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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While most DVD players we buy for our computers come with either PowerDVD, WinDVD or some other DVD playing software, you may find that the cheaper drives or the OEM versions do not come with the necessary software to play DVD’s.

Most media players do not play DVD’s out of the box, but rather use the codecs from the DVD programs above to decode the movie.

VLC Media Player will let you play DVD’s for free. It is put together by a group of volunteers, and if my memory serves me correctly, it started off being a class project.

I first heard about VLC many years ago when I was playing around in the Be operating system. It was the only option for playing DVD’s as commercial products were not available. This was around 5 years ago. Back then, VLC had a few problems playing DVD’s as the program was in its infancy. The movies were generally unwatchable as they were still working on the DVD decryption.

VLC has now evolved into a great and well known Media player. It is also skinable so you can change its appearance and there are versions for many different operating systems. There is not a great deal more I can say about VLC, it is very simple and it does what it is meant to, no questions asked.

If you do not have any DVD software or would like to to try another media player, check out VLC Media Player. It is free and can play just about anything you throw at it, including DVD’s.

Visit them and download it from Videolan.org.

Media Portal has been around for a few years now, put together by a group of passionate volunteers. Media Portal is an open-source(free) home theatre software solution, allowing you to play music, movies and pictures all from its tidy and easy to navigate interface.

The team has come a long way since the early days of coding this program. There are now many more features, support for many more TV tuner cards, as well as being much more stable. In my case, the Media Portal software allowed me to do more with my TV tuner card than the manufacturer supplied drivers and software.

Media Portal is similar to Windows Media Center (WMC), but the coders are striving to make it better and more desirable than WMC. Media Portal has much more to offer than WMC, as it can be customised to suite your needs, allowing you to change the entire appearance to suit your lifestyle. You can also install plug-ins giving you any number of extra features not already part of the Media Portal package itself such as weather reports and stock information. Did I mention, it is free.

A few of the features Media Portal offers are:

• Fully skinable interface so you can change the appearance.
• Watch TV, Movies, Pictures
• Listen to CD’s, MP3’s and many other types of audio.
• With a TV tuner card in your computer, you can watch TV with time-shifting(pause live TV) and schedule recording of TV shows. You can even watch shows while another is recording in the background
• Load TV guides
• Play games
• Search the web
• Install plug-ins to do all sorts of fun stuff
• etc

Inspect My Gadget highly recommends that you get yourself a copy of Media Portal and give it a try. If you connect your television and stereo to your PC, you will be able to take full advantage of this fine piece of software. 

Media Portal is updated frequently and is available from team-mediaportal.com.