Oh TV, I love thee

Oh TV, how can I watch thee...let me count the ways:

1. Live TV in the living room (so 1983)
2. Tivo'd shows in the living room (goodbye commercials)
3. Media Center PC in the living room (Tivo + $1000 - $13/mo.)
4. Tivo'd or Media Center'd shows on the Portable Media Center or Windows Mobile device (slow transcoding sucks)
5. Tivo'd or Media Center'd shows on the PSP (via some series of
decryptng and transcoding)
6. Video Ipod ($1.99/show is mighty pricey and they look ugly on any screen bigger than credit card)
7. Some off brand portable running Linux or BSD straight out of Taiwan or Korea (LOTS of formats supported, but usually bad UI, and bad PC software)
8. Windows Media Center Online Spotlight - Comedy Central Motherload from your sofa with a remote control...'nuff said (man we need some folks to fix the naming of our products)
and so on and so forth, forever and ever

You get the point...there are a LOT of ways to get your daily fill of Days of our Lives and guess what, there are going to be a LOT more ways coming up.

Yahoo Go! links Web services to phones, TVs - Wireless World - MSNBC.com
Microsoft partners with Murdoch in video pact (I guess no one remembers how DirecTV screwed Microsoft in the heyday of UltimateTV...here we go again)
Google sets up the Video Lemonade Stand

And soooo much more. Yes folks, TV 2.0 is finally upon us. I, like you, have been waiting for this for a long time. Man, I'm kicking myself for missing CES this year...CES TV junkies, I envy you.

Apple to sell video downloads

While my time with the Creative Zen was short and sweet, I realized that a technically great device was hampered by the lack of a great content acquisition model. It was damned near impossible to get a DVD that I owned onto the device; I had to use a few illegal products to break the encryption of the DVD and then wait hours for it to encode the file properly. Also, the content available from MovieLink and CinemaNow offer an array of mind-boggling license terms that were difficult to keep straight (some were downloadable, some weren't; some were active for 3 days, some were active for 24 hours after beginning to watch it; etc etc). Not only that, these companies rarely provided any really good movie choices.

I know the idea of the Portable Media Center was to acquire content from your Windows Media Center PC, but you still had to wait a major amount of time for the video to transcode to the proper format for the PMC. There really was no concept of instant portable gratification like that found with the iTunes Music Store. While Microsoft is planning on a second coming of the Portable Media Center, unless the content model is hashed out, I think it may be another extremely niche product, catering to a subset of those Windows Media Center users with money to burn and TV on their minds just about everywhere they go.

Enter Apple. The company that, dare I say, perfected the music download model (while others have tried to immitate, none have gained the adoption of the masses that Apple as thus far garnered) is planning to bring music videos to your hand. It's an obvious leap to see that Apple will be offering movie and TV show downloads (assuming their lawyers can play nice with the TV and movie industry lawyers) in the near future. Why will this win too? Because Apple knows how to create a viable content model. They'll make it work right. I'm hoping for native Xvid, Divx, MPEG-2, OGM, everything-and-the-kitchen-sink support, but will settle for some sort of super speedy conversion or wrapping technology that obviates the need for the Windows Media Player model of hours-long transcode sessions.

Hannibal of ArsTechnica speculates on Apple's upcoming video download service (quite an interesting if not most-likely accurate portrayal of things to be):

The iTMS video section will initially be limited to music videos in QuickTime format, as well as some Pixar content (shorts, and maybe a few films). All downloadable video will come wrapped in proprietary Apple DRM, and (as is the case with AAC) this QT + DRM format will be the only DRM-enabled video format that the video iPod will be capable of playing. Video iPod owners will be able to use the device to play a few non-DRM types of video, like MP4, DIVX, etc., and they may be able to rip DVDs and play them on the iPod, but they won't be able to play DRM'd video downloaded from competing online video services. In this respect, Apple will attempt to replicate in the video download space the successful business model that they innovated in the music download space. They'll also be going into direct competition with Microsoft's Windows Media format.

Link.

Tivo to Go

FIC Press Releases

Wow! I was waiting for TivoToGo but could not believe there are going to be portable devices that are compatible with it...if it's compatible with Windows Media digital rights management and Windows Media Center content, then I believe AMD and Tivo may have just bettered the Portable Media Center.

By the way, the Creative Labs Zen does NOT charge from the USB port as I originally thought which left me lugging around a dead gadget. The USB connection does keep the Zen alive (which begs the question of why it does not charge the device...probably trying to be a good USB citizen and not overload the port). Anyway, I have the device back here now and am about to load more content on there (if there is room) for more portable media fun.

I can't wait for my TivoToGo to become active though...I just signed up my Tivos for priority upgrade (whatever that means). I think I'm going to have to cobble together a Windows Media Center for kicks. Also, I'll be watching MacWorld for Apple's announcements (praying for Media Center like stuff built into the Headless Mac or something like that to make me do the official switch-when my home desktop becomes a Mac...ooooh)

Creative Zen Portable Media Center...the saga continues

Part 1 is here

Part 2:
DVD ripping to the Zen: not really. I used a piece of software called DVDDecrypter that ripped the first "The Apprentice: Season One" DVD with no problems. Then I tried another piece of software called Win2AVI or something that compressed the video into a WMV file. Woohoo!

While I'm starting to really like the little Zen PMC, it's still too much of a hassle for me to enjoy the DVDs that I own. I'm not going to go through and rip all of my DVDs manually (who has that much hard drive space?) and then feed each file to the compression tool. Yikes! I know, I know...I can probably script something to do this, but I'm definitely not in the mood these days (with the trip to China coming up in a day or two). Plus one of the developers at MSN TV is a Linux fiend and he has some sort of setup at home that he uses to automate this process. I'm going to have to bug him about this so I can make a little Linux converter box. Maybe I'll hack the AMD Geode thing (assuming I can get my hands on one) and have it spit out the files to a gigantic file server (that has yet to be built).

Not to go off on a tangent, but I've always dreamed of having a gigantic file server filled with all of my media. I mean ALL of it. I would rip the hundred or...

so DVDs that I own, the few thousand songs that I own, all of my photos, and other random videos that I find. I figure I'd need about 2 or 3 terabytes for the first 5 years this thing is in operation. Hmmm...mental note: investigate homegrown disk arrays. Then all of my PCs and MSN TV 2s and whatever else I can stick ethernet or wireless onto would be uber connected to this one content source. Oh yeah, it'd be nice if it were a DVR too...then I can stream this stuff to all of my PCs/devices. Oh yeah (#2), would be great if I could have secure access to it from the Internet, so I can enjoy all of my media files where ever there is Internet connectivity (like Borders at Santana Row). We hang out there so much that I decided to spring for their wireless service...it's great, but now if I could build this thing. What would I call it? Hmm...LifeServer? Hehehe...sounds like "LifeSavers" candy. How about the Burma Superstar (man I love the food there)?

Anyway back to the Zen PMC. I decided what the heck...let's take the plunge. I loaded up Windows Media Player with all of my music and photos as well as the stuff I've collected off the web. I also put the home videos from our trip to Thailand last year on there. The process was pretty lengthy as WMP had to transcode (fancy word for translate) everything to smaller files. Part way through, I started fiddling with the settings and found that I could specify the quality level of the videos and songs. I put both quite high but that didn't change the time. Their copying and transcoding algorithm is pretty good...WMP will transcode what it needs and in the background transfer whatever doesn't need to be transcoded. Neat. Anyway after a couple hours of leaving WMP and the Zen to their tango (while I worked on my Test Specs for the next MSN TV 2 software update), the process completed and there it was...like my iPods except black (not white) and fat (not skinny). It was fully loaded with all of photos from the past year and Thailand trip. If I have time, I'll load all previous year photos tonight. It also had pretty high quality versions of my home videos and funny clips from around the Internet.

I guess the real test is taking it on the road with me (which is what I intend to do). I have a feeling that while this version of the Zen may not be right for me, I think a future, slimmer, larger-screen-endowed future model will be something that I will have to pick up (especially if I build Burma Superstar with Windows Media Center 2005 or 2006).

Creative Zen Portable Media Center Review (Finally!)

HOW-TO: BroadSnatching to a Portable Media Center - Engadget - www.engadget.com

I haven't had much use for the Creative Zen Portable Media Center device that has been hanging around my office as of late. I was quite excited to try it out, but I quickly realized that it was quite useless without a Media Center PC (not even DVD ripping under fair-use laws are supported!). Sigh! So sadly, the neat little video brick took a back seat to all of the other gadgets populating my office.

Until today. After reading Engadget's "Broadsnatching" how-to, I was inspired to try. So try I did...iPodder didn't quite work as advertised (it kept downloading only the first enclosure in the RSS feed so yet another sigh). I searched around and found Nimiq which quite simply works.

I followed the rest of the instructions and pretty soon my harddrive was filling up with all sorts of random content. My favorites (of course) being Channel 9 vids.

I've gotten all sorts of random stuff from blogdigger so far and am hoping someone aggregates categories of good video content like tv show and movie clips among other things.

So far the experience has been pretty neat. it's great to finally use the little Creative Zen, but getting the content to the device takes a LONG time due to a conversion process that Windows Media Player does to "convert" files to something the PMC can understand.

After I waited and waited for a while, the files finally arrived (at which point I discovered I can set the files to convert when my PC is not doing other things so I will leave my laptop on tonight and see what I can grab).

Regardless, this alone is making the Creative Zen Portable Media Center a joy to play with. Now if only I can rip a DVD onto the thing...no matter, I'm already investigating various pieces of software to aid me ripping DVDs that I rightfully own onto this thing so I can watch them.

The catch:

Final exam in Psychology tomorrow...need to finish test specs and other work goodness before Thursday...why?

Because Friday I will be running around doing last minute shopping and packing...why?

Because Saturday at 8:30am, I'll be on my way to China with my wife for a 3 week vacation.

Note: when the vacation begins, I will mostly be out of contact as my ability connect to the Internet in China may not be as regular as the near-Internet-umbilical cord status that I enjoy here. I will do my best to check-in on the FAQs and comments once in a whiile, but no guarantees on a quick (or any) replies. Then again, I don't guarantee replies even if I'm here, but I do generally get back to most of you fairly quickly (most of you that have asked questions in the FAQ and that have emailed me can vouch for me).

Creative Zen Portable Media Center

Just got my hands on the Portable Media Center from Creative Labs. It's just a demo unit, but I can keep it for week or so. I'll put it through it's paces and post a review!