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| How to Rip, Convert, and Stream Your Media Posted: 12 May 2015 03:29 PM PDT Liberate your music, videos, and moreYou've likely moved onto Netflix or Hulu or some other direct streaming way to watch "television." But what about that massive collection of discs collecting dust in your AV room? Or the gigabytes of videos you want to share with relatives who haven't figured out how to watch videos on your photo-sharing site? Or the eBooks for the reader that long ago died? Today, there's simply no reason to let your valuable collection rot away in isolation. To help you, we put together a guide that shows how to easily free the media you own to use it where you want it—on your phone, on your tablet, or streamed across your network.
How to… put your videos on a DVD in one minuteThe optical disc is dead. You know it, we know it, the American people know it. We also know that is a complete load of bantha dung. The truth is that even if you have moved to a fancy-schmancy cloud existence where you watch your entire transcoded video library at the coffee bar from your hybrid, convertible, solar-powered tablet, a lot of people are still living in the land of the DVDs and physical media. So when you want to show Aunt Peg the video of your kid snorting milk out of his nose, you have to burn it to DVD. After you've added video via drag-and-drop, you'll want to change the title to something appropriate by clicking Project Settings and selecting General. 1: Download DVD Flick
Perhaps one of the easiest and cheapest ways to get this chore done is to use DVD Flick. This app is free and handles most of the messy chores of creating title menus, transcoding, and burning to disc that scare most people off after five minutes. As far as combo disc burning/transcoding apps go, DVD Flick is pretty much fire and forget. First, download the program from www.dvdflick.net (it should link you to Sourceforge.net) and install it.
There's a basic functional menu system isn DVD Flick that works adequately.
2. Pick your videos Once you've launched it, you start a new project and being to drag-and-drop to it. You can also select "Add title" and browse to the folder that holds the file you want DVD Flick to add. The default for DVD Flick is to burn to a standard disc. If you want to burn a double-layer disc because Aunt Peg wants to see the hours of video at a higher bitrate, click the "Project settings" button; under General, change the target size. From there you can also pick how many threads you want the program to take during the encode and choose the encoder priority. If you intend for the disc to viewed on PAL, you can change that using the Video settings of "Project settings." If you're putting multiple videos on the disc, you can change how the disc plays back on a DVD player. By default, it will proceed to the next title, but you can click on Playback and change it return to menu or loop the particular title. Under Burning, you can also choose to create an ISO image rather than burn it directly to disc. This can be useful if DVD Flick has issues burning to your particular DVD burner.
Under Project Settings > Playback, you can change the playback behavior of the disc. 3. Create menus By default, the disc you create with DVD Flick should just play on any commercial deck, but Aunt Peg probably wants a menu. Click on the Menu settings button and pick from several pre-canned menus that work fine. Just note that the title menu of the disc will be taken from the Title field of "Project settings." To change it to "Kids Video," click on "Project settings" and General, and change the title to suit your preference.
4. Burn it Once you're ready, just click "Create DVD" and DVD Flick will begin transcoding the titles and burning the disc. Keep in mind that while we said we'd tell you how to put your videos on a disc in one minute flat, that time doesn't include the encoding and burning. If DVD Flick for some reason can't burn to your DVD player, you can either create an ISO and burn that or use another app such as CDBurnerXP (www.CDBurnerXP.com), Ashampoo Burning Studio (www.ashampoo.com), or ImgBurn (www.imgburn.com) to burn the files to a disc. The video files you need to burn are typically located in C:\Users\Your Login\Documents\dvd\dvd. Using CDBurnerXP, for example, you'll want to choose "Video DVD," select the contents of the Video_TS folder, and then burn it.
The time it takes to encode the media is lengthy, so you'll want to do something else for an hour or so during the creation process. 5. Final advice The real secret to DVD Flick is its ability to transmogrify (not an actual technical term) just about anything. The program supports 45 file formats, 60 video codecs, and 40 audio formats. From what we've seen, it'll take anything from 3GP to MP4 and convert it without complaining. One weakness of the program you should be aware of, though, is that it's not for editing video. It's not a full-service video editor nor does it claim to be. If you want to edit out the part of your phone video where you whacked your privates on the hand-rail while trying to perform a skateboard trick, you can't do it. (Although in today's world, skateboarders actually want to edit in the part where privates are smashed on handrails.) And yes, videos that you shot with your phone held vertically (it's officially called Vertical Video Syndrome) will typically be displayed sideways. DVD Flick does try to flip videos correctly when it can, but it isn't consistent. If you want to edit video or add transitions and effects, you'll need a real editor such as Adobe Premiere Elements or CyberLink Power Director. Neither are difficult to learn to use, but aren't apps that you can fire and forget like DVD Flick.
If DVD Flick can't burn it to disc, you can just use another program, such as CDBurnerXP, to dump the contents of the Video_TS folder onto a disc. How to... rip discs to stream on your network
Let's face it: Optical media is a pain in the butt. If you're a real cinephile, you have to set aside a huge chunk of space on your bookshelf for all the Blu-ray discs and DVDs that you've been accumulating thanks to your love of film, TV episodes, and whatever else you happen to enjoy watching. The raw act of playing a movie can also be a bit annoying. You have to get up off your comfy sofa, chair, or beanbag-type creation; walk over to your movie stash; decide what you want to watch; and slap it in your player of choice. You then have to (likely) suffer through all those stupid advertisements and trailers that Blu-ray player manufacturers will never allow you to skip through. You'll probably have to navigate some creatively designed menu or two just to triple-check that the Blu-ray's audio tracks align with your home setup. And then, finally, you'll get a chance to press play. By then, your popcorn has burned. It's a lot easier to fire up a desktop or NAS box—or plug a USB key into your DLNA-friendly router—and stream your files around your house instead of fiddling with scratch-prone discs. To do that, you first have to convert your physical media into digital format. And that's what we're here to show you: how to convert your Blu-ray collection into multi-gigabyte files that are a lot easier to manage and view. 1. Own the movie
If only ripping Blu-ray discs were as easy as popping one into your drive, waiting for Windows to fire up a "Rip Disc" Autoplay option, and sitting back while your OS did all the work. Unfortunately, the biggest hurdle between you and digital file-making glory are the digital-rights-management schemes that the movie studios slap onto their discs in an attempt to prevent you from doing everything we're about to tell you how to do. Everything, that is, with an asterisk: We're not going to tell you how to bypass this encryption directly. We're going to assume that you're simply using this article's knowledge to rip all sorts of other films that aren't locked down by annoying AACS encryption. Should you want to do the not-so-legal thing, you'll just have to figure out that part on your own. The actual ripping process is the same; we just can't tell you how to go about bypassing copy protection. Sorry! That all said, the first thing you'll want to do is make sure that you have a Blu-ray drive either installed into your PC or attached somehow (yes, USB-friendly external Blu-ray drives exist). You don't need anything super-fancy or super-speedy, since you'll likely set the process to start and go off to make yourself a sandwich (or a three-course meal) while it churns along. Plenty of simple Blu-ray drives can be had inexpensively; don't concern yourself with a writer, or Lightscribe support, or any of that—just get a simple Blu-ray/DVD combo drive. 2. Download MakeMKV Once you're checked that one off your list, you'll want to hit up your search engine of choice and track down a program called MakeMKV. If you casually do a search for "Blu-ray ripping app" beforehand, you'll find that there are plenty (and we mean plenty) of programs that will allow you to convert the contents of a disc into a digital format. Some will work with AACS-encrypted discs; some won't. Finding a perfect app for Blu-ray ripping is a bit like finding a needle in a haystack, given the proliferation of software that exists.
MakeMKV's website makes it look like it's a dodgy download; trust us, it isn't. MakeMKV, we argue, is that app. First off, it's free; that already gives it a pretty strong advantage over most other contenders. Second, it couldn't be much more user-friendly for ripping-newbies. With but a few clicks of some fairly large buttons, your system will be processing that which you've placed into its optical drive without hassle (usually). Third, it works very well with a wide range of discs we've thrown its way. Before you start ripping, you need to register MakeMKV—the program will, in fact, prompt you to do so before you can do anything else. If that sounds like a bit of a contradiction, given that we just gushed over the app for being completely free, hear us out. MakeMKV is technically in beta, and has been for some time. The developer continually releases updated registration keys via the official MakeMKV forums, which enable the program's full functionality for a set period of time. Once that time runs out, you have to head back to the MakeMKV website to grab a new key (and often an updated version of the app).
MakeMKV's registration key can be found in its online forums. If that sounds like a minor annoyance, you're right. However, it's a very, very small price to pay for MakeMKV's killer functionality. The ability to rip the contents of Blu-ray discs and automatically convert them into full-fledged MKV files, thus preventing you from having to learn about the complicated world of media encoding, fiddle with all sorts of settings, and use more than one app to go from disc to digital file, is pretty amazing. 3. MKV doesn't stand for "make killer videos"
A quick note about these MKV files, though. For the uninitiated, an MKV file is an open-source "container" that can combine multiple audio and video streams (as well as subtitle tracks) into a single, easy-to-modify file. The streams themselves can be encoded in any number of ways; MakeMKV doesn't actually do any encoding itself, which is why the MKV files this app outputs tend to run a bit on the huge side. It just bundles. If you want to shrink your MKV files down to more a manageable size, you'll need to do a bit of post-processing, which we'll cover in a bit. And, naturally, since MKV is an open file format, a number of third-party developers build support for MKV right into their software players: VLC, MediaPlayer Classic, MPlayer, etc. You'll still likely need a decoder for the apps to play your movies correctly. For that, we recommend the easy-to-install, crap-free Combined Community Codec Pack—give it a Google and a download, and you'll be one step closer to playing the files you have yet to actually rip. 4. Start your ripping
Enough with the wind-up to the main event; let's get ripping. Place your Blu-ray disc into your optical drive and fire up MakeMKV. When you do, the program will immediately perform a quick analysis of the disc and, presuming there aren't any issues upfront, you'll see a giant icon of an optical drive sitting below the Source drop-down menu. If for whatever reason you don't, and your source isn't actually your Blu-ray drive, click that menu and select the correct option.
This home video Blu-ray only has one title, so it's easy to make your choice, but on a disc with multiple titles or videos, justmcheck off the ones that you want to convert.
You'll notice that there aren't really any options you can edit within this screen on MakeMKV. That's intentional. When you're ready to begin the ripping process, click on the giant optical drive icon. MakeMKV will give your disc a thorough scan to ensure that there aren't any abnormalities that could otherwise interfere with the ripping process. It'll also build out the list of titles and chapters on the disc itself, which you'll see in the leftmost portion of the window once the scanning process is complete. Here's where things get fancy. You can either rip the entire disc as-is, or you can go through and piece together a custom MKV based on the various parts of your Blu-ray that you do (or don't) want to keep. The caveat about that is that MakeMKV can't identify the various segments it's identified on your disc; you might see 15 different titles (corresponding to 15 individual MKV files that the app might make), but only one of these will be your "primary" movie file. The rest will be other media elements that are also on the disc, which you may or may not want to rip as well. Our recommendation? Don't worry about the individual titles; you can rip the entire disc and delete them later, if you'd like. What's more pressing are the audio and subtitle tracks, as you might not want to, say, rip a Blu-ray disc's full 5.1 track (adding to your file size) if you're just planning to watch the movie on a two-speaker system. Or, for that matter, you might not care about subtitles; no need to increase the file size of your eventual film with features you aren't going to use. Expand the various titles by clicking on the arrow next to each title's checkbox (which determines whether or not MakeMKV will be making an MKV of that title). You can't change the video (obviously), but you can select which audio tracks you want the app to pack into that title's MKV container. Select and deselect audio tracks to your heart's content; that's the easy part. Subtitles are a bit trickier. 5. Leave on subtitles You might see subtitles split into two options: A Subtitles option and a second nested Subtitles option beneath it that contains the same language reference as the higher-level subtitle, but with the words "forced only" appended to it. If you'll recall your favorite fantasy movie of choice, you've likely noticed times when non-human people speak languages that you can't actually understand (Avatar, anyone?) Forced subtitles are often the words that appear during these parts—different from normal subtitles, in that they'll appear on screen regardless of whether you've turned on a movie's subtitles or not. We recommend you leave forced subtitles on when ripping your films (for the English subtitles, at least). If you notice that you still aren't seeing the subtitles you should be seeing during parts you can't otherwise understand, you might want to go back and re-rip your movie with the full English subtitles enabled; you can always flip them on and off in your media player of choice. Once you're ready to rip, click the big icon that looks like an optical drive. Your Blu-ray player will be off to the races—the very slow races, as ripping a full disc's worth of data is going to take a decent amount of time. MakeMKV quoted us around 45 minutes to an hour for our test disc, a 25,799MB source being read at a rate anywhere between 9–12MB/s.
Sit back and relax; it takes MakeMKV a bit of time to rip a packed Blu-ray disc.
How to... convert movies for your phone or tabletSo, you've ripped your movies into MKV files and you're ready to watch them. You could always pull up a chair and hang out on your computer all day long, but you're a busy person. Places to go. People to see. You're not always going to have the luxury of being within arm's reach of your little home cineplex. Thankfully, devices exist nowadays that allow you to carry and watch your films wherever you happen to be. We're talking about your smartphone (or tablet), of course. Don't forget to bring earbuds or headphones, lest you tick off everyone around you with your home movies or whatnot. 1. It's too big There's just one fatal flaw in our mobile movie plan: Those MKV files we previously created are downright huge. Even when we split out everything but the raw movie—no added features, no anything—our test disc provided us a file that was 20GB in size. That's a little too much for your average smartphone. And, even then, you're not going to want to be deleting and transferring new movies to watch all the time. Remember, when we first ripped our test movie as an MKV, we ripped the whole thing: video and audio in its uncompressed, raw form. Compressing your film will allow you to sacrifice a little bit of quality (likely imperceptible to you) for a great deal of space-savings. Plus, you'll be able to shrink the beefier 5.1 audio that you likely ripped alongside your film to a more manageable stereo output—we have yet to see anyone rocking a smartphone in a 5.1 speaker setup, and highly doubt that will ever come to pass. A word about compression, though: If you really want to squeak out the best combination of file size and quality, you're going to have to fiddle with a number of fairly complex settings. We won't send you down that path if you're just looking for a way to optimize your huge MKVs for Android or iOS sans hassle, but know that there are plenty of additional options you can play around with if you really want to—it's all a matter of personal preference and just how much space, and what kind of quality, you're looking for. 2. Use 720p to save space One thing we'll recommend right off the bat: Go 720p. While it's true that a number of today's smartphones have 1080p-resolution screens, and your picture might look a smidge more pixilated than if you were running it at your screen's native resolution, we found that we couldn't notice a difference when playing a 720p and 1080p movie on our HTC One smartphone. We'll gladly take the space savings: 49MB for 11 minutes of the 720p film versus 87MB for 1080p—a 44 percent decrease. The app that we'll be using to do our conversation is a tried-and-tested bit of freeware: Handbrake (www.handbrake.fr). It costs you nothing to download or use, and it combines basic functionality—in the form of presets that you can pick from, for the casual converter, with advanced options for those who want to experiment with what the app can do to their movies.
Handbrake initially scans your files so it can figure out your default options. Handy!
3. Don't get overwhelmed Once you've downloaded and installed the app, fire it up and try not to feel overwhelmed by the number of options that you can play around with. For our basic conversion task, you won't have to fiddle with much.
Before you start editing video options, pick a destination folder (and name) for your movie. Start by clicking the Source button, selecting "Open File," and browsing over to wherever you stashed your MKV file(s) on your system. Select the one you want to convert and hit "Open." Pick whichever device on Handbrake's sidebar matches what you'll be watching your movies on—iPhone or Android, for example. This will automatically modify a number of settings within Handbrake, including the size the video itself that the program will output. In the case of Android, this defaulted to a 720p video automatically when we were using a 1080p video as our source file. While you could just slap the big green start button and call it a day right now, there are a few other settings worth exploring when converting your movie for mobile use. If you want to bump up the quality of your film, go to the Video tab and look for the slider for the preselected "Constant Quality" setting. The more you move the slider to the right (lower numbers), the higher the overall quality of your video—and the greater the file size. Go left, and you'll reduce the file size at the expense of quality. Why does this matter? We're normally fine sticking with Handbrake's presets quality-wise (especially given the size of the screen we'll be watching the film on), but it might be worthwhile for you to know if the file size of your film is still especially large after Handbrake converts it on the app's default settings. If you don't mind a bit of quality loss—or test various iterations of the Constant Quality setting and find that you can't really see much of a difference at all—it might be worth your while (and your ability to pack tons of movies onto your device) to reduce the movie's overall quality and tighten up its file size. Otherwise, you'll want to do a little more tweaking in Handbrake's Audio tab. In there, go to the drop-down menu for the movie's audio Mixdown and chage it from whatever it happens to be to Stereo. Since your smartphone isn't a 5.1 device, you don't benefit from (nor do you need) the extra audio tracks, and that should help you shrink movie's file size a bit. If you want to play with quality settings on this screen, the Bitrate option is where you'll be able to dial down the audio track's quality in order to shrink the final file size even more.
The right-hand presets are pretty useful for those who want to encode movies sans fuss. 4. Start your transcoding Ready? Ready! Click the green Start button at the top of Handbrake's window to start the transcoding process, which transforms your MKV file into a more universally accepted MP4. While your video churns along, hit up the Google Play or Apple App Stores and look for two particular apps for playing your final films. We're big fans of VLC—especially for iOS—but it's currently in beta on the Android platform, so your mileage may vary as to just how well the app works on your particular hardware. If you're finding that VLC is giving you a bit of a headache on Android, try switching over to MX Player. It's one of the more popular Android apps for video viewing, but it doesn't support any videos encoded with DTS audio. We already fixed that by converting our MKV file to stereo, but in case you passed up our advice, that might be the reason why you're possibly seeing video and hearing nothing when you go to watch a ripped movie on your smartphone.
Ditch that 5.1 surround sound if you're only going to watch movies on a stereo device. By now (plus an hour or so, depending on your system's speed and the size of the MKV you're converting), your video should be just about done. If not, and Handbrake is reporting that the total estimated time for converting is going to be some hideous amount, you can always go to Tools > Options. Once in the General section of Handbrake's preferences, look for the option that allows you to set what the app should do "When Done." Change that to Shutdown, and your system will power off as soon as Handbrake is done converting your movie—a useful option for when the app has to run all night long.
How to... make your own audiobooksThe average American spends almost 2.5 hours a day in the car—that's not counting those poor souls trapped in grid-locked cities on a 95-degree day. One way to keep your mind from turning to mush is interesting audio choices. In today's world, though, that's not easy, what with FM radio being a wasteland of pop music that drops your IQ by the second, and the AM band a wasteland of kooks and cranks screaming about the PC being king (kidding). Once you've burned through the free offerings on Librivox.org, you'll need a new source of entertaining audio as you mash the gas and brake pedals for the next 27 miles. For some of us, that's making your own audio books. Well, we loosely call it an "audio book," but it's really taking the audio track from your favorite movie or television show to listen to during your commute. 1. VLC to the rescue
Ideally, car makers would use disc players (yes, people still use those) that could play just the audio track of a DVD in their default audio systems, but the best you can do in most cars today is play an MP3 file from a disc. So how do you listen to Star Wars IV on the way back from your 9-to-5? The cheapest (but not necessarily the easiest-to-work-with) piece of software that'll solve this dilemma is that Swiss Army knife of media tools: VLC Media Player. The basics are fairly easy but not as straightforward or full-featured as a commercial app. We've also found it to be little flaky on extraction at times, too, but it's hard to argue with the price tag of "free." Go download VLC from www.videolan.org and install it, then insert your disc in your optical drive and fire up the program.
Is there anything VLC won't do?
2. Set your quality level
If you intend to rip multiple discs, you can set your quality preferences by hitting Ctrl + p and clicking the "All" radio button under "Show Settings" on the left-hand side. Drill down and look for "Input /Codecs" and select Twolame under Audio codecs. This lets you set your default audio encoding quality. Click save. Now hit Ctrl + d or click "Media / Open Disc," and confirm that the DVD radio button is selected. You'll also need to tell VLC which title to select. Typically, this is Title 1; you can also watch the movie using VLC to try to determine what the Title number is. If you're trying to grab a secondary audio track, you'll also need to play with the disc to determine which audio track you want as well. We've found that the -1 input on Audio track seems to work for most movies.
You can set the encoding quality and mode for all encodes. This gets reset if you install an update, though.
3. Select convert On the bottom of the "Open Media Dialog" window, click the triangle and select convert. Then, under destination, click the Browse button, and give the file a proper name. Be aware, if you don't browse to the location where you want VLC to put the file, it won't convert the file. Now, under Profile, select "Audio - MP3." Click Start and VLC will begin ripping the audio track. When you're done, you should have a meaty little MP3 file that can be moved onto your audio playback device of choice.
Make sure you select the Destination file location and name, or it won't work.
4. Gets the job done
For the most part, VLC will do the job for most folks, but if you're really serious about producing your own audio discs, we actually recommend investing in a commercial product. We've had great luck with ImTOO DVD Audio; it lets you rip the audio track into small 10MB chunks that can then be burned onto a CD in chapters (make sure you burn the disc as a gapless disc) and can perform normalization of audio across the disc. ImTOO DVD Audio will set you back $29, though, and it doesn't handle encrypted discs.
How to... archive your CD collection properly
What's that? You actually have physical discs for your music? You haven't yet subscribed to the digital age of downloading all of your jams in a friendly MP3 or AAC format, for use on almost any device you can get your hands on? You still use your car's CD player? We don't mean to be (too) glib; there are people who still purchase physical discs for their music (this writer among them), especially when bands pack all sorts of extras and lovely design work in a deluxe, physical package. However, that doesn't mean that you should just hold onto your discs forever. Ripping them to your computer ensures that you'll always have a copy of their contents should the unthinkable happen: your precious, impossible-to-repurchase disc gets a scratch, you accidentally break it, or the disc just becomes unreadable for a variety of random, annoying reasons like disc rot.
You can pull down information for your disc from the Web, and edit it. 1. Let's talk formats
Thankfully, converting your musical tracks to digital files is one of the easiest things you can possibly do on your PC. If you've ever used a handy little program called iTunes, the software practically does all the heavy lifting for you. If it's set up correctly, you just have to fire up iTunes, pop in your CD, wait a few minutes, and you'll be able to enjoy the fruits of your (minimal) labors via your iTunes library. However, we think you can do better. First off, let's talk formats. MP3 is pretty much the standard for digital music tracks at this point, but it's a lossy format. While it might sound indistinguishable from a CD track to your ears, it's not a picture-perfect digital representation of the original source audio. For that, you have to turn to a lossless codec like Apple Lossless or FLAC—the latter, an open-source codec that does a slightly better job with compression at the expense of encoding speed. One secondary advantage of a lossless codec: You can copy and convert that file to a lossy codec sans issue. If you start lossy, like ripping all your files as super high-quality MP3s, then reconvert these files to another lossy codec at some point down the road (lower-quality MP3s that you want to fill your smartphone with), that's definitely going to affect the audio quality. 2. Download FLAC If you're not an Apple / iTunes fan, we recommend you grab the all-encompassing app Foobar2000 (www.foobar2000.org) for ripping and converting your CD into FLAC files. When you go to install it, make sure you're performing a Full installation, which will also install the various converter utilities the app uses during the ripping process. Also grab the FLAC Windows binaries from Sourceforge, (http://sourceforge.net/projects/flac/files/flac-win) and install them, too.
Make sure you pick FLAC as your output format (and have FLAC preinstalled!). 3. Make perfect archives
Open up Foobar2000 and go to File > Open Audio CD, select your correct optical drive from the presented list, and then click Rip. We like to then click the Lookup button to ensure that Foobar2000 has correctly matched all the information it can glean from the MusicBrainz or freedb online databases to your disc (you can select either to use). After that, click the "Proceed to the Converter Setup dialog" button. The Converter Setup window is simple. For the output format, select FLAC. In the Destination options, you can customize the file names of what Foobar2000 will be creating; we like adding "%track%" to the beginning of the file names so that we can keep a CD's contents in its correct order. Otherwise, those are the major options you have to consider; we didn't add any processing effects, as we want our files to be faithful digital recreations of the original CD audio. Click the Convert button, select a destination for the files, point to the location where the FLAC executable was installed (likely in your Program Files x86/Flac directory), and wait! If you want to jam what you've previously ripped, you can play your FLAC files directly from Foobar2000, as well. For an app that's a bit more comprehensive music library–wise, check out MediaMonkey (www.mediamonkey.com). How to... put your e-books on any deviceSo, you've been on a spending binge, buying e-books from wherever you like, whenever you like, as well as healthily partaking of the offerings at Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org). You've been using various apps to read all of your willy-nilly acquisitions, but now you'd like to consolidate everything into one tidy, centralized location. One where you can then push out your books in any format to most common e-readers and tablets. Heck, maybe you'd even like to get fancy and store your e-books in the cloud or have a piece of software function as a content server so you're never without the written word. Enter Calibre and its plugin feature to the rescue. 1. Install and setup Calibre
There are other software programs that can do parts of what Calibre does—and some even do a few select things better, like offering prettier virtual bookshelves—but we much prefer just how comprehensive this program is. You can read, manage, format, sort, and convert all the books in your library, and even manage the books on your e-reader or tablet, as well. To get started with Calibre, first download it from http://calibre-ebook.com/download_windows and install it. Next, Google for Apprentice Alf's plugin for Calibre and download it from AA's WordPress site. Be sure to uncheck the box that asks you to use the download manager, and also be careful to only click on the gray "Download" button to avoid installing unwanted, extra things. Then unzip the file and install the plugin via Calibre's Preferences menu.
This is what Calibre first looks like when you fire it up, but there's one more step to do before adding all your books—install Apprentice Alf's plugin.
In the Plugin menu, choose "Load Plugin from File" to get started with the process.
2. Build your centralized library Close and restart Calibre, then make sure you've installed the Kindle application to download e-books bought from Amazon (.azw/.mobi formats) or Adobe Digital Editions for just about everywhere else (.acsm format). To import your e-books, click on the "Add Books" button on the menu, then navigate to the folder where each program keeps its library. (For Kindle, the default is "\Documents\My Kindle Content"; for Adobe Digital Editions, "\Documents\My Digital Editions.") You can add whole directories at a time, or just individual files. Unless you're running Calibre on a netbook (which we're pretty sure you're not), the importing should go very quickly for each book.
Grab as many files as you like at one time, or just dump the whole directory into Calibre at once.
3. Convert to your preferred format Now here's the fun part: converting your e-books to the format you want them in. Select which books you want to process, then click on the "Convert Books" button, which will automatically bring up the "Bulk Convert" dialog box. (If you prefer to tweak each individual book's settings before conversion—like tags, series information, and cover image—click instead on the drop-down arrow next to the Convert Books button and select "Convert Individually." You can edit these settings after conversion, too.) Once everything's set, click "OK," and Calibre will take care of its task in a jiffy. 4. Take it further You can also use cloud storage as your library location to both backup your collection (for those paranoid about losing all their books to a hard-drive crash) and access your books from multiple computers. If you want to take it even further, you can also experiment with using Calibre function as a content server. Time to get fancy!
Review: Roku Streaming Stick
Now that you've liberated all of your media, what to do with it? Sure, you could load it onto a NAS or home server, but that requires more work—it would be really nice if you could just buy a device for the time being so you could toss up videos and music from your smartphone or tablet to your big-screen TV as you wanted. One contender for being such a solution is the Roku Streaming Stick, the company's most compact addition to their lineup of cable-box replacements—but does it actually work well in that capacity? Not quite
Among its other touted features (namely, being able to choose from over 1,000 channels and 31,000 movies for entertainment), the Roku allows you to view photos, listen to music, and watch videos that you have stored locally on your device. The only problem? It can't handle large videos without a fair amount of buffering, nor those not formatted as .mkv, .mp4, .mov, or .wmv using the H.264 codec. So if you've spent your time ripping all of your Blu-rays as .avi files, or you've got anything larger than a couple hundred MB, you're out of luck. However...
If you want an expansion of all the media you have on hand, though, the Roku Streaming Stick works great for that—and even offers some competition for the Chromecast. Like Chromecast, you can cast Netflix and YouTube to your TV, but you've access to more than just a handful of integrated services—try over 1,000 channels. And unlike Chromecast, which requires you to install separate apps for each service you use, Roku's "channels" are all accessible directly through its interface (which you can navigate with the included remote). The caveat, though, is that much of its channels require purchase, a paid subscription, or a cable subscription to take advantage of them. The freebies, while a nifty perk, offer rather scant viewing selections; generally, we got the most out of watching the news clips and PBS. We also weren't fans of having to sign up for an account at Roku.com in order to add channels—particularly because we also had to add a credit card to even complete setup of the unit. Sure, it might be "convenient" to buy content under this system, but we rather resent being strong-armed into participating their walled ecosystem. So, which to get?
Certainly, the Roku isn't the only streaming stick around. But it occupies a different space than the Chromecast—the latter is more geared toward folks who like to do everything from their tablet or laptop. Video streaming from non-YouTube sites, though, is now quite smooth (a far cry from Chromecast's early days), meaning if most of what you want to view is on the web, saving $15 could be a better bet. If you're the sort to want more of a TV/cable experience, though, the Roku Streaming Stick is a better bet. While you can use a smartphone or tablet to control the stick via the Roku app, the included remote means you'll never have to dig around (or charge) a second device in order to zone out in front of the boob tube. With the addition of easy setup (even if it includes that dratted required account signup), it's a worthwhile addition to your living room for media junkies. It just won't play all the stuff you've ripped.
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| Newegg Daily Deals: EVGA GeForce GTX 970 Video Card, Samsung 850 Evo 1TB SSD, and More! Posted: 12 May 2015 12:57 PM PDT
Top Deal: With so many awesome games having come out lately and even more on the horizon, is your rig prepared to play them? If not, take that tax return and do yourself a solid by checking out today's top deal for an EVGA GeForce GTX 970 4GB Video Card for $325 with free shipping (normally $335; additional $15 mail-in-rebate; Free EVGA backplate and free games w/ purchase, limited offer). This is the Superclocked version with EVGA's ACX 2.0 cooler. Plus you get a bunch of freebies, including the aforementioned backplate and a pair of games, Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and Batman: Arkham Knight. Other Deals: Samsung 850 EVO 2.5-inch 1TB SATA III 3-D Vertical Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) for $380 with free shipping (normally $390 ; Free 1TB portable external hard drive w/ purchase, limited offer) Corsair Vengeance Pro 16GB (2x8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 1866 Desktop Memory for $110 with free shipping (normally $125) WD Black Series 1TB 7200 RPM 3.5-inch Internal Hard Drive for $70 with free shipping (normally $75 - use coupon code: [ESCASKN22]) EVGA GeForce GTX 960 4GB Video Card for $250 with free shipping (normally $260 - use coupon code: [EMCASKN26]; additional $15 Mail-in rebate) |
| Corsair RGB Keyboard Owners Can Now Share Lighting Profiles Posted: 12 May 2015 12:35 PM PDT
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| Gordon Moore Sees His Self-Titled Law Lasting 10 More Years Posted: 12 May 2015 09:40 AM PDT
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| G.Skill Finds New Frequency Ceiling for Retail Ripjaws 4 DDR4 Series at 3,666MHz Posted: 12 May 2015 08:14 AM PDT
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