Give Our Abilities Time

As I mentioned in my prior post, I have been "broadcatching" HD content in x264/MKV format, and converting to DVR-MS to play on my extender, and so far I've been pretty happy with it. I do have to keep my eye on things more than I'd hoped but it's working fine.

However, I had to find a new way to convert downloaded MKV content to the iPod. (A 30GB "iPod Video" or "5G" device. It's a couple of years old but it has worked fine, and my birthday's coming up in five months and the iPod Touch will probably be reasonably priced or replaced with something even more technologically awesome, if my dear readers get the hint :D ) It so happened that I came into possession of a bunch of MKV files for a 10-year-old show I've been watching a lot of, with no XviD copies available online.

First attempt: SUPER

Thus I turned to SUPER as it is free and seems to convert anything to anything else one you figure out its many options. My first try used these settings, which I, for convenience's sake, exported as iPod_Video:

• Output container: mp4
  
• Output video codec: MPEG-4
  
• Output audio codec: AAC LC
  
• video size: 320:240
  
• aspect: 4:3 (as I edit this after the fact, should've been 16:9)
  
• frame/sec: 30
  
• bitrate: 1248 (in retrospect, could've been lower)
  
• options: Hi quality, top quality, stretch it
  
• (audio) sampling freq: 44100
  
• channels: 2
  
• bitrate: 96
  

(I know it would've been easier to show the picture, but I don't want to confuse my family by using my flickr account which is typically used for showing my entire extended family and friends pictures of my son.)

These settings resulted in a 54MB file that had no sound (in WMP, I didn't check iTunes/Quicktime). Several other attempts (that I cannot now remember, as it's been five days since I started working on this) were similarly slow and unsuccessful.

Second try: iPodifier/ffmpeg

I then downloaded iPodifier and set it up to watch the Recorded TV directory, figuring that MKV files were automatically converted to DVR-MS via the method documented in my previous blog post, and then iPodifier could pick them up for conversion to iPod Video-compatible MP4.

Seemed simple but, when I launched it, this showed up in the log window over and over:

3/8/2009 6:17:23 PM : Transcoding started: ffmpeg.exe -y -i "C:\Users\Public\Recorded TV\myfile.dvr-ms" -f mp4 -s 320x240 -acodec libfaac -async 4800 -dts_delta_threshold 1 -threads auto -vcodec libxvid -qscale 7 "S:\Temp\myfile-Mar 08 09 0330pm{TV}.mp4"

3/8/2009 6:17:23 PM : Transcoding finished successfully in 0min

According to the wiki this is related to some sort of problem that mencoder is having with the DVR-MS file causing an infinite transcoding loop, the first of its known issues. I am having the second known issue but had already renamed the files, so I just tried with a renamed file. Same thing:

3/8/2009 6:50:47 PM : Transcoding started: ffmpeg.exe -y -i "C:\Users\Public\Recorded TV\myfile.dvr-ms" -f mp4 -s 320x240 -acodec libfaac -async 4800 -dts_delta_threshold 1 -threads auto -vcodec libxvid -qscale 7 "S:\Temp\myfile-Mar 08 09 0645pm{TV}.mp4"

3/8/2009 6:50:48 PM : Transcoding aborted

So I checked what ffmpeg had to say for itself:

C:\Program Files\iPodifier>ffmpeg.exe -y -i "C:\Users\Public\Recorded TV\myfile.dvr-ms" -f mp4 -s 320x240 -acodec libfaac -async 4800 -dts_delta_threshold 1 -threads auto -vcodec libxvid -qscale 7 "S:\Temp\myfile-Mar 08 09 0645pm{TV}.mp4"

FFmpeg version Sherpya-r11050, Copyright (c) 2000-2007 Fabrice Bellard, et al.

libavutil version: 49.5.0

libavcodec version: 51.48.0

libavformat version: 51.19.0

built on Nov 18 2007 09:00:58, gcc: 4.2.1 [Sherpya]

Input #0, asf, from 'C:\Users\Public\Recorded TV\myfile.dvr-ms':

Duration: 00:43:53.6, start: 0.240000, bitrate: 2265 kb/s

Stream #0.0: Audio: 0x0000, 48000 Hz, stereo, 192 kb/s

Stream #0.1: Video: mpeg2video, yuv420p, 696x480 [PAR 320:261 DAR 16:9], 980

0 kb/s, 23.98 tb(r)

Output #0, mp4, to 'S:\Temp\myfile-Mar 08 09 0645pm{TV}.mp4':

Stream #0.0: Video: libxvid, yuv420p, 320x240 [PAR 4:3 DAR 16:9], q=2-31, 20

0 kb/s, 23.98 tb(c)

Stream #0.1: Audio: libfaac, 48000 Hz, stereo, 64 kb/s

Stream mapping:

Stream #0.1 -> #0.0

Stream #0.0 -> #0.1

Unsupported codec (id=0) for input stream #0.0

Apparently this file had some sort of conversion problem between MKV and DVR-MS. A different file from the same batch had AC3 audio and converted with the command line:

ffmpeg.exe -y -i "C:\Users\Public\Recorded TV\myfile.dvr-ms" -f mp4 -s 320x240 -acodec libfaac -async 4800 -dts_delta_threshold 1 -vcodec libxvid -qscale 7 "S:\Temp\myfile-Mar 08 09 0645pm{TV}.mp4"

I had to remove iPodifier's suggested "threads auto" option as that doesn't seem to work on my relatively recent build of ffmpeg (SVN-r16596-Sherpya). iPodifier was also making a mess of the filename so this was about the point at which I gave up on iPodifier and just used command-line ffmpeg.

The size was still tiny (70MB) and you could tell in iTunes that the quality was much worse than my ~320MB episodes converted from XviD using my old method.

I tried again with qscale 4 (iPodifier's "Best" quality) and the result was a 107MB file in ~44 minutes. I didn't even watch it (because I overwrote it accidentally in the next run).

I tried again with qscale 3, having found this article and noting that it seemed to be a better tradeoff between quality and size. Its result was a 140MB file. On this one, I noticed that in both QuickTime and when synced to the iPod the audio goes out of sync pretty early on, and also that the rendered video size was actually 426x240, not 320x240 as I had asked it to convert to. I guess I don't know what it ought to do in this case, but the program I've been using gives me a letterboxed 320x240. iTunes accepted the import of the video and the iPod showed it properly, but maybe the other program (which typically yields a ~330MB file) is inserting the black bars into the material itself, hence its larger size? Seems silly given that iTunes (or maybe the iPod itself) can handle the conversion.

Pressing on, I tried again with qscale 2, resulting in a 214MB file, and tried again with qscale 1, which created a 721MB file. Both looked great, not noticeably different from each other, but it was with this run that I noticed that both files had out-of-sync audio (though qscale 2 was further off).

So I decided to stick with qscale 2, but needed to dig into the settings to fix the audio. Here was the command line I started with, courtesy of iPodifier (minus the "threads auto" option that didn't work in my relatively recent build of ffmpeg):

ffmpeg.exe -y -i "C:\Users\Public\Recorded TV\myfile.dvr-ms" -f mp4 -s 320x240 -acodec libfaac -async 4800 -dts_delta_threshold 1 -vcodec libxvid -qscale 2 "S:\Temp\myfile-qscale-2.mp4"

My guess was that the "async" parameter was the problem. I also imagined that dts_delta_threshold had something to do with it but I don't actually understand at all what the description ("Timestamp discontinuity delta threshold") means. Somebody fixed something at the bottom of this page by setting it to 0 so that may be worth a try as well. Yeah, I'm not that scientific with this shit. I tried async 1 and dts_delta_threshold 0, but the sound was immediately, horribly off.

Thus I tried async 1 with the dtb_delta_threshold option left off (per this admittedly several-builds-old post on andy vt's forum). I threw in -threads 2 and it went blazingly fast, but the sound was still worse than with the original async 4800.

This post suggested using async 2 so I tried that (with dtb_delta_threshold turned off). No luck.

I tried once more with async 2 and dtb_delta_threshold set to 1, but that didn't work for me, either. I decided that maybe MKV --> DVR-MS --> MP4 was not that efficient. But what converted MKV to MP4?

Third try: XviD4PSP

Good old ViDEOHelp.com. They offered like 8 ways to convert MKV to iPod MP4 and the simplest used XviD4PSP. Though I had no need for any of the formats described in the name of this free product, and was worried that most people are converting for use with newer iPods than mine, I figured it was worth an hour of my time to try given the many frustrating hours I'd spent on the other programs. On my first try, I used these settings:

• Format: MP4 iPod 5.0G
  
• Denoise/sharpen: disabled
  
• Brightness/contrast: disabled
  
• Video encoding: x264 HQ Ultra (yeah, it bothered me that only x264 and XviD options were present, but I gave it a try)
  
• Audio encoding: AAC-LC ABR 128k
  

  
  

This worked! The result was 320x184 (which I guess makes sense given the 843 x 480 source resolution) and it was only a ~115MB file, but the play was very smooth and the sound was pinpoint-accurate.

I looked at the output in the XviD4PSP window to see if I could reverse engineer the command lines and utilities used, but I'm not sure. Clearly it is using the x264 utility for video encoding, and it does appear to output its settings, but I can't tell what it uses for audio or for muxing video and audio back together.

The major downside of this utility is that it doesn't appear to have a queue -- it's just one video at a time. This is exacerbated by the fact that it is much slower than DVR-MS to MP4 via ffmpeg -- that took 7 or so minutes for the file I was using to test, whereas XviD4PSP takes about 30 minutes for that same file. So, I can't queue up a bunch before I go to sleep and have them waiting for me in the morning. Nor can I schedule them until I figure out the underlying utilities that provide the actual conversion.

But, it works and the quality is good. After a week of trying other methods and failing, that's saying a lot.

--sbreck

…and have been happy with the switch, there are a few reasons I still use Media Center:

• occasionally there is a conflict between my shows and my wife's shows and she gets dibs because she records so little TV compared to me (and doesn't know how to download her own shows)
  
• the DCT 6412 that RCN gave me in my HD DVR package only has a 120GB hard drive, so I have seen a few shows get dropped off for lack of space and feel like I'm constantly having to watch shows more frequently than I'd like to keep them there
  
• I still don't have pay channels and Big Love is back on HBO
  

Thus, for the above reasons, I still have SABNZBd+ and NZB TV running to grab a few shows that I would otherwise have missed, or might like to watch on my iPod. Typically I grab XviD versions with MP3 sound, which as I have mentioned before work fine on my Linksys DMA 2100 Media Center Extender.

But, maybe I have watched enough HD content in the last few months, but I find myself wishing I could watch higher-resolution stuff on the extender. I've been here many times and tried many different conversions, usually resulting in multiple steps and many hours of conversion followed by disappointment (skips, halts, no sound, way-out-of-sync sound). But today I noticed Ian's link to an Engadget HD tutorial on automatically downloading and converting 720p quality content via DVRMSToolBox, so that you can just watch it right in the Recorded TV and enjoy skip, FF, resume, etc. at the native resolution of the file. Seemed relatively simple so I gave it a try.

First things first, I knew I didn't need uTorrent or tvRSS since I have the aforementioned SABNZBd+ and NZB TV running to automatically download the TV shows I want. Thus my first step was to download and install DVRMSToolBox.

After messing around with the extensions to be watched (need to add .mkv to both Watched Ext and Video Types, not just the former as Engadget's instructions state), I ran into another problem which is that I think the wrong action ("nativecommdetect" which I'm assuming is the commercial skip processing) is running and my "convert MKV to DVR-MS - mencoder" is never running.

To troubleshoot, I:

• deleted all actions besides my own new action in the Processing Condition Editor -- it still tried to detect commercials
  
• changed Delay Processing from Find Commercials to Ignore (this worked, and as I scanned the comments I found the same advice)
  

I started the sample file (Big Love 3x06, 1,528MB) at 6:48 PM by dragging it into the Recorded TV directory, and it was done 50 minutes later, with a DVR-MS file waiting in the same directory. In my quick check, it looked fantastic and the audio synced perfectly.

So, later, my wife and I cracked open a bottle of prosecco (someone brought it to a brunch we hosted recently) and sat down to watch Big Love. Less than 10 minutes in, it froze, and then a few minutes later I was offered the chance to reconnect to the Media Center PC. I was unable to do so. After some troubleshooting and cursing, I found that the PC was totally locked up; not even the mouse would move. Coincidence? I hard-powered it off and tried again. I hate to use my wife as a guinea pig but I was pretty curious if this was a usable conversion of the show. Fortunately, I made it all the way through the episode without incident so I downloaded a couple more MKV files with which to test. Having made it through two more, I can say that this is working pretty well for me. Finally, reliable HD content on the extender without having to do a ton of crazy conversion steps!

Thus, my thoughts turned to automating it further, such that the conversion takes place once the download is complete. Since all that has to happen to convert the file is to move it into the Recorded TV directory, I didn't think it would be too hard since SABNZBd+ allows you to launch scripts. My read of the documentation didn't seem to make it quite clear what actions launch the script (besides telling it manually in the web console). Regardless, I set a scripts directory within SABNZBd+ (http://yourserver:yourport/sabnzbd/config/directories/) and created a batch file called moveMKV.cmd in there. The batch file contains the following:

@echo off

echo moveMKV.cmd starting against %3...

if not exist %1\*.mkv goto :nomkv

echo ...moving %1\*.mkv to Recorded TV...

cd %1

move %1\*.mkv "C:\Users\Public\Recorded TV"

echo ...moved

goto done

:nomkv

echo nothing to move

:done

echo ...done.

exit

Marvel at my batch file skills. Um, anyway, if it's not evident, it looks in the path of the newly downloaded file (%1) and if there's an MKV file in there, it moves it to the Recorded TV directory. %3 is the name of the job (which should be "Big Love 3x06" in the example) -- I'm just using it so I know what's running. To test, I just created a fake directory and fake MKV file somewhere and ran moveMKV.cmd twice. It worked both times. I think I might have confused the hell out of DVRMSToolBox with the fake MKV file, though, as it just sat there logging "Waiting to process file:" over and over until I deleted the file.

Then, I turned the batch file on by going to the Switches page (/sabnzbd/config/switches/) and choosing moveMKV.cmd as the Default user script (2nd last option on the right). To test, I searched Newzbin for a small x264 file and downloaded it. The script worked on the first try and moved the MKV file into Recorded TV as I'd hoped, at which point DVRMSToolBox's FileWatcher picked it up. Sweet!

Since I figured this out and wrote up the steps, it's been a couple of days and I've watched a couple more files without any hiccups. The picture is great, the sound is great, and the files start up much faster than XviD files. And the extender seems a lot more reliable and less likely to crash playing DVR-MS Recorded TV than lower-quality XviD files. The only downside is that the XviD content takes like 7 minutes to download and then you can immediately watch it, so it's closer to instant gratification than downloading a big MKV that takes 25 minutes, and then converting it for an hour. But when it's fully automated to happen in the middle of the night, so that stuff is waiting for you, it's really great, and I find myself watching stuff on the extender that I already have on my DVR just to avoid fast-forwarding through commercials...

Enjoy,

--sbreck

Since I'm the father of a 20-month-old boy, I take a lot of pictures, and put them up on Flickr for sharing with family members. My home PC is on Vista and so is my work tablet, so I've been using Windows Photo Gallery to tag the pictures with tags relating to people, places and events, and then tagging the best with a "flickr" tag, dragging these into Flickr Uploadr, writing up some commentary, and uploading them. My pictures are all stored in the default location in Windows and that directory is shared with my work user and my wife's user account on her (XP) laptop.

Every so often I get burned out on choosing pictures and writing commentary but the relentless demands of my wife and mother-in-law for fresh pictures never cease. So I usually still have to choose the pictures to show because my wife doesn't have Photo Gallery, and then I use Outlook to resize them and e-mail them to her, while she writes the commentary in GMail, sends it back to me, and then I paste it into Flickr Uploadr, one picture at a time. This does save me time because I don't have to write the commentary, but there has to be a more efficient way.

Besides this, and more importantly, our son has grown interested in pictures of himself and his relatives and friends, to the degree that he tells us "find picture of Oskie [his nickname for himself] pouring cat food at Grammy's house" or "picture of Oskie and Grammy and Mommy in the playroom". The way I had tagged everything made it pretty easy to do that search, though as has been noted in many internet comments, there was no good way to do an "AND" search as would be most efficient for my son's two requests -- if you search for Grammy Mommy it is as if you did Grammy OR Mommy and you get every picture with one or both of them in it. Clicking on the tag for one person and then using the search field to find the other person is how you solve that.

Since my wife has XP on her laptop, I also had to find something that was like Windows Photo Gallery but worked on XP. Windows Live Photo Gallery seemed to fit the bill so I installed it on all three machines. The Vista machines knew where the pictures should live, and I added my share to my wife's laptop. It began to process the pictures and build the list of tags and, after many hours, it seemed to have all the tags are in place.

First impressions were that Live Photo Gallery was a smarter and fancier version of Photo Gallery, with better editing tools and the whole People Tags thing, and it had the added benefit that it actually ran on my wife's XP PC.

However, after a few days of trying to tag pictures on my laptop and home PC and checking to see what syncs, I came to the conclusion that if you share a directory, you can only set People Tags on the machine on which the directory is shared. Using my laptop to tag people in pictures in the share sometimes set them, sometimes required dropping back to the gallery and hitting F5 a bunch of times on both computers before they set, and sometimes actually removed all the tags from the pictures.

This really started to piss me off and an earlier draft of this blog post had a long rant about it, when finally I took a breath, sat back, and asked myself if I was trying to make the program do something it wasn't meant to do, when in fact what the program wanted me to do was staring me in the face. So I set up Gallery Sync between my laptop and home PC, which ties into sync.live.com (the former FolderShare). I connected the laptop and desktop via crossover (the wireless router is in another room) but could see that they were syncing at like 10Mbit over wireless, so I turned off wireless and just copied all the stuff over from the laptop manually. Sync was smart enough to figure out that I did that, and just checked everything once I turned wireless back on and Sync could sign into Live. I can't blame Sync for not knowing that the private IP address was the faster network to connect to my desktop PC.

And, now all the People Tags work great, and Sync really seems to sync changes within 10 seconds, which is less time than it took to make one Live Photo Gallery library see the changes made to its underlying files from another machine.

One problem I saw tonight is that some videos and pictures ended up with the wrong "date taken," 1/31, and I can't figure out why this could be or how to fix it besides figuring out the date each actually was taken and fixing it myself. Even odder, the files are fine in the source directory -- I even renamed some of them and saw that they resynced in the little Activity window, but they still have the wrong date on my laptop.

I've also played with the Flickr upload but I'm not sure I've saved a step. As described many, many words ago in my first paragraph, I tag pictures so I can find them later, and if they are flickr-worthy I tag them with flickr. What I used to do was then drag this bunch into Flickr Uploadr, select them all and tag them with Oscar (supposedly there are a few viewers of my photostream who subscribed to this tag though I suspect there's just one and his name is Matt and he lives in Boston and if I told him that I almost never post anything on flickr besides pictures of Oscar my full photostream feed would probably suffice), name each picture and write commentary, and then upload the batch. Now I can type into the "caption" field in the same program I tag them with, which has the added benefit of being searchable later down the line. Then again, take a look at this blog very entry -- I'm not known for brevity and this is true of my flickr commentary as well. There is a couple-sentence limit on the Caption field in the picture so I ran out of that. I also am not sure what to do about the title. A clever or cute title is key to a well-received flickr picture but I'm not quite sure I want to rename the file given my (justified) lack of trust in Windows maintaining an accurate Date Taken for the life of the file. IMG_0540 or whatever places the file in a sequence that will always exist (until I get another camera as I just did, but, what can you do). So when the pictures are uploaded to flickr from Live Photo Gallery I have to create titles for them, finish my captions if they got cut off, delete all the tags and replace them with Oscar (again, I can't blame Live Photo Gallery for my use case, which is to have "private" tags in Windows and a far more limited set of "public" tags). Still, I could still use Uploadr but I'll stick it out with Live Photo Gallery for the next batch and see whether its advantages (of having the commentary local and searchable) outweigh the disadvantages of requiring post-processing. (Oh, and it takes like 20 seconds to log into flickr when you click Publish to Flickr.)

Finally, after all these years of thinking I was too smart for automated sync programs for your camera, I decided what the hell, I'll let Live Photo Gallery figure out which pictures are the latest for me, and put them in the right place. The first sync didn't know which pictures were newest and created a lot of duplicates in the directory. There should probably be a setting that figures that if the same file with the same Date Taken exists in the directory to which you're copying it, it shouldn't copy over those files. But I used DOS FIND to make a textfile of every file with a (2) in the name and then made a batch file from it which moved everything to a temporary directory (from which I could delete them). Incidentally, Vista is an asshole when it comes to searching -- *(2).JPG does not find any files called IMG_1234 (2).JPG as you would expect. Neither does "dir *(2).jpg" so maybe parentheses are a meaningful wildcard of some sort. Anyhoo, the next time I used Live Photo Gallery to import pictures it properly chose just the newest ones, so I guess it keeps its own records of when an image was imported rather than looking at what's in the directory to which it's importing. I would also like to import pictures from my laptop but suspect I won't be able to sync the two galleries that closely such that imports from camera to one gallery are recorded in the other gallery. That, I suppose, argues for doing it based on the contents of the destination directory rather than a separate database. But I'm willing to risk deleting extras and try it.

Having a son has really cut into my blogging but a weight has hung over my head since I noticed a week or so ago that I actually have 10 subscribers on Google Reader. Instead of writing some long-ass blog entry with detailed, researched complaints, here are some short ones:

• Treo and Palm in general -- that company is dead. I switched to Blackberry. The incredible stability of the Verizon Blackberry 8830 has been amazing compared to the Treo 600, 650, and 700p I suffered with for four years.
  
• Windows Media Center -- I actually still use it but not to record TV. I got an HD DVR from my cable company for $9/mo and there is no way that will ever exceed all the money I spent on Media Center (PC, OTA HD tuner, extender, hard drives, antennas for OTA HD, etc.) and I still only get one HD channel reliably. And the SD cable picture sucked. When my cable company finally switched to digital (e.g. scrambled) cable it was time to choose Media Center or choose against Media Center. I chose against and so far, I miss 30-second skip (have to fast forward through commercials now) but other than that I have a much better picture and much more reliable recordings and behavior.
  
• Motorola S9 Bluetooth headphones -- these are cool and I got them with gift certificates so I'm not, like, burning with anger at these flaws, but I'm hard pressed to find situations in which the music stream doesn't skip. And, Blackberry's media player won't play audio through the S9 when playing a video, which was a huge disappointment (I was hoping to stop using the iPod and to just use these on my BB to watch videos). And, the iPod connector thing is so flaky that for days I didn't think it worked with my model of iPod (G5 Video). (The truth is that you have to wake up the iPod from deep suspended mode (where it shows the Apple logo to boot up) with the Bluetooth adapter connected, then play some music, and only then can you play video. If you let the music or video playing stop, you can't get it to start the Bluetooth thing again.) I like the idea of having these lightweight headphones that can play music on my Blackberry, and sometimes it works great (like if you are standing still on the subway, and turn off the Blackberry's cellular antenna) for music, and at the gym it is useful to go cordless with the iPod, but the connection is just flaky. I will someday get an iPod Touch but I do hope that it has A2DP Bluetooth built in by that point, working with video.
  
• Converting video -- I do this a lot as I grow obsessed with a TV series, buy the DVD or download all episodes from the newsgroups, and want to watch them on Media Center Extender at home or on iPod on my commute or on the treadmill at the gym. For the extender, make sure you get XVID video and MP3 audio. XVID + AC3 = pitch-shifted audio with silence every 5 seconds. (I heard that if you used stereo RCA jacks AC3 would be fine but that seems like a pain when I have an expensive Yamaha YSP amp with a coax digital connection which works fine for everything else.) So, basically no HD unless you find WMV content specifically converted for Xbox but I've found that can skip or have problems as well on the generally underpowered extender. For iPod, I use this random Aimersoft thing that has worked great (though not with AC3). Since I have to convert AC3 stuff to MP3 with AutoGK for the extender anyway, that leaves the extra step as conversions for the iPod. But basically it means that my PC is typically running some conversion process at all times.
  
• ThinkPad X60 Tablet with Vista -- This is my work PC and has been for close to two years now. I am growing to hate it but I'm not sure what would be better given that the weight, the battery life with the big 9-cell battery, and the 1400x1050 12" screen are all great. Wireless is flaky as hell (lately I can't switch it off with the hardware switch and then get it working again without a reboot), docking takes minutes and it never remembers that the monitor extends to the left, and the fingerprint reader only lasts for about 6 sleep/wake-up cycles before it is no longer recognized. That happens with a lot of stuff. I am rebooting every other day these days and that's BS. If anyone has suggestions on a business tablet that is a real speed improvement with equivalent weight and screen resolution, I'm all ears.
  

I have a much longer entry about the Treo/Blackberry thing among my OneNote pages here but I'll save that for another time or maybe it will never leave the drafts. I'm going to try to blog more and write less in 2009. Happy New Year,

--sbreck

This is a follow up to my original post on converting videos from my Canon camera as, searching for something else, I came across this post by Omar Shahine on the same subject. As I was finding it very time-consuming to convert my videos one at a time with AutoGK (so they would play on the DMA 2100), and I ended up with something that was almost the same size and had the risk of not playing on the extender, I thought I would use a command-line script as he suggests:

cscript.exe "C:\Program Files\Windows Media Components\Encoder\wmcmd.vbs" -loadprofile "C:\Users\sbreck\Documents\Canon.prx" -input "s:\temp\Oscar.new" -output "C:\Users\sbreck\Videos\Oscar\"

(Refer to Omar's post for links to Windows Media Encoder, the script, and workable settings for Canon.prx.)

Unfortunately, launching cscript.exe wmcmd.vbs crashes "Microsoft ® Console Based Script host".

For the sake of expediency, I turned to Charlie Owen's entry that shows a graphical method to do the bulk of my conversions, using Omar's settings, and that got me through the bulk of my conversions. However, I do like the idea of having conversions without me ever having to worry about them again, and I like even better the idea of picking up a bit of scripting, so I returned to Omar's solution.

Fortunately, the cscript.exe crash is easy to resolve. Read this KB article, and quickly you will see that it is a Vista / WME9 problem. Then install the hotfix linked there.

Now, the process. I have, under the default Videos directory in my profile, a directory called Oscar, 'cause that's the name of my infant son who is the subject of all these videos. I further have subdirectories called iPod and Original, because I'd like the main subdirectory to contain WMV videos suitable for playing on the DMA 2100 Media Center Extender, and I have a packrat mentality when it comes to digital media which drives me to amass more and more hard drive space for things I deem irreplaceable, such as unconverted Canon videos in Motion JPEG format. Anyway, I'd like to move these videos off the camera into a holding directory, place the converted WMV version in the main Oscar share, and then move the original to the Original subdirectory. And then back them up since you can never have enough copies of your kid's videos (and because I share out the backup for Media Center viewing because the backup server is always up).

To do this, I made a batch file that contains this:
@echo off
S:
cd \temp\Oscar.new
if not exist *.avi goto nonew

echo converting movies...
cscript.exe "C:\Program Files\Windows Media Components\Encoder\wmcmd.vbs" -loadprofile "C:\Users\sbreck\Documents\Canon.prx" -input "s:\temp\Oscar.new" -output "C:\Users\sbreck\Videos\Oscar\"

echo moving originals to appropriate location...
move *.avi "C:\Users\sbreck\Videos\Oscar\!Original"

echo launching SyncToy to back everything up...
net use \\server\share /user:sbreck mypassword
if not exist \\server\share\some_file_that_exists goto done
"C:\Users\sbreck\AppData\Local\SyncToy\SyncToy.exe" -R"BackupVideos2"
goto done

:nonew
echo no new movies to convert
goto done

:done
pause
exit

and scheduled it to run every night at 4AM. My test runs were successful and so was a job I left in Oscar.new to test the scheduled task. So, now I just load the videos in there, and late that night they're converted and backed up automatically. Much slicker than any manual solution.

--sbreck

Since this is incidentally related to my Linksys DMA 2100 purchase, I will include it with the other postings:

Late into the first night of DMA 2100 ownership, after setting it up and writing my first blog entry / review, I took the somewhat definitive step of moving my HP z552 back to my office so we could enjoy a living room without the incessant fan noise of the z552 and its sick-sounding USB hard drive companion. I continued to test, tweak and research the DMA 2100 and can report some additional findings:

Zoom not working on non-broadcast materials (XviD stuff from Video Library):
This guy suggested that the component video hook-up was the problem; when my HDMI cable showed up I found that it was not. Information \ Zoom does not do anything with videos in the Video Library in component or HDMI mode.

Xvid start delay:
According to TGB, this is very common. To me, it's not a big deal, a bigger deal is the delay in changing channels, but so far the primary DMA 2100 user in my apartment hasn't noticed that so if she isn't complaining, I'm not complaining.

Audio drop-outs:
I have noticed a problem with XviD more annoying than the start time. I have been watching Deadwood obsessively, and converted a bunch of, uh, downloaded episodes so I could watch them on my iPod on my way to work. On my commute I can watch about 15 - 20 minutes of Deadwood, so if I start one in the morning, and watch more on the way home, then I might want to finish it in the evening, so I'll launch it on the TV and skip ahead 40 or so minutes. Unfortunately, my Deadwood episodes consistently have audio that drops out every 8 seconds or so. Usually this problem seems to be with AC3 audio content, but GSpot shows that these episodes are just normal XviD and MP3, and should play the same as everything else. I was able to successfully watch most of them after converting them with AutoGK (just, literally, not changing anything except maybe the MP3 audio bitrate), but the season/series finale, which I am 12 minutes into, is still having the dropping audio problem. Not sure what the problem is but I will continue to investigate.

Network speed:
After a day or so of DMA 2100 ownership, I found XviD videos to be unplayably slow, and even recorded TV was extremely sluggish (taking seconds to register the skip). The reason, as I determined by going to the Network Test thing in Tasks, was very poor network performance. The first day it didn't give me any trouble but by the second day Network Test only showed 2 to 3 bars, below the "acceptable for TV" threshold. I remembered that the DMA came with a printed piece of paper saying that the MCE PC might have problems on Gigabit networks without following a certain KB article, but since I couldn't find the piece of paper, I figured it was far easier to pull the MCE PC's network cable out of my Gigabit switch and into my 100Mbit switch. This I did, and found my network problems resolved and the playing of recorded TV far snappier. (Xvid was still messed up when I tried to forward to 40mins on the sample Deadwood 3x04.)

Music:
A commenter noted problems with album art and other metadata that I haven't seen, but yesterday and today I've been listening to music (specifically the new Black Mountain record "In the Future", which is really growing on me, and I'm also obsessively playing the song "Dunwich" on the latest Electric Wizard record "Witchcult Today") and have seen a problem several times now. Stopping a song doesn't "take" -- you are listening to music, press stop, the song stops, and then you press the green button, and after a few seconds the song starts playing again. Once this happens, you can't press stop to make it stop; it's like it's playing in some stealth mode that you can't interrupt. I've been going to Tasks and choosing Close, which logs the extender out of the MCE PC, and then logging back in, but of course I shouldn't have to do that. I suspect playing a video or going to Live TV would stop it also, but haven't checked.

--sbreck

P.S. I am slowly assembling posts on the DMA 2100 from random problems, annoyances, bugs and fixes that I see. I'll keep posting them when a fully formed post on one or more issues appears, and will update this ending as I see them:

DMA 2100 initial impressions

converting Canon camera videos and DVDs for use with the DMA 2100

OTA HDTV and the DMA 2100

following up with Linksys DMA 2100 problems

…or just click the DMA 2100 label over on the right.

Another step in the many changes I plan following the install of the Linksys DMA 2100 media center extender is to bring HDTV back into the system. Obviously Microsoft rolled over for the cable industry in disallowing CableCard or any other legal method of displaying broadcast HD content besides over the air HDTV, so I had to reintroduce a DViCO Fusion HDTV 5 USB Gold to my hp z552 after banishing it to my gaming PC awhile back. The problem was that the z552 would get so overheated from the processor-intensive act of showing or, god forbid, recording HDTV over the air that you could barely hear the TV over the fan noise. Now that I have an extender, I'm trying again.

First I downloaded an updated driver for my Fusion HDTV box and installed it on my Media Center PC. Then I added the tuner in Media Center (it was automatically detected along with the channel names). Then I ran through the digital antenna setup.

In case I haven't done this to death in other posts, here is a list of channels that work if you are on the Upper West Side with a west-facing window that looks into your neighbor's window, 12 feet away, and has a slight northern view if you crane your neck to the right:

(In other words, this is a list that I made for myself to know what channels to remove that you folks can look at or scroll past, wondering why the hell you read navel-gazing blogs like this in the first place. Probably because you searched Google for "DMA 2100 HDTV OTA" or whatever the hell term landed you here. Welcome!) There were other channels that the digital antenna setup showed had very poor signal strength so I left them off. Let me note that this is much better than it used to be. Maybe the new 2.63 driver is more tolerant of bad signals? I have the same Terk V55 sitting straight up in my window the same way I've had it for a long time, so maybe the weather was conducive to HD OTA signals tonight or something.

Anyway, I scheduled "Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles", or whatever it's called, tonight, but unfortunately, Media Center threw a No Signal error right at 8PM. But when I went to the channel, it played fine, and when I pressed Record, it recorded the whole show. There were like two or three stutters in the recording but otherwise it looked and sounded great -- since I never download HD content and gave up on OTA a year or so ago I forget how good it looks. And having the computer recording the HD in one room while a different purpose-built device (the DMA 2100) renders it in another room means that you don't get the sense of an overheated engine or whatever the z552 sounds like when all its fans are blowing at high speed. It was a pleasant surprise to find that the DMA 2100 really handled the HD content without any complaints or stuttering (aside from what I just mentioned which I think was a signal, not DMA processing, problem). If only the writers' strike was over for the shows we watch, I'd be switching all my recorded series over to OTA HD immediately!

--sbreck

P.S. I am slowly assembling posts on the DMA 2100 from random problems, annoyances, bugs and fixes that I see. I'll keep posting them when a fully formed post on one or more issues appears, and will update this ending as I see them:

DMA 2100 initial impressions

Converting Canon camera videos and DVDs for use with the DMA 2100

OTA HDTV and the DMA 2100

…or just click the DMA 2100 label over on the right.

Update: I suggest looking at my follow-up post for a far more efficient way to do this.

-------

I have been trying to resolve a critical problem with the new Linksys DMA 2100 media center extender -- namely, that it does not play videos of my 7-month-old son that I take with my Canon camera. These videos are AVIs in "Motion JPEG" format, with PCM audio.

First, I used something called Aimersoft Video Converter, which is sort of a shitty package but has typically worked OK when converting downloaded stuff to iPod MP4 format. When I converted my camera videos to Xvid, they had audio that was just periodic clicks. I tried different audio settings in Aimersoft with Xvid but no luck. I tried converting them to WMV, but then they didn't play at all -- the extender threw a codec error.

I thus googled "convert Divx to Xvid media center extender" or something like that and found AutoGK, which actually had an option entitled "Standalone" for standalone players, with a sub-choice for "MTK/Sigma". I remembered reading chrisl's post on TGB which noted that the DMA has a Sigma chip while researching the DMA before buying it, so that seemed like the move for me. I thus got it and converted a video, and to my delight, it worked just fine. I then converted a bunch of others and unfortunately, none worked -- the audio kept clipping and echoing and was generally unlistenable. I remembered that I used CBR 128Kbit audio for the first conversion, and "automatic" for the rest. Thus, here is a working method of conversion of home videos for the DMA 2100 (short attention spans should focus on the items in bold):

• Download and install AutoGK
  
• You'll have to play with "Predefined size" in the output size settings but my videos are like 15MB to maybe 350MB so I chose "1/4 CD (175MB)" for those that are below that number.
  
  • Note: Unfortunately, about a third of the videos seemed to end up with the audio cutting out and the picture becoming choppy partway through. The common thread was that the converted video ended up larger than the original.
    
  • So if you only have small batches of similar sizes, I suggest setting the output size to be a custom size equal to its current size. For me, that always meant a slightly smaller size, and a video that played without any problems.
    
• I clicked Advanced Settings and chose "CBR MP3, 128 kbps" since Auto gave me the screwed-up audio described above. For video, I used what I think are the defaults, "Auto width" and XviD
  
• I pressed Ctrl-F9 and there was the key setting in the bottom right: "Enable standalone support" and the "MTK/Sigma" chipset.
  

As I create similarly-sized versions of original videos, I have to think about how much of an "electronic packrat" I am going to be. If I have DivX conversions of my originals that are approximately the same size, do I need to keep the Motion JPEG originals? I keep iPod copies because all of them so far are like 700MB. But another 5.5GB of movie files, when my kid's only 7 months old, indicates that I'll have like a terabyte of kid videos including the multiple copies by the time he's 3. That's not including the nightly backup copy I make to my VMware ESX server. Eh, if I run out of disk space, I'll buy some more. Hopefully upon reading this my wife will agree :D

----------

As an aside, it would seem that the primary function of AutoGK is for the conversion of DVDs into AVI format. Since the DMA 2100 doesn't play DVDs itself nor stream them from the Media Center, this also had a slight impact in that we can't play the two Baby Einstein DVDs that we occasionally bust out every other week (we are that sort of enlightened Upper West Side parent that strives to avoid parking our son in front of the TV). I ripped them to DVR-MS using CloneDVD and they played fine on the physical media center, but upon testing it yesterday morning I noticed a slight electronic hiss/rasp in the background. I thus followed these instructions and re-converted it just now. (Took just under an hour for two passes against 1/2hr of video. Hmm.) The result was a 400MB AVI (as opposed to a 1.12GB DVR-MS). On the PC, this file played just fine, with fine audio and video. On the DMA 2100, it also played just fine, albeit with a 5- to 10-second lag before it started playing (same as most other XviD content I've tried on the DMA) and also with parts cut off in "Zoom 2" mode. Ah well, for this, I doubt a 7-month-old baby is going to care. I converted the other Baby Einstein DVD and put them on the shelf, where they will remain forever.

--sbreck

P.S. I am slowly assembling posts on the DMA 2100 from random problems, annoyances, bugs and fixes that I see. I'll keep posting them when a fully formed post on one or more issues appears, and will update this ending as I see them:

…or just click the DMA 2100 label over on the right.