My Kit - Part 3 : The Video and Audio stuff

And now to the heart of the matter 🙂

Organising, Viewing and Playing Back

For pictures I keep things organised with Picasa2. For quick viewing of single shots (and some basic editing) it’s IrfanView

For audio I organise, bulk listen, grab podcasts etc with iTunes. For individual files it’s Winamp.

For video I mainly use VLC, but sometimes will fall back to the old favourite Media Player Classic, which uses the cool ffdshow to do some extra smart work.

For recording

To do audio recordings I use Audacity. It can also do sound processing and convert to MP3 etc.

As for digital TV recordings, I have a Nebula Electronics DigiTV box. This high defintion USB-based system is very reliable and gives excellent results.

For video conversion

I use the wonderful MeGUI to convert my videos. Bit of a learning curve, but well worth it. Great stuff, developed and supported by a smart bunch. I convert to X.264 (an open version of H.264; the leading-edge video conversion scheme )

If it’s a TV recording – from the Nebula box – I will first pass it through VideoReDo Plus. This frame-accurate MPEG editor let’s me remove the ‘junk’ before and after the main show as well as get rid of the ads. I don’t record (keep) that many commercial TV shows, so don’t use the ad-removal that much.