Bill’s a videophile. Dave’s an audiophile. As mediaphiles, we use to carry all sorts of files like AVI, MP3, or WMA on Zip disks or burn them to CDs, just so we could bring our favorite movies and songs wherever we went: the office, school, radio station, or home. But those days are over, now that we’ve got Mastermind by DivX. Mastermind is a free, media management service that lets us manage and organize our video and audio files, access them, and play them back wherever we are.
Mastermind is personal, so we’re not sharing our media with others. It’s also private: Most of our media files are kept on our Scryber Labs PCs and a few files are stored on our Web space on our hosting company’s server. None of our files reside on Mastermind’s servers.
To run Mastermind, all we needed were a free account on the DivX web site and the free client software downloaded to any computer from which we planned to access our files. Once our accounts were set up, we could access the Mastermind web site from any of the computers to which we had downloaded and installed the Mastermind client, log onto our account, and access our files. As long as our PCs in the lab are up and running, we can access our files.
Mastermind currently supports AVI files for movies, and MP3 and WMA for audio. The company plans to add support in later versions of the software. We may be the brains behind our operation, but DivX is the Mastermind behind our portable media.
Where to get it: http://www.divx.com/ Price: Free System Requirements: Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP and access to the Internet with browser. The current Beta version of the client software supports AVI, MP3, and WMA.
Bill Dubie and Dave Sciuto are the hosts of The Computer Report, New
England’s longest-running technology talk show. Contact them at
billdave@thereport.com.
