New Life for Old Friends

I'll admit when I first got my Media Center PC I thought that Media Center was the coolest thing around. Here was a great way to finally watch AND record TV on my computer, something for some reason I always wanted to do. There was also a pretty cool program I picked up along the way called MyTVtoGO and started using it a little to record shows and drop them onto my PSP. That wasn't really a long lived thing. Eventually the 360 dashboard picked up and I pretty much put Media Center to the side, not really having a need for it. As a matter of fact when I did some cable cleanup I even disconnected that cable from the PC, TV to PC disconnected.

Fast forward to the present and boy that has changed. I am always on the search for ways to do more with technology and media and in a sense make my media world better and easier (which always means more work and complicated). I came across a program I once used called Pocket DVD Wizard and it reopened some doors. Initially it was a way to start putting some more movies on the iPhone but then I realized it worked with the PSP as well. Well for some reason it didn't want to work well with all the files I was throwing at it for the PSP (the iPhone was fine) but that led me to updating to the PRO version of the PSP Media Manager and I started to convert and send movies to my PSP with ease once again.

Of course this was movies and my kid likes allot of his cartoons. Luckily the latest version of the PSP Media Manager works with dvr-ms files, you know the ones that Media Center creates, and as it goes PBS and the Disney Channel don't put commercials during their shows!

So tonight I hooked back up that cable to the PC and once again I'm recording a bunch of TV shows that will soon make their way to the PSP. It does help that I picked up an 8 gig memory card for $35 (they originally retailed for $300!!!).

I like iTunes but lets face it at $2 a show and a finite amount of storage anyway I can't really keep that up, and once the kids get to a certain age these shows go away so their not long term keeps. This way I can alternate new shows in once in awhile since the good thing about kids is they can watch the same episode over and over.

So Media Center and PSP welcome back to the world of media, glad you stuck around and were willing to come back and join us!