May 8th, 2007
by Michael Swanberg
As a road warrior, I have struggled forever with finding the best method for getting my recorded TV programs to travel with me. Here is the journey so far.
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The number one solution has always been to throw money at the problem. But I have tried desperately to avoid that solution. In the end, it may be the way to go. From what I can tell, it would be easy to get a Windows Media Center Edition PC (also called MCE, around $1,000 minimum for an MCE PC) and a compatible portable player ($200+). But there are reasons not to go that route, although it may prove to be the simplest. First, there is DRM associated with much of how MCE operates. The video formats are proprietary. The MCE-compatible players MUST be sync’ed through Media Center or Windows Media Player. I want to be able to easily control my viewing experience in both directions.
I have had an Archos product since the first media player they had, the Archos Jukebox Multimedia, which had a screen the size of a postage stamp. I moved up to the 4-series from there, and now I have the 80GB Archos 504. The best thing about the Archos players is that they appear as a drive on your PC so you can arrange files the way you want to. The worst thing has been how firmware updates seem to make a fully-charged battery appear to be almost empty. But the 504, so far, doesn’t seem to have that issue.
As for recording TV, well, MCE is notorious for only being able to record off of non-digital cable. If you have satellite or digital cable, you’re out of luck. But I think that may be changing with the Vista version of MCE, although I am not certain. So, I need a good way to record TV from satellite boxes that can also be used the way I want to use them (read: no DRM).
The Archos 504 has a DVR station that will basically turn it into a TiVo-like box itself, but come on. How stupid is that? How is my 504 supposed to be recording TV shows while it’s on the road with me? They need to make a DVR station that can record to any ol’ hard drive instead.
Many of you are screaming “TiVo!” But if I am not mistaken, pulling video off of a TiVo requires hacking the box or an additional fee. And the additional fee, if I am not mistaken, only gives you access to play the videos on a PC, not to re-encode them for placement on a portable player. I have heard conflicting stories on this, so I may be wrong. But it seems to me that if TiVo allowed you to download DRM-free, re-encodable videos off of their players, then the MPAA would sue them into oblivion.
I have to stress here, if anyone out there has a better solution or better ideas, please feel free to leave comments. I am always looking for ways to improve on this.
Okay, back to the story. So, I have my old ReplayTV, which has been a workhorse for me. It does cost $12.95 a month, unfortunately, but it doesn’t need a phone line to download it’s programming; it can get it straight from the internet. As well, the ReplayTV has a built-in sharing feature, which was what got them sued into near non-existence. The idea was that you could share programs with friends and family over the web or in other rooms of the house. Trouble is, underground networks popped up where people would request shows that they didn’t have the right to view from people they didn’t know.
But the nifty thing about ReplayTV is that there is an application called DVArchive that runs in Java and makes your PC appear to be a ReplayTV to your actual ReplayTVs so that videos can be downloaded. It’s a great application, albeit somewhat unstable on my PC.
The next step is to re-encode the video for moving to the Archos. The Archos can play the mpeg-2 files straight from the ReplayTV, but re-encoding them in divx keeps the size way down. For this, I had to find a scriptable encoder so that I could do the re-encoding automatically. For this, I turned to VirtualDUB.
VirtualDUB is well-known amongst video enthusiasts. I had to get the altered VirtualDUB that reads MPEG streams, though. The quasi-proprietary ReplayTV streams have the audio out-of-phase with the video by about 300ms, so I had to make those adjustments in my scripts as well.
Okay, so I have the videos coming off of the ReplayTV via DVArchive and a scripted job that runs daily and re-encodes all of the new videos to divx (I use the archive bit to tell whether a file has already be re-encoded, and it also allows me to easily set a video to be re-encoded again, should I lose the divx file or something). If anyone is interested, I can post the scripts and batch files for this.
So then how do I manage my shows on the Archos? Well, I use SyncBackSE, which is a backup utility, and a darn good one! I set it to sync my Archos when it is connected (SyncBackSE will detect the Archos being plugged in and will run the sync profile automatically). But I have it sync both ways. So, when I am done watching a show on the Archos, I can delete it right there (something an iPod can’t do). Then on the next sync, SyncBackSE will also delete the file from my PC. No muss, no fuss.
But you may wish to hold off, since there may be a better solution.
I just found out about iPodifier, which is a program that does essentially exactly what I am looking for. It watches folders for new files and then re-encodes them. Unfortunately, the re-encoding process is somewhat limited as it is designed to create video that is ready for a Video iPod. Well, I have one of those! It also adds the new videos into iTunes for you and creates playlists. As well, the 504 can play M4V files.
The trouble for me here is that iPodifier is Windows only and my iTunes runs on my Mac. Well, no problem. Apparently (I haven’t tried this feature yet), iPodifier will create podcasts of your shows! If you have a web server (which doesn’t mean you have to have a website, just a server somewhere on your LAN), iPodifier will update the XML files appropriately. Then all you have to do is subscribe to that podcast in iTunes and voila! I can’t wait until the weekend when I am back home and can try this feature!
Epilogue: I also have a PC dedicated to recording video using Snapstream’s BeyondTV. It works quite well and can also automatically re-encode video to WMV or divx. The only problem is that it re-encodes to WMV9 (the Archos only reads WMV7) or divx with AC3 audio. I purchased the AC3 codec for the 504 and now those files work. The main trouble is that the PC tends to lock up periodically, maybe twice a month. So I can’t exactly rely on it as my sole source of entertainment. In the end, if I could get all the shows I like in download format, that would be my favorite solution.
And please, no one tell me about MythTV. I have tried three times to make a MythTV box work and have failed all three times.
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