Last month we want way over our bandwidth cap. By how much did we go over? A lot. So what I have been looking at for the past 48 hours is a way that we can get our on demand entertainment without using excessive amounts of bandwidth. What solution did I some up with? Plex. Plex is a nice server application that I now have running on my PC. It feeds all my movies, TV shows, music, and pictures onto every Roku box in the house. Considering we have a Roku in the living room and in our bedroom, I think this is a perfect solution.
So what I have done is gone into the archive (piles of DVDs) and copied over tons of movies that I ‘acquired’ over the years. In addition to that, I have started ripping lots of DVDs that I have been wanting to watch, but am too lazy to go upstairs and gran the actual disc. Since each movie takes up about 1 GB of space, I will have plenty of space to store everything on the 500 GB drive that I am using. So far the interface it fantastic and the experience is awesome!
On a different note, I have been actually enjoying using my PC over the past day. I have been moving info from my Mac to my PC via a 16 GB thumb drive. Typically, I have been pulling movies and shows off of my iTunes library and ripping discs and then setting up the server on the PC. I am still surprised how much faster my PC is to my Mac and when my Mac kept locking up on me yesterday, I was ready to give up on it.
Why it was locking up was my 16 GB thumb drive got fuX0r3d and the file system was reverted to RAW. Inserting it into my Mac would lock in entire system, and hooking it up to my PC made it available, but it was unable to be formatted. That is, by using the GUI. I was able to go into my Command Prompt and manually reformat the drive to FAT32 by a simple command line. I actually felt like the Old Trev who used to have some serious computer kung fu.
Do all of this mean that I am walking away from my Mac? No. However, I do think I will be using my PC more and considering that I have been thinking about going to an Android phone when my contract is up next year, it makes me really think twice about being an Apple fanboy. I hate to say it, but Apple just doesn’t have the same mojo since Steve Jobs passed.
In high school I was totally on the PC side of the Mac vs. PC debate. Maybe my roots hold true and I will always be a PC guy at heart.
