player would automatically download new episodes of my favourite shows. It seemed like a perfect application to me apart from finding it unstable when playing back movies, and that the interface was a little slow.

There is now a new version which has been rebranded as Miro. It appears to be the same program, only this time it is much more stable, and the media player component works a dream. I am comfortable saying that this is the best Vodcast software I have ever used. I have already subscribed to some of my favourite shows, which then get downloaded as new episodes become available. I can then watch the Episodes in full screen.

Miro also allows you to search YouTube, Google Video, Yahoo video and many more for just about any video you could ever want. Miro offers an extensive collection of options and it has playlist support. A must for anyone who loves their Vodcasts. The phenomenon can only grow.

Unlike many other video download programs available on the web, Miro does not restrict you by forcing you to download only the content they offer. This is open to you to add your own vodcast sources.

Available for free from Getmiro.com.

There are many ways to replicate a signal across multiple monitors. Some methods work much better than others. The price difference varies greatly as well. The more money you spend, the more control you will have and the better your results will be.

Generally, there are not a great deal of consumer reasons for wanting to do this. It is much more suited for commercial trade shows where you have multiple screens all around a stall. The reason I looked into this was because I needed to split my signal between my TV and a second monitor.  

This article will explain some hardware options you can use to get from one video source, to multiple screens, replicating the same image on each screen. This is not a true dual screen setup.

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Most applications are best run at a high resolution to ensure you have plenty of screen space, however some games require you to change your screen resolution to a setting which the game supports.

To change your screen resolution, you would generally need to go into your display properties and tinker with a few settings. While this is easy enough to do occasionally, if it is something you want to do regularly, it becomes quite an annoying process. It gets even worse if you require low resolutions, as they are not always made available to you here. You would need to go further and enter into the advanced section of your display properties to switch between the resolutions.

I constantly need to switch between 1280×1024 and 640×480, as my CRT TV only supports the lower resolution. I used ResChange to setup some desktop shortcuts to make the job much quicker and easier. I can also see this being useful for a range of scenarios such as wide-screen laptops connecting to 16:9 projectors on a regular basis.

ResChange is a command line utility which will do as the name suggests, change your resolution. You can apply a whole range of switches such as height, width, frequency, as well as telling ResChange which monitor to do the change to if you have dual screen setup (defaults to monitor 1).

Once installed, I made shortcuts with the following switches:

For 640×480 I used
”reschange.exe” -width=640 -height=480 -refresh=60

For 1280×1024 I used
”reschange.exe” -width=1280 -height=1024 -refresh=max

While compatibility mode would allow me to run some things at the lower resolution, not all programs support it, so changing the resolution of Windows was best. This has worked flawlessly for me in both XP and Vista. If you need a range of resolutions, you could make a start menu group with multiple shortcuts for various resolutions in there.

(Update 4/8/08: This is now called Display Changer. There are some new features whcih make it even more handy.)

Available for free from Softpedia.

There are many good reasons to have a list of what movies you own. It can make it easier to choose a film to watch, give you film information and it provides a record of what you had in case they get stolen. I have wanted to catalog my movies for a long time in case they got stolen but did not get around to it as all DVD cataloging software I could find, was shareware and costed money. Besides, I thought I had a good idea of what I had.

Last year my fears came true, I had my entire collection of 400 DVD’s taken from my house. I was lucky as later in the evening, some were found in pawn shops and on the people who carried out the crime, the rest could not be tracked down.

Insurance covered a certain amount of the DVD’s which had vanished, in the form of a voucher. I created a list of the DVD’s from the pawn slips and included the ones I received that night from the cops. Then I headed to the shop to replenish my collection. I thought I would have a good chance of buying the same DVD’s that had been stolen. I ended up not really having a clue, and instead I ended up purchasing a whole heap of DVD’s that were different to what I previously owned, and then ended up missing badly. If only I had a comprehensive list of DVD’s before the series of unfortunate events happened.

This article will show you the Ant Movie Catalog. There are two parts to the software. One part is the editor, which does not look all that great, but it does work. Secondly is the Ant Movie Viewer, which you can see a screenshot of in the picture above. It looks nice and does what I want. Best of all, it is the only free DVD catalog software that I have found which is worth using.

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I have been a user of a Harmony 880 as pictured on the right for around a year now and it has made life for my wife(important!) and I much easier. No longer did I need to have 9 remotes on the coffee table to control my components, as this remote can do it all.

Logitechs range of Harmony Universal remotes is growing larger, allowing you to find a remote which suits your needs and your budget.

There are many Universal remotes available on the market, ranging in price from a few dollars, into the thousands. Logitechs range is very good value for money and suitable for the regular home user or home theatre enthusiast.

Harmony remotes let you control all of your devices individually, which is alright, though any universal remote will let you do this. What makes Harmony remotes different from some of the cheaper options, is the ability to set up activities which let you press one button to do a task. For example, if you want to watch a DVD, you can program the remote to turn on your TV, AV receiver and DVD player, set them all to the right input sources and play the DVD.

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