What Is The Deal With Ring Tones?

I just don't get it. Maybe I'm getting old - I don't know. What is the deal with ring tones?

In the last few years they have become a multiple-hundred million dollar business. Are people buying these things regularly? I have a feeling most people are simply buying a few ring tones because of the novelty of having them on their phone and the growth will slow down a lot real soon.

The fact that most of the time you can't take your ring tones with you to your new phone will certainly make a lot of people mad and may make them think twice about forking over more of their hard earned money.

Plus, who needs to buy ring tones when you can make them yourself! Check out this site. There are other similar programs out there too.

The ring tone business will also be hurt because more and more phones will have the capability of playing MP3s or other music formats.

I myself don't need a ring tone because I keep my phone volume down very low - I enable vibrating ring mode so that I don't have to remember to silence my phone whenever I go into a restaurant or a movie theatre. If only we could get all of the people will really loud ringers to do this!

Hauppauge WinTV PVR and MediaMVP

I recently purchased a Hauppauge WinTV PVR-250 and a MediaMVP. They are a lot of fun to toy around with. I use the PVR-250 to record television shows weekly so that I don't miss them - just like Tivo except not quite as user friendly. I highly recommend both the WinTV PVR-250 and the MediaMVP.

Lots of techies use the WinTV-PVR boards as part of their own home brew DVR/PVRs. I thought about going this route or trying to hack an XBOX, but since I am very short on time these days, I decided to try something that wouldn't require many many hours of tweaking.

I use the MediaMVP to view my recorded shows. The shows get streamed from my Windows XP pc in another room. It really works great. MediaMVP even has some special features if you also have a Hauppauge tv tuner board. But it seems like they left out a feature that would really make the combination unbeatable - the ability to view and time shift live TV being captured by your TV tuner!!! Hauppauge - are you listening???

Update - you can actually view an mpg file while it is being recorded, however it is less than ideal. For one, you must be actually recording the show - you can't just stream whatever the WinTV-PVR is currently showing. Also, the skip feature doesn't work past the length of the file when playbak started.