Midweek update.

 Last week I was going to have a nice midweek update about how I installed xbmc and started streaming my movies all over the house to all my devices. Well that didn't happen. You can check out my weekend review and my media center tribulations. On Tuesday morning 6/24/14, I fired up xbmc and tried streaming on my Xbox. It worked. It played m4v and mp4 files no problem. I did see a lot of artifacts in a couple TV series I tried. Oh well, I'm not going to go back and re make those files. For me m4v high profile works really good for TV shows and cartoon TV shows. For everything else I use android tablet mp4 and it works good for file size and resolution.

 I have been experimenting with ac3 pass through for surround sound. Like X2 X-Men United has stereo, Dolby digital and DTS. I want to be able to select those tracks if I'm streaming at home. The trade off is the file size is getting bigger. For X2 I first tried it just with stereo and it was 800 plus meg file size. With Dolby digital it was 1.4 something gigs. Still not bad. So now I want to try all three sound options and see what the file size is. I need to have smaller file sizes for tablets and you don't need surround sound for those either, so it's a trade off. 

 Transformers is like 1.7 gigs and that was before I even tried adding surround sound. So I figure two and a half gigs and below should be okay. This morning I finally got time to setup a test. I have a movie that has surround sound and DTS. I have one test with just stereo and subtitles. One test, I have with stereo, surround sound and subtitles. One test I have stereo, surround sound, DTS and subtitles. And the last test is stereo with just DTS and subtitles. Now I can have confirmation of file sizes for what audio track selected. I can't wait to test it. Just in case you were wondering, the Debian throw away computer is a no go. I'm going to try xbmcubuntu and see how that goes. 

 Music

I haven't found any new music lately. 

 Video games

I really haven't been playing any Rom's or games. Last Saturday I watched my nephew play some game on Xbox and it looked pretty hard. He kept dying numerous times. That's a pass for me. Ha ha.

 Inspiration

I haven't had as many pictures for inspiration or motivation lately. I have found a couple pictures I liked though, so enjoy.

 Who doesn't love orangutans!!! Well I do so here ya go. I used to watch a show on Animal Planet called Orangutan Island. I loved it. It made me laugh and smile. So seeing these pictures from National Geographic, it took me back. Next time I will hopefully have updates on file sizes and xbmcubuntu. Don't wait with baited breath though. Ha ha. Till next