My Current Projects

Being a geek, and in love with Movies and Music, as well as having some skill with programming, I have a fair collection of Movies (DVD) and Music (CD as well as Digital).

I have a Nice large Pulldown screen, as well as an Acer PD125 Projector. I also have a set of Logitech z5500 Speakers (kinda cool, enough sound to rattle both my windows and my neighbours).

To date, it has been an absolute mission trying to get a DVD to play, to give you an idea, because I am renteng my place, It is hard to find ways to cable it all so that it looks good, but is temporary enough not to absolutely destroy my deposit on the place. Also being a bit of a DIY junkie, I am doing everything myself as I get some spare cash.

Right now, I am once again cash strapped because we have the silly season right around the corner, so that means presents, buying plane tickets, etc...

However, I have this old PC, specs something like below:

• Celeron 1.7 GHZ CPU
• 256MB Ram
• 40GB HDD
• Winfast Geforce 4400 MX AGP Graphics (64MB)
  

As you can see this is hardly what would qualify as a PC these days, more like a calculator. Here is how this is going to turn into a new Media centre PC over the next 2-3 Months with very minimal investment in additional hardware.

I have a Portable DVD-RW which is quite good, I carried the monster around in my Laptop Bag and used it perhaps 2 times to write anything. I will use this for Creating Archives of my media (Photos, DVD's etc) as well as Making custom Compilation CD's for when I decide to take a drive somewhere.

I also have a 250GB Portable Drive inside an Enclosure. I will use this as my media store by removing the drive from the enclosure and installing as a secondary drive in the machine, which gives me a nice bit of space to start with.

That leaves only one thing in my mind being Surround Sound. My current onboard stereo card simply will not make the cut. For this I will make the only cash investmet needed in the short term which will take the sape of a Soundblaster Audigy Value PCI card, there I go with my audio able to scale up to 7.1 Suround.

Ok, that settled, but now what about software...

The picture at the top of this screen is a part of the conceptual design of the system. I plan to have two parts to the solution, a Media indexing system which I will build on PHP, MySQL and Apache, and a Media player setup which I will use to play any media indexed inside the box, and for this I will use Video Lan (Check it out, I must say this is a nifty little media player) which I intend to automate through PHP via Command line parameters.

Anycase, enough about that, I am currently working on the conceptual design and layout of the indexing site, and will most likely change my mind as I go along.

This project will hopefully teach me the following:

• How to use Macromedia Fireworks to design a kickass site
• PHP's extensions for handling MP3 information as well as using GD to build image libraries.
• A crap load of new JavaScript + CSS + DHTML details, this design I have in mind will absolutely challenge every single boundary when it comes to Web design, I intend to see exactly how far I can push them
• PHP Error handling classes and interfacing with the Operating System, I will more than Likely get a feel for Ruby/Pear, and most likely play with Some Python/Linux Shell scripting to make things work.

I hope to complete this project by the end of this year, and will post some updates, screenshots and other documents here.