ping

Playing FLAC files on PC’s

In the past, the PC’s in my home all used Windows Media Player (WMP) to play the MP3 files available via Samba shares exported from the server. WMP doesn’t support FLAC natively. There are codecs that can be installed that solve that particular issue when I tried that in the past WMP became flaky. I have tried Winamp in the past but never really warmed to it, primarily because the media library wasn’t that good. The WMP media library allows me to rate tunes and it makes automatic playlists based on what I listen to the most.

Well, things have changed. I tried Winamp v5.33 and I now prefer its media library to the one in WMP. It does most of the things the media library in WMP does. It is very easy to find the tune I’m looking for by entering an artist, tune name, group name or whatever in the search field. Winamp whittles the possible entries down as I enter my search term character by character. In WMP I enter a search term, press the search button and I hope for the best.

Included with the player is MusicMagic from MusicIP (called Predixis in Winamp). It is supposed to be able to analyse your music, when you then highlight a particular tune it can suggest other tunes for a playlist. Unfortunately MusicMagic as bundled with Winamp doesn’t support FLAC files, which is a bit odd as the stand-alone program they have does. The idea is interesting so I would like to see how well it performs.

Summary: Winamp is now the media player of choice on the PC’s in my home.

The MP3 files are gone…

I’ve deleted all my MP3 files… and re-ripped all my CD’s and encoded them in the FLAC format instead. So why did I do that? The two main (and inter-connected) reasons are: I wanted to future-protect my audio files, and I want good audio quality.

Future-protection
I don’t mean to imply that the FLAC format will last forever, but by storing my music in a loss-less format, I can convert it to something else at a later date without loosing anything. For those who understand what it means that MP3 is lossy, imagine converting MP3 files to some other lossy format, and then converting that to yet another lossy format some years later. The quality of the audio files would be worse each time they were encoded into something new. In IT terms, MP3 is quite an old encoding format originally standardised in 1991. With the astonishing success it has had, I doubt the format will disappear completely in my lifetime, but it will become increasingly dated. And who knows, maybe it will eventually disappear. The only way to ensure I don’t loose any of the audio quality of the original CD’s is to store it in a loss-less format. I may convert the audio files to another format in the future, but I don’t want to rip the CD’s again with all the associated pain of ensuring the various tags are correct.

Audio Quality
I remember when I first listened to some MP3 files 8 years ago or so. I couldn’t understand what everybody was so excited about, I mean, the sound quality was terrible. I could easily hear the difference between a CD played on my stereo and the same music played as MP3 files on my stereo. Later I learnt that it was possible to encode MP3 files in a good quality. So that is what I’ve been doing until now. I encoded all MP3 files as vbr, variable bit-rate at the highest quality settings. That resulted in audio quality good enough that I couldn’thear the difference between the CD and the audio files. But as pointed out above, it wasn’t a future-proof solution. It is also some time ago that I started ripping and encoding my CD’s so I wasn’t really sure that all CD’s had been encoded the same way.

How I did it
I’ve done all the ripping on my Linux server, not because there aren’t any decent Windows programs around to do it, but because it could quitly sit in the corner ripping and encoding while I was doing real work. Occasionally I would then slip it another CD.

The programs I used were grip and of course the FLAC encoder/decoder. The latest version (1.1.4) is really fast compared to previous versions.The paramters I used with FLAC were:

-8 -V

-8 ensures you get the highest compression. Some sources on the internet claim that the time taken to encode using -8 is not worth the few extra % disk space saved. As already mentioned, v1.1.4 encodes much faster than the previous version. I found that it did save me anything between 50-150 KB per track, so I thought it was worth it. -V verifies the file at the end of the encoding, if you have a lot of CD’s to rip and encode, you want to be sure your copy is good.

Grip (like cdparanoia) does a lot of checking of the CD and that takes time, but unless you want to do it again as you find that some of the CD’s had scratches resulting in poor audio, you had better do the ripping right the first time.

Disk Space
Well, loss-less encoding takes up way more space than a lossy format, even at the high quality encoding settings I was using for MP3. I did a test of 6 different CD’s (some classical, some modern), comparing the disk space used when they were stored as MP3 files and afterwards when stored as FLAC files.

6 CD’s, encoded in 86 files: Mp3: 622 MB, FLAC: 2117 MB

Encoded as FLAC files, all my music CD’s now use 54 GB of disk space. I was actually a little surprised by how much disk space the FLAC files are using, but I don’t regret it.

Anything else?
I expect to run into a few problems with being able to play the FLAC files. My D-Link DSM-320 media player for example doesn’t support the FLAC format. One of my kids has an iPod, the other an iRiver, so there will no doubt be other posts about FLAC files.

Sagem PVR 6280T

In August 2006, I purchased a Sagem PVR 6280T. The Sagem PVR 6280T is, depending on how you define it, a DVR (Digital Video Recorder) or a PVR (Personal Video Recorder) for DVB-T (Digital Video Broadcasting- Terrestrial). Mine is a Freeview model, Freeview being the British version of DVB-T. It has twin tuners, an Electronic Program Guide (EPG) and an 80 GB hard-disk.

If you are on the market for a PVR, get the one with the largest hard-disk. My 80 GB model allows me to store 40 hours worth of material. In our case the reason hwy the hard-disk is always full may be because we don’t actually watch that much TV. So we get it to record something we want to see, and two months later it is still sitting on the hard-disk, un-viewed.

In an earlier post, I described how a Personal Video Recorder (PVR) is a must when watching TV. And it is!

I just don’t know whether the PVR 6280T is the PVR I would recommend. On the one hand, it has transformed our TV watching experience, it is usually quite simple to use, but it is buggy. Or maybe they are “features”. Maybe the other PVR’s on the market are also buggy which is why I haven’t traded it in yet, but I am considering it.

In Use

Before I get too far down that route, let me describe some of the good stuff. Well, before that, let me describe it. Not very big, non-standard size, so you can’t stack it with any other audio or video equipment. It has a small temperature-controlled fan, I’ve only noticed it being on once. You can vaguely hear the hard-disk softly clicking as the heads move around but it is very silent. Being a small computer with a hard-disk, it has to boot up before you can use it. It is definitely not “instant-on” technology.

Recording Programmes

Here is how we usually use it. After having turned it on, I press the “Guide” button on the remote and the EPG comes up on screen. In the upper left corner is a small preview window showing the current programme of the currently selected channel. On the right side a line displays graphically how far the programme is, and at what time it ends. Below that is a description of the programme. On the lower left side I can scroll through a list of channels, and on the lower right side I can see a programme list for that particular channel. Using arrow keys I can scroll through this list. Once I’ve found something I want to watch, I press the “Record” button and that’s it, I’ve programmed it and a little clock icon appears next to the programme. I can now switch it of.

Viewing Programmes

When I do want to watch the recorded programmes, I switch on again and this time I press the “List” button. Here I can see a line that graphically illustrates how much disk space is in use (in our household it usually hovers around 80-85%). I can see the actual list below. I navigate to the right programme and hit the OK button. When the commercials show up I can fast-forward through.

Other Stuff

Other than being very easy to program and watch programmes with, there are lots of other niceties to the 6280. It is for example quite simple to cut of the beginning or the end of a recording. You can also split a recording in two and then merge them again. I guess you would want to do that to get rid of commercials in the middle of a recording you want to keep.

Software Upgrades are automatic. Software upgrades are transmitted over the Freeview net at different times for different models. The trick is simply to have the PVR turned on during one of those times. On the Freeview website I found a list showing that there were was an update to the 6280 and it was a higher version number than what it had originally been supplied with. When I went to see what the current version was again, I found that it already had the latest version, so it must have upgraded itself without anyone noticing.

So as I said, in general it is so easy to use, and yet…

The Bad

If you are watching a recorded programme while the timer kicks in to start recording something else, the display actually switches to that of the channel from which it is now recording. It usually switches back to what you were in the middle of watching.

Well, first of all I consider this behaviour a huge bug, worst of all though is that sometimes (not often, but it has happened more than once) it then seems to hang. I can’t switch to a live program or a recorded programme. It is stuck. It does finish the recording though and then usually becomes responsive again. It has happened once or twice though that I had to switch it of completely to reset it.

Having twin tuners means it can record a programme on one channel while I’m watching another programme on another channel. Unfortunately it doesn’t mean I can record two programmes at the same time which must be a design choice. If I were able to record two programmes at the same time, since both tuners are in use, how should the PVR react if I switch it on and want to do some channel surfing? As it is, it just completely ignores me if I try to make it record something that overlaps with another programmed recording. The only indication that there is an overlap is the fact that it ignores your command to program a recording. It would be elegant if it came up with a question on whether I wanted to forego being able to watch anything live during the overlap and set up two recordings anyway. As it is, I have to find the list of programmed recordings to see where the overlap is. I can then go back to the EPG to check what the other program was and then decide whether I want the recording to go ahead, or cancel and set up the other recording.

Anytime you watch anything live you have the option to pause the programme and (provided you have been watching for long enough) rewind and then go on playing. The reason it can do this is that it is always recording what you are watching and it always keeps up to the last 30 minutes of what you have been watching. If you pause it, the 30 minutes is also the maximum amount of time it can be paused. Being able to pause just like that, or to rewind a bit is great, unfortunately there is a drawback to this functionality. Anytime you switch channels, it first has to start recording to the hard-disk and then playback from there. Not much you can do about that other than putting a fast hard-disk into the box, so I can’t blame Sagem for that. I can blame them for what I consider to be a bug. When I no longer want to pause, I press play. You would expect it to continue from that point on, but no. It immediately gets in step with the live transmission, so I now have to press the rewind button to get back to where I really was. In other words, there is no point in using the pause button (unless you want to be reminded of where in the programme you were), let it play and then press the rewind button when you want to catch up on what happened while you where out.

Another oddity is seen when you want to watch something that is in the middle of being recorded. You go to the list of recorded programs and you will se a red circle next to the programme that is in process of being recorded. You press the OK button and you find yourself not at the beginning, but at where the programme is right now. So you then have to press the rewind button to get to the very beginning of the recording.

Will I Keep It?

I probably won’t trade in the PVR 6280T. I can live with the oddities and it is a stop-gap. What I really want is a network connected PVR, or at the very least with a USB port so I can take a recording of the device. I want to be able to store those recordings I want to keep long-term, and I want to potentially view them somewhere else in the house, and the PVR 6280T is a stand-alone island in that respect.