Digital media guides

PDF and ebook .epub files are popular ways to access information. However, managing these files can be an issue and it’s one that Adobe Digital Editions can help you solve. It's a free application that can be downloaded from www.adobe.com/products/digitaleditions. When you install it, you’ll be prompted to enter your Adobe ID. If you don’t have one, you can sign up for one or skip it at this stage. The program needs access to your internet connection to install correctly, so make sure your firewall gives it access.

One problem with digital set-top boxes (STBs) that can record digital TV to external storage is that they invariably only support the FAT32 file system. That means the maximum file size you can get, even in theory, is only 4GB. If you’re capturing 1080i video, it doesn’t take long to go through 4GB of storage — about half an hour. So what these boxes do is split the files into sub-2GB chunks. While the STBs are designed to play them back easily enough, converting them to another format is a bit of a pain when you have all of these chunks to work with.

One way to share music, video and other digital media files over a network is for each potential listener/viewer to download the files from another PC on the network and play them locally. Streaming is another way, simplifying the process by transferring a media file to the remote PC as it’s being played, rather than copying then playing. Of the media players available that support streaming, Windows Media Player (WMP) and iTunes are the most widely used and most keen digital mediaphiles will have both players on their PC.

For the most part, video conversion is a pretty easy process: one file format goes in and another file format comes out. However, every now and then, more often in creating rather than converting, a media file just doesn’t work. It happens in converting with most formats if you try to stop the conversion before it’s finished.

I received a reader email recently asking for a solution to this problem: how do I play any media file without worrying about codecs? Media codecs are something the online world has been struggling with as recently as January when Google announced that it was removing H.264 support from its upcoming Chrome OS. H.264 is about as popular as a codec gets, but for reasons best known to Google, it’s decided to remove it, most likely in favour of its own WebM format. And that’s the problem — every company seemingly has its own codec to push or vague patent issues cloud the use of others.

Reader Christopher Jensen sent us an email, basically asking us to do a roundup of twin-tuner PVRs that can record or copy to external hard drives, since there are so many free-to-air TV channels available these days. I had a quick look at what’s on the market and at the moment, there are few devices that fit this description. Homecast’s HT8200PVR manages to do this with twin high-definition (HD) tuners and includes a 500GB hard drive in addition to multiple USB ports for file transfer direct to a PC or external storage. At the time of writing, this unit was selling for $400.