The Art of Taking it Easy
By David Shamah, The
Everybody, they say, was somebody in a previous life.
Most people like to believe they were somebody important the first time around
a king, or a prince, or at least a union chief.
Me? I was probably a rock, sitting around all day
doing nothing. How else to explain my extreme laziness under any and all
circumstances?
Some people have an overriding ambition to achieve
and so do I; I aim to achieve a perfect balance of relaxing and doing nothing. After
all, hard work has a future payoff, but Laziness pays off now. I mean, hard
work never killed anybody, but why take a chance? As far as I'm concerned,
Efficiency is a highly developed form of laziness. See? I'm so lazy I steal my
one-liners from Jackie Mason's reject pile!
As far as I'm concerned, one of the greatest
inventions of the modern era is the "boss button" one of those
programs or Web pages (http://www.donsbosspage.com) you can call up in a split
second when the boss walks into the room and you want to give the impression
that you're (ugh!) working.
Fortunately, the Internet era has provided us with so
many ways to waste time, from Internet radio to DVDs to streaming video to
games and silly Web news page oh, the list goes on and on! It's just amazing
anything gets done anymore!
Of course, you want to get paid. And productivity
must be maintained. Fortunately, there are always a fair number of
obsessive-compulsive types in any office who can be relied upon to keep the
overall productivity numbers up. Which leaves me and my ilk
more or less free to participate in the ongoing party that is modern digital
media.
But venturing into the digital age has work related
risks of their own. Managing your digital life can be
complicated! You've got your browser, of course, but then there are all the
different formats for digital audio that you need to sort out when you want to
listen to some music, not to mention the codecs
required to watch video. The reward of being entertained is just not worth the
work (that word again!) you need to do in order to achieve your goal.
What we really need is a "lazy man's way to
digital entertainment" a simple method to organize all the stuff you
want to watch and listen to. Such a program would not only save time and effort
crucial to the well-being of the shiftless. It would also be a boon for lazy
computers, whose processors can't keep up with the barrage of processes
entailed by the nearly dozen programs that you would need to have available in
order to run all the different types of file formats music and video come in.
If you want to be entertained nearly endlessly, in
the most simple manner possible, I've got just the
thing. Media Portal (http://mediaportal.sourceforge.net) will let you get to
all the digital music, video even TV that you need to keep you vegetating
the whole day through, as well as simplifying the process and getting all those
codecs and file formats under control.
The people behind Media Portal (http://mediaportal.sourceforge.net)
have done all the work so you don't have to. Using its set of plug-ins, the
program can organize, play, display and otherwise manipulate nearly everything
on your PC; music, video, the weather report, RSS news feeds, images, MealMaster recipe databases it even lets you record live
television broadcasts you capture with a TV video card, making it a sort of
mini-Tivo (http://www.tivo.com) for your PC!
Take videos, for example. When you first open the
program, Media Portal will check to see what video codecs
you have and which ones appear in its database of playable video that you are
missing and will tell you where to download them for free (the site is
http://www.free-codecs.com). Only those who have tried to play a video in, say,
Windows Media Player 9, and have gotten a picture without sound or vice versa
can appreciate the time, effort and frustration the program saves you in having
to figure out which codecs are missing, and locating
a site to download them from. You can play AVIs,
Quicktime files, or other video formats, as well as DVDs from your DVD drive.
It's less known than MP3 tagging, but DVDs and other video files can also be
tagged with information on the show, actors and actresses, genre, etc. all
from the Internet Movie Database (http://imdb.com). The player has full DVD
support including subtitles, etc. And you can even run your existing DVD
player through Media Portal.
How about music? Media Portal comes already set up
with the most common music file formats ready to play, including .mp3, .wav, .ogg, .wma, and others. If you have
a program installed that uses other file formats (like Real Player), you can
configure the program to play those too. You can also display artist
information, song name, etc. on the program display. You can also list your
music information by genre, artist, name, etc., and associate visualizations
from Media Player 9 with particular songs. And Media Portal also has a
full-fledged radio player for streaming Internet radio or for local FM radio
you can pick up if your computer has an FM audio card.
You also get other ways to keep yourself busy while
actually doing very little. If you're a news junkie, you can list all your RSS
(syndicated news Web pages). You don't need a browser or separate application
open for this just an on-line connection to update the pages. Are you the
type that only listens to the news for the weather report? Media Portal has you
covered, too; specify a city, and it will download the latest weather report
from weather.com, complete with temperature (Celsius or Fahrenheit), a 5 day
forecast even a satellite image! And if you like eating or at least reading
about food you can download recipes from Internet sites, catalog them and
display them in Media Portal.
But the coolest part of Media Portal is its ability
to take TV broadcasts that you can watch with a TV capable video card, record
them and play them back anytime! Digital recording of analog (or digital) TV is
the wave of the future. In fact, in the
You dont have to wait for YES to starting running
your own Tivo-like recording system, and with the
free Media Portal, you'll probably save yourself a good amount of money. Media Portal
lets you record local TV broadcasts onto your hard drive, and will play them
back (using the FFDShow or InterVideo
video/audio codec). You can automatically schedule programs to record at set
time intervals (includes timeshifting support), and
organize and view your shows. Media Portal requires a TV video card to use this
function (the program's Web site help file lists the cards that have been found
to be compatible), and can process programs you watch with the card's antenna
i.e., terrestrial broadcasts or input from your TV system via a cable
connection. If your cable or satellite box can be hooked up to the video card
and use your monitor as the TV screen, you can use Media Portal to record any
scheduled show on any channel you're wired to receive.
And you can even display program info using XML TV (http://membled.com/work/apps/xmltv/),
which will display program content with satellite/cable services in many
countries.
Like any open source program, Media Portal is a work
in progress and wants help from whoever can give it especially in maintaining
the documentation, according to the program Web site. And finding out what you
need to know is a snap there's a downloadable, easy to understand manual (the
program interface is deceptively simple) and a large user forum. Here you can
find like minded lazy people who know that to really enjoy digital
entertainment, you really shouldn't work too hard!
Download Media Portal from http://mediaportal.sourceforge.net.
The program's requirements page (http://mediaportal.sourceforge.net/requirements.html)
says it works with Windows XP (SP 1 and 2) but it seems OK with Windows 2000 as
well.
ds@newzgeek.com