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My Adventure in Building a Virtual Media Center

Over the last few months, I’ve been having more and more difficulty with a computer that I built several years ago as a Media Center PC.  It’s become unstable for various reasons including failing drives, software installation and removal, upgrades, etc..  This has left me with a semi-usable machine, that ultimately isn’t reliable enough to set a program to record, and expect it to be available.  To exacerbate the situation, I have hours and hours of favorite shows and movies that are marked as Copy-Once protected.  While I support the rights of content producers and Digital Rights Management, it can be annoying when you lose entire seasons of your favorite shows.  Copyright issues put aside, I want a reliable way to continue to use Windows Media Center, despite the fact that for the moment, Microsoft appears to be abandoning it.

First things first.  I opted to build my VM Lab using VMware 6.0, installing it on the existing hardware.   Originally, I tried using the standard image from VMware, however, like many others using older hardware, I ran into driver problems.  So I did some digging and discovered ESXi-Customizer-PS Script, and opted to follow the instructions available in this video on YouTube.  Long story short, this allows you to built a custom ISO image adding drivers for older hardware.

Following the creation of my custom ISO image, I needed a way to install it on the hardware, and for this I used an  inexpensive USB stick (Lexar 8GB) along with Rufus 2.10, created my bootable flash drive.  Instructions on using Rufus for this exact purpose can be seen on youtube.

Now that I have VMware up and running my next step is to run through the creation of a fresh new VM.  If all goes well, I may even attempt a Physical to Virtual conversion, but let’s not get too far ahead…

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Using SubRip files to Edit Video

Over the years, I’ve fallen victim to early adopter challenges.  I built my first DVR enabled PC in 2001.  I’ve continued to snub the traditional consumer market, preferring instead to go it alone, and have more control.   I have a lot of television recordings collected in numerous formats.  So large, that the ability to reduce my storage needs is important.  In fact, I started to delete recordings simply to save space.  Early on, because most recordings were in standard definition (SD), I eventually chose to burn video’s to DVD to save space.  Overtime, storing and organizing the library of DVD’s became cumbersome too.

I really didn’t like the fact that my recordings included “wasted” space storing commercials as well as the program.  So I tried some applications that were designed to automatically detect commercials and cut them out.  Early on, the results weren’t very good at all.  So I started working on a process that I could use to cut out commercials and keep only the portions of the video that I wanted.  This is really handy in reducing the size of football games for example…

What I wanted:

  1. A simple method to mark the start and end of clips fast and easily.
  2. Control over quality and container formats.
  3. Fast performance.
  4. The ability to edit without having to re-encode video.
  5. The ability to retain captions.

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