Video jukebox

Video jukebox is the name of an American television program. This was aired on HBO from 1981 to 1986. This showed music videos from the famous recording artists of the time on a monthly basis. Some of the artists were Human League, Blondie, David Bowie, Culture Club, REO Speedwagon, Madonna, Prince and Duran Duran. A general episode of this program lasted for approximately thirty minutes. It consisted of almost seven to eight music videos.

In the late 1970s, before the debut of MTV network, HBO used to air a couple of music videos as an intermediate between the feature films and other series. These small clips were called as “promotional clips” and they carried the Video Jukebox moniker. In December 1981, Video Jukebox made its debut as a half hour series. Due to this HBO was available to more houses than MTV. Thus, a video on Video Jukebox was exposed somewhat more than would have happened on MTV. This situation did not last long and MTV got more cable markets by 1983.

Till September 1985, the Video Jukebox program did not have any host. In this month, Dennis Elsas was introduced as a voiceover talent. His work was to introduce the videos being telecast in the program. Elsas continued as the host of the program till its end in November 1986.

In the mid-1980s, this program reached the peak of the popularity. It had several special editions like Sixties Jukebox, Heavy metal jukebox, Comedy jukebox, Country jukebox and Christmas jukebox.

Now it is possible to build a self DVD Video jukebox. The equipment necessary to set up a DVD video server is as follows –

The personal computer to be used may be any old computer. However, it is advisable to use a PC with minimum 1.0 GHz CPU. It is more important that the personal computer must have a large hard drive. It is estimated that each movie would require a space of 8 GB. Thus, the maximum possible hard drive capacity is required. The video card that is recommended is the ATI all-in-wonder card. This has robust and easy to use multimedia center software. This card also has a nifty RF remote and component output for viewing the output on the television. There must be a really fast DVD-Rom drive. A 16x-Read is recommended as the speed of the drive is proportional to the speed in which the DVD is ripped.

Now the system set-up is ready. Now, to transfer encrypted data on the DVDs to the hard disk, some software is essential. The DVD decrypter is simple to use, popular and available for free. The “Read ISO mode” is used to rip the DVD to an ISO image. The next question is how to play the ISO files. For this, any software that permits mounting ISO files to a virtual drive can be used. There are many free tools for this purpose. However, the recommended software is the Alcohol 120% as it is very reliable. For a DVD playback software, Windows Media player can also be used. However, the recommended software is WinDVD Platinum 6.0.