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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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.

For many years now, I have had my computer connected to my television and stereo so that I can watch films from my computer, sitting comfortably on my couch, or to set the mood with winamp visualisations and music when people are coming around. I have not seen many home setups which take advantage of this. It is so much nicer hearing your MP3 collection, pumping out the big speakers in your house.

It is very easy to set up and it can be done very cheaply, and in some cases free. The cost comes in with cables and adaptors which are cheap unless you need to buy an extra component. It should be possible for everyone to acheive for well under $100.

This article will show you how to connect your computer to your television and stereo. We will cover lots of different scenarios so I hope by the end of this article, everyone will have successfully been able to acheive this.

This theory is identical to if you want to hook your computer up to a projector so if that is what you use, this article is also appropriate for you.

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