Chad Dyess’ Blog

News and Observations on Gadgets and Digital Media

When we’re entertaining guests, gathering everyone in my theater for a demo is always a crowd-pleaser.  But before I built my home theater PC, I would have to dig out a DVD, load it into the player, then get it cued up to the right chapter.  Not only was this tedious, but it tended to bore everyone.

One of the primary reasons I built my was for watching movies.  I wanted to have my movie library available online, with a nice interface for exploring my collection, without the need to shuffle through shelves of DVD cases trying to find a movie to watch.  That’s how I found My Movies.   The interface is great, and it has all the features I wanted, and then some.

Once I ripped my DVD collection to disk, my next step was to set up a quick and easy way to show off my home theater by playing specific movie scenes using My Movies.  What I ended up with worked great, and has been a huge success, so I’m outlining the steps here for anyone who may be looking for a similar solution.
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A few weeks ago, I installed DirecTV2PC on my main so I could watch shows that were recorded on my DVR downstairs.  The program worked great, except that it doesn’t integrate with , which forced me to get out the keyboard and leave in order to run it.  I know there are some applications that will let you add a program into , but once you launch your application, it’s usually not very easy to close the app and get back into .  After a bit of searching though, I found a handy program called Launcher that was exactly what I was looking for.
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