my msi wind and osx audio workaround (plantronics audio 480)

(thanks Q for the skin!)

if you have a msi wind and are running OSX Leopard on it, you probably have found out that yes the speakers work but the mic and headphone jacks do not.

as of right now, there is no software workaround known and most likely never will be (joel in the comments pointed me to this thread at msiwind.net on getting headphone working natively! no mic though ). 

so, what do you do if you still want to be able to use headphones and a mic?  do what i did, get an OSX compatible usb audio device; keep reading for a quick demo of the Plantronics Audio 480 System (newegg link approx $50)!

my video MP4 tagging and zune tip!

MP4 video files are the new mp3 of video or so it seems.  my psp, iphone and ps3 all use these type of files while numerous other devices do too (appletv, xbox360, cellphones, ipods, zunes, etc).

After finally deciding to upgrade my PS3's harddrive (again) to a 500GB drive, i decided to start tagging my mp4 movies.  i've been using the Zune software and iTunes as my main music/video players lately.  so by instinct i updated all of the metadata for my mp4 videos in the zune software.

later that day, i came back and imported a tagged file into iTunes and did not get any of the metadata transferred over.  i then started looking into other apps to do this; however after doing some digging in the zune software found the problem or quirk.

when you update metadata in the Zune software player, the player itself will have to recreate the mp4 file w/the tag info for it to properly tag. so if you tag about 70 some movies like me; you have to wait quite sometime for all 70 files to get the metat data updated.  i found this by going to my movie folders and seeing a mp4DC.tmp file that kept growing and then resetting and would eventually be identical in size to my mp4 files.

i believe that the zune player is updating the container which in turn houses the metadata info so it has to offload the video while it does this (?? i'm guessing here).  So just be sure to leave Zune open after updating metadata! 

this also will expain why your pc may seem like its working really hard after you imported your full mp4 library into the zune software. (noticed it on my wind and was worried my harddrive was about to die).