Most of us have a fairly large collection of media files on our home computer. These could be our audio tracks, the photos we've taken on vacations or videos we've ripped from our own DVDs. There's little point using our laptop screen to view a movie or attempt to listen to our favourite tracks through the computer speakers. As your laptop or home computer is likely to have a VGA-OUT or DVI-OUT socket, you only need one cable to connect this to your TV. Problem is that you need some decent media management software to get the most from your collection.

Boxee for Windows and for Mac is an early preview version of this superb free open-source media centre technology that's designed to find and group together your media collection, connect your computer to your TV and watch your movies, photos and listen to your audio tracks.

Boxee for Windows and for Mac links.

The problem with BBC HD scheduling is that some of your favourite TV programmes are not always simultaneously broadcast on the HD channel at the same time as BBC1 or BBC2. This is due to the BBC only having one channel for HD content. However, the BBC iPlayer is a fantastic application that enables you to to watch BBC programmes you've either missed or forgot to record, again, at a later date. You can catch up with missed episodes of Eastenders using the iPlayer.

iPlayer will contain HD content going forward, which means that the forthcoming Dragon's Den, due to be filmed in HD, can be streamed and played through iPlayer on your computer. If you have a computer connected to your TV, you can stream HD programmes directly through your HD television. This includes your Mac, too, as there is a Mac version of iPlayer.

iPlayer HD news release.

Unfortunately I'm not a big fan of installing iTunes on my PC. It just never seems to go smoothly. The installer wants to write to it's own temporary folder in the root of my C: drive, and often claims it doesn't have write-permission. It's a shame that Apple often keep updating iTunes and it's a pity it can't be achieved quickly and smoothly from within the application. Apple need to look at iTunes is updated on a Windows-based machine.

iTunes 8.1.1 is now available for both Windows and Mac machines and the latest version is more than just a basic minor release. This new build now offers you support for renting HD movies through the application, so you can choose to download and view a HD movie within 30 days of paying for your rental. Once you start watching, however, you only have 24 hours to finishing viewing. Why would you want to watch HD movies via iTunes on your PC or Mac? You could easily connect a Mac to your TV and watch movies you download from the Mac via your television.

iTunes 8.1.1 for Windows and for Mac links.

If you're mad keen on a band that produced their music through the 70s or 80s (think Pink Floyd), you've probably spent time collecting both their CDs and rare tracks. Video performances will have been made available, but most likely imported to a computer and then encoded with an old codec that isn't supported by the mainstream video players, such as RealTime or QuickTime. Alternatively, it could have been encoded by a Mac-based codec, thus is not supported by Windows Media Player.

VLC Media Player 0.9.9 is a universal free media (video/audio) player that's been around for aeons. It's a cross-platform media player and packed full of the codes you'll require to play just about any video. The latest version contains a number of improvements and fixes, including improved performance on Intel Macs.

VLC Media Player link.

With the launch of the new 3rd generation Apple Shuffle, yesterday morning, one of the important system specifications was the inclusion of Apple iTunes 8.1. The new version of media management application has been made available and you can download immediately. The biggest disappointment with the previous iTunes (8.0) was that it can be quite bloated, take a while to open and is less respsonsive than it should be, particularly for Windows users. There are times when we double-click on the iTunes icon on our desktop for it to open a minute later.

Apple iTunes 8.1 is now available and this is a fairly major upgrade. The application has received a speed boost, so it's more responsive than before. New features include support for the 3rd generation Shuffle, as well Genius support for your TV and movies, so you can find similar programmes on the iTunes Store.

Apple iTunes 8.1 link.

Most of us have an extensive digital audio collection and one of the wisest moves would be to synchronise this audio with a digital media player and then take that on the road. However, we're not always able to get from the office to home, before we head out on the road or need to stay over night somewhere, but we still want to be able to access our favourite audio tracks.

TVersity 1.0 RC5 is a media streaming device that you can install on your computer (or media centre) and then use this to provide and stream your audio tracks over the Internet. It also enables you to stream your media, video and audio, to other devices within your home, such as your Playstation 3, XBOX 360 or mobile device.

TVersity link.

The dream must be to setup your own digital audio media centre where you could move from room to room and hear the same track being played, through any audio device, wherever you are located in you house. It's possible, it's easy and cheap to create. Apple iTunes already allows you to distribute audio to various locations, whether this is your computer speaker or a remote Airport Express audio unit. Connect one of these Airport Express devices to an audio device and you can get iTunes to send audio to any or all of these units, at the same time, wirelessly. However, what happens when you don't want to use iTunes?

Airfoil for Windows 2.6.2 is a commercial tool that uses the same standard that Apple uses within iTunes to distribute any audio to your Airport Express device. You can hijack Windows Media Player, your web browser or most other applications. This means you can listen to Internet radio on your hifi, wirelessly.

Airfoil for Windows 2.6.2 link.

As hard drives have got larger, many of us now have large audio collections on our PCs. It's possible to store your entire CD collection on a modern hard drive, but not all music is extracted from audio CDs, you may have MP3s and other audio files sourced from online music stores or download sites, even old records that you have recorded. Once you have all these files on your computer it gets more and more difficult to keep them organised, especially when they have misspelt titles, missing artwork and other discrepancies.  

TuneUp 1.1.2 is a plug-in for iTunes designed to help you maintain an organised audio library. This useful utility sits to the right of the standard iTunes interface and can be used to find missing artwork and identify incorrect track names via the Gracenote database, all of which can be done in batches.  

TuneUp 1.1.2 link.

A few years ago I used to use an old Mac Mini as a basic FTP server on a fast broadband connection. In fairness, it was a flawless setup, never went offline (unless the broadband line went down), remained quiet in operation and is a recommended setup. However, as the need for a faster connection drove us away from providing content from within the office, the Mac Mini was made redundant. Although it's a Power PC system, we realised recently it could be used to stream audio around the home. Connect an Airport Express to every audio device where you want to play your tunes and you're away. Well, nearly.

Signal 1.1.3 enables you to control your streaming audio through your iPod Touch, iPhone or similar device. Simply install Signal on to your Mac Mini (or another computer, Mac or PC, with iTunes installed) and you can see your music and control output from your iPod Touch. Wherever you're in the house, you can move to another track, control volume, speaker distribution and more.

Signal link.

If you've 'collected' digital audio from the old Napster days, we'd safely say that you probably have a rather extensive audio collection, with most tracks lacking the right information, artwork and other elements that you want for a successful catalogue. The snag is, if you have thousands of tracks, updating them isn't an easy task. Ideally you'd find a companion tool that would reside alongside your existing iTunes library and enable you to update tracks en-masse.

TuneUp Companion 1.0.4 is such a tool. It enables you to check your tracks and search for and then update your artwork. You can fix track information on the fly and much more. However, there are two big problems - firstly if you store your iTunes audio on another computer (such as a media server), then you can't use it to fix or manage your tracks. Secondly, one of the key features is to search for and update the artwork on your tracks, but in our test, out of the 50 tracks where artwork was clearly missing...it could only find artwork for one of these tracks. These 50 tracks were all sourced from iTunes or imported via audio CDs a few years ago. Old they may be, but a tool such as TuneUp Companion 1.0.4 - designed to fix these issues - should be able to do what it says on the tin.

The other issue we have is that it will only clean a small number of tracks before you have to pay a subscription fee.

TuneUp Companion 1.0.4 link.