Digital media for your living room

Digital photos and audio have been extremely popular for several years. Programs such as iTunes and Picasa make them easy to integrate into our daily lives, especially with the death of DRM (Digital Rights Management) for music files. DRM basically tied your music to one computer and forced you to only use the music player which you purchased the songs with.

Digital video has been around for a while too, but it has always been limited (and somewhat taboo) due to the complications involved in either converting a DVD to a digital file, or downloading that video illegally from the Internet.

Just recently a push has been made to legitimize digital video content with services such as Amazon Video on Demand, iTunes Store, and Netflix streaming. There is also Digital Copy, which is a digital copy of a movie that comes with several new DVD and Blu-Ray movies. Unfortunately, all of these options use DRM and tie you to using a specific computer, or a specific program to play it. The Amazon and Netflix services mentioned can easily be streamed to any computer that you are logged into their service with, but what about if you want to copy that movie to your laptop or iPod to watch while riding a subway to work, or when you are traveling and don't have Internet access? And if you don't have a device that is compatible with the service then you are pretty much out of luck.

That's a huge problem, and is what is holding back the adoption of this technology from the mainstream public. And Blu-Ray is in a weird limbo too because it is sandwiched in between the established DVD technology (which everybody has), and this new digital media technology.

Digital Copy was also poorly executed. I have several movies that came with Digital Copy versions of the movie, but I haven't activated a single of them because you have to choose at the time of activation whether you want a version that will play in iTunes or if you want a version that will play in Windows Media Player. You can't have both, and you only get one activation. How do I know what computer or devices I want to use that file on in the future. If you have an iPod/iPhone, only the iTunes version will work. But what if you have a Zune HD, or any other device? Digital Copy will never take off as long as it contains DRM and you are limited as to what you can use to play it.

I want to watch movies/videos on my television!
The other challenge has always been how to get the movie/video files to play on your living room television.

Media Center PCs have been around for several years. I have built a few myself, and they work relatively well, and are usually the most diversified in what they will play on your TV. But they are generally high maintenance. You've got to keep up with Windows updates, driver updates, software updates, and antivirus protection. You pretty much have to be an "IT guy" with lots of time and patience in order to even consider this option. And who wants a huge ugly PC sitting in their living room with the loud fan buzzing away? There are some more attractive Media Center PC options available today such as the Dell Inspiron Zino HD and the Apple Mac Mini, both of which have a small footprint.

AppleTV was the first device which made it simple to stream content to your television that was purchased or rented from the iTunes Store. This works great for iTunes content, and is the only device which can play iTunes video on the TV. It has a beautiful simple to use interface. But that limitation of only playing iTunes content is what eventually caused me to get rid of mine.

Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 will stream content from your PC, but both are very finicky about what file formats they support. And neither will play DRM protected audio or video, unless purchased from their own respective online store.

I recently purchased a WDTV Live for a couple of family members. The user interface is nothing to write home about, but it is completely silent and it plays a wide variety of video file types. It has Pandora, Flickr, and Live 365 built into the box. And you can use a program such as PlayOn to stream a plethora of other content to the box, such as Hulu and Netflix. If you need/want something right now, I highly recommend WDTV Live.

However, Boxee has recently announced that they will be releasing the Boxee Box. Speculation is that it will be available Q2 2010, but no official release date has been announced. It has an extremely polished and intuitive interface and connects you to an extensive amount of online content (Hulu, Netflix, etc.) natively without the need for additional software to be run on a computer. And just like the WDTV Live, Boxee has long been known to play a wide variety of video formats. I'm not too fond of the sunken cube look, but the Boxee Box uses an RF remote. This means that you can hide the box in a cabinet because the remote control does not require a direct line of sight to work. I think the Boxee Box is going to change how a lot of people watch their video content. Watch out for this one!

Here's the announcement video for the Boxee Box.

Photo calendars make great holiday gifts

For the past few years, I have been creating calendars for my family using my photos and family birthdays. They've been well received and I'm constantly reminded to do a new one right around Christmas time.

Gather your dates
The tedious part of creating a calendar is gathering and documenting birthdays and anniversary's of everyone that the recipients of the calendars might want. If you are from a broken family, or are giving the calendar to multiple families, then this can be a lot of work. I find that it is best to document all of the birthdays in your address book and group each of the people into tags or groups based on what calendar they should be included in.

If you are just creating one calendar for your parents, then it is pretty simple and straight-forward.

However, if your parents have separated and have families of their own, it becomes much more complicated. You have to split the birthdays into separate groups... one for your father's family and one for your mother's family, because your father probably isn't concerned with the birthdays of your mother's side of the family and vice versa. If you have a sibling who is married, then another group of dates might be required to include their spouses family. When you account for the birthdays/anniversaries of aunts, uncles, and cousins, it adds up.

I find that it is easiest to use Google Calendar to create a separate calendar for the dates that you want on each of the calendars you are going to create. Here is a list of the Google Calendars that I have solely for creating photo calendars to give out at Christmas.

Mother - Includes her side of the family, as well as the dates of her husband's family.
Father - Includes only his side of the family.
Me - Includes everything in the Mother calendar and Father calendar.
Sister's husband's family - Includes only her husband's family dates.
My Sister - Easiest one... includes everything from all of the calendars listed above.

Choose your photos wisely!
The first year that I created calendars, I just used some of my best photos... no people at all!

Once you start adding people to photos, it complicates things. You run into the same challenge of segregating your photos based on who is in the photos. In the calendar examples above, I wouldn't want to put photos of my father in my mother's calendar. And my sister's husband's family probably wouldn't enjoy photos of my parents. Someone is bound to be offended.

If you don't want to drive yourself crazy spending countless hours sorting photos, stick to a common subject or stay away from people photos completely. One year I made a calendar of just photos of me and my sister growing up (there are some embarrassing ones in there!). And for the past two years, the calendars have been of my niece, so that is appealing to everyone! When picking photos, I just try to pick ones that don't include other family members.

Creating and ordering your calendar
Choosing a calendar service for creating and ordering your calendars is important. So far, I have used Apple, Kodak Gallery, and Shutterfly.

Apple - For Mac users it's a no brainer! Create your calendar in iPhoto and order the calendar from Apple. They have the best quality calendars of all three services I have tried, but they are also quite a bit more expensive. Calendar creation in iPhoto is a simple and seamless process. It pulls dates directly from your iCal calendar(s), and the photos directly from iPhoto. I created my calendars in Google Calendar (as described above), and then set up iCal to pull those calendars by the Google Calendar links. Sadly, I don't use a Mac anymore, and I haven't found any other calendar services that offer that level of integration with your existing data.

Kodak Gallery - I used Kodak one time. Overall, I was pleased with the quality of the calendar, but the spiral binding was too small for the calendar pages to turn. So you ended up having to force the pages to flip to the next month. Also, everything was a manual process. You have to upload your photos to the Kodak service using their proprietary photo web uploader, and you have to enter the dates manually. It was a lot of work! In the end, I chose not to use Kodak again due to the issue with the spiral binding.

Shutterfly - This is my second year using Shutterfly, and overall I like them. The overall quality is nice and the pages flip easily in the spiral binding. Unfortunately, you do have to upload your photos to the Shutterfly website using their proprietary web uploader, and you do have to manually enter all of the dates into their website. But the site maintains those dates on your account, so you only have to enter them once. Unfortunately it does not allow you to group the dates or assign tags. Pricing is nice and the calendars are very customizable. I will continue to use Shutterfly in the future unless something better comes along.

Ideal calendar solution?
What I really want to see is a company that lets me use my existing data where it currently resides. I am a Google person, so I would like to use my own Google Calendars, and my own GMail contacts, and my photos from Picasa or the Picasa Web site.

Google already has all of the functionality in place that Apple has for a fully integrated calendar service. Google just needs to add an add-on/plugin built into their Picasa application. Picasa can already pull data from my GMail contacts. I am sure it would be simple to have it input the calendar information from my Google Calendar too. Google wouldn't even need to build the integration. Calendar websites, such as Shutterfly or Kodak, could build plugins so that you could build the calendar in Picasa and then automatically upload the compiled calendar data/photos to Shutterfly or Kodak for processing.

Seems like a no-brainer, but so far nobody besides Apple has made photo calendar creation a seamless process. We'll see what happens next year.

What are your thoughts and recommendations?