Follow-up on TV to Go

A couple weeks ago I was pondering how to get “TV to Go.”   Since that time , I’ve made quite a bit of progress — and flattened my forehead a bit.  Enough progress to say I’ve been watching shows at the gym and enjoying it more than I had originally anticipated.

The first piece in the puzzle was the link to ted that “someone” emailed me after my earlier post. Ted stands for “Torrent Episode Downloader” and that’s just what it does. 

Tell it what shows you want (the free and legal ones from PBS, of course!) and the tell it what bittorrent client you have installed and it’ll take it from there.

Amazingly simple to use.

The challenge then became how to get these shows into a format that would work on my old iPAQ. I wasted quite a few evenings on this part. I’m not real educated about the world of video/audio codecs and formats and piles of 4 letter acronyms that have “x”  or “g” in them somewhere.

My original intent was to use PocketTV, a slick little MPEG player. MPEG 1, that is. I tried their simple guide but ultimately failed.  Repeatedly. Spectacularly.

After a bit of web searching, I ended up with MediaCoder. I got close a few times, but still couldn’t get something that was useful in the right format (unless I didn’t mind not having sound!). While chatting with my neighbor a couple nights ago he asked why I didn’t just use the built in Windows Media Player and convert my shows to WMV format.

Huh.  Good question. Perhaps I’ve been making this too difficult?

Turns out that works just fine.  I’ve transcoded several shows down to 320 x 240 resolution WMVs which reduces their size by half (around 140MB for an hour episode).  They take about 50 minutes to convert and they work great on my iPAQ when done.  I’m happy.
(not that I wouldn’t mind a simpler/faster utility if you have ideas…)

First thing I learned is that I need to remember to crank up the back-light on my iPAQ before watching a show under the fluorescent lights of the gym. My first attempt at the gym had me cursing the show for making everything so dim and dingy!  With the light cranked up, it’s much more “viewable”.

Second thing I learned is that there’s no pausing and continuing when using the portable windows media player.  I tried to pause, but on resume I was at the beginning — and there’s no jumping further into the show.  Argh… That one’s easy to adjust to though, I just do all my cardio stuff for 45 minutes now, but eventually I’ll want to figure out what’s going on there or switch to a different player.

My old iPAQ isn’t the perfect machine for this, but it really is quite serviceable while I determine if this is something I want to get used to or not.

Possibly Related posts:

1. Gym’tronics
2. I Just Want to Buy TV Episodes…
3. This podcasting thing… revisited
4. DMCA Notice — New Direction for TV On the Go
5. Looking for TV to Go