The Art of Taking it Easy

 

By David Shamah, The Jerusalem Post, Dec. 31, 2004

 

Everybody, they say, was somebody in a previous life. Most people like to believe they were somebody important the first time around – a king, or a prince, or at least a union chief.

 

Me? I was probably a rock, sitting around all day doing nothing. How else to explain my extreme laziness under any and all circumstances?

 

Some people have an overriding ambition to achieve – and so do I; I aim to achieve a perfect balance of relaxing and doing nothing. After all, hard work has a future payoff, but Laziness pays off now. I mean, hard work never killed anybody, but why take a chance? As far as I'm concerned, Efficiency is a highly developed form of laziness. See? I'm so lazy I steal my one-liners from Jackie Mason's reject pile!

 

As far as I'm concerned, one of the greatest inventions of the modern era is the "boss button" – one of those programs or Web pages (http://www.donsbosspage.com) you can call up in a split second when the boss walks into the room and you want to give the impression that you're (ugh!) working.

 

Fortunately, the Internet era has provided us with so many ways to waste time, from Internet radio to DVDs to streaming video to games and silly Web news page – oh, the list goes on and on! It's just amazing anything gets done anymore!

 

Of course, you want to get paid. And productivity must be maintained. Fortunately, there are always a fair number of obsessive-compulsive types in any office who can be relied upon to keep the overall productivity numbers up. Which leaves me and my ilk more or less free to participate in the ongoing party that is modern digital media.

 

But venturing into the digital age has work related risks of their own. Managing your digital life can be complicated! You've got your browser, of course, but then there are all the different formats for digital audio that you need to sort out when you want to listen to some music, not to mention the codecs required to watch video. The reward of being entertained is just not worth the work (that word again!) you need to do in order to achieve your goal.

 

What we really need is a "lazy man's way to digital entertainment" – a simple method to organize all the stuff you want to watch and listen to. Such a program would not only save time and effort – crucial to the well-being of the shiftless. It would also be a boon for lazy computers, whose processors can't keep up with the barrage of processes entailed by the nearly dozen programs that you would need to have available in order to run all the different types of file formats music and video come in.

 

If you want to be entertained nearly endlessly, in the most simple manner possible, I've got just the thing. Media Portal (http://mediaportal.sourceforge.net) will let you get to all the digital music, video – even TV – that you need to keep you vegetating the whole day through, as well as simplifying the process and getting all those codecs and file formats under control.

 

The people behind Media Portal (http://mediaportal.sourceforge.net) have done all the work so you don't have to. Using its set of plug-ins, the program can organize, play, display and otherwise manipulate nearly everything on your PC; music, video, the weather report, RSS news feeds, images, MealMaster recipe databases – it even lets you record live television broadcasts you capture with a TV video card, making it a sort of mini-Tivo (http://www.tivo.com) for your PC!

 

Take videos, for example. When you first open the program, Media Portal will check to see what video codecs you have and which ones appear in its database of playable video that you are missing – and will tell you where to download them for free (the site is http://www.free-codecs.com). Only those who have tried to play a video in, say, Windows Media Player 9, and have gotten a picture without sound or vice versa can appreciate the time, effort and frustration the program saves you in having to figure out which codecs are missing, and locating a site to download them from. You can play AVIs, Quicktime files, or other video formats, as well as DVDs from your DVD drive. It's less known than MP3 tagging, but DVDs and other video files can also be tagged with information on the show, actors and actresses, genre, etc. – all from the Internet Movie Database (http://imdb.com). The player has full DVD support – including subtitles, etc. And you can even run your existing DVD player through Media Portal.

 

How about music? Media Portal comes already set up with the most common music file formats ready to play, including .mp3, .wav, .ogg, .wma, and others. If you have a program installed that uses other file formats (like Real Player), you can configure the program to play those too. You can also display artist information, song name, etc. on the program display. You can also list your music information by genre, artist, name, etc., and associate visualizations from Media Player 9 with particular songs. And Media Portal also has a full-fledged radio player – for streaming Internet radio or for local FM radio you can pick up if your computer has an FM audio card.

 

You also get other ways to keep yourself busy while actually doing very little. If you're a news junkie, you can list all your RSS (syndicated news Web pages). You don't need a browser or separate application open for this – just an on-line connection to update the pages. Are you the type that only listens to the news for the weather report? Media Portal has you covered, too; specify a city, and it will download the latest weather report from weather.com, complete with temperature (Celsius or Fahrenheit), a 5 day forecast – even a satellite image! And if you like eating – or at least reading about food – you can download recipes from Internet sites, catalog them and display them in Media Portal.

 

But the coolest part of Media Portal is its ability to take TV broadcasts that you can watch with a TV capable video card, record them and play them back anytime! Digital recording of analog (or digital) TV is the wave of the future. In fact, in the United States that future is already a few years old. Tivo is basically a hard drive that lets you record TV programs to a hard drive, so you can watch them later at your convenience. Besides the convenience of watching what you want when you want, you can also fast forward over the commercials. YES satellite television here is set to offer this service to customers in the coming months.

 

You don’t have to wait for YES to starting running your own Tivo-like recording system, and with the free Media Portal, you'll probably save yourself a good amount of money. Media Portal lets you record local TV broadcasts onto your hard drive, and will play them back (using the FFDShow or InterVideo video/audio codec). You can automatically schedule programs to record at set time intervals (includes timeshifting support), and organize and view your shows. Media Portal requires a TV video card to use this function (the program's Web site help file lists the cards that have been found to be compatible), and can process programs you watch with the card's antenna – i.e., terrestrial broadcasts – or input from your TV system via a cable connection. If your cable or satellite box can be hooked up to the video card and use your monitor as the TV screen, you can use Media Portal to record any scheduled show on any channel you're wired to receive.

 

And you can even display program info using XML TV (http://membled.com/work/apps/xmltv/), which will display program content with satellite/cable services in many countries. Israel is not listed yet – but since the whole project is open source, meaning user-contributed, all it would take is some enterprising user to set up the XML page with info for Israeli users. And what good would all this digital entertainement be without a remote control? Guess what – Media Portal lets you program your remote control to manage your computer entertainment system too ! (The system is based on Lirc, at http://www.lirc.org).

 

Like any open source program, Media Portal is a work in progress and wants help from whoever can give it – especially in maintaining the documentation, according to the program Web site. And finding out what you need to know is a snap – there's a downloadable, easy to understand manual (the program interface is deceptively simple) and a large user forum. Here you can find like minded lazy people – who know that to really enjoy digital entertainment, you really shouldn't work too hard!

 

Download Media Portal from http://mediaportal.sourceforge.net. The program's requirements page (http://mediaportal.sourceforge.net/requirements.html) says it works with Windows XP (SP 1 and 2) but it seems OK with Windows 2000 as well.

 

ds@newzgeek.com