Zune Tips Weblog

ZuneBoards.com recently released ZuneTV, which is a web site for downloading video files. It operates much like YouTube.com, except it allows you to also download videos in Zune compatible format. So far as I can tell, the video downloads are free (you need to have a ZuneBoards account to download files).

The nicest thing about this site, is that you won’t need to use external programs (such as Orbit Downloader) to download the files and convert them. The limiting factor for me, is that the video content seems lacking (having similar user-generated videos as YouTube.com). I’d rather download TV episodes, documentaries, etc. than Charlie the Horse in Candyland.

So for now, I’m still sticking with hulu.com and veoh.com for TV Show downloads. And, I’ve got my TV Tuner card with Vista Media Center recording and converting scheduled TV shows for my Zune!

I just posted a new page titled “Veoh.com & Hulu.com Video Downloading” that details how to download videos from sites like www.veoh.com and hulu.com and convert them for playback on your Zune. The trick, is finding the playing video file’s http address and downloading that file onto your Desktop PC. The page I wrote up discusses using a program called Orbit Downloader to “sniff” out the desired video file and download it.

The downloaded file is in FLV file format, which you’ll need to convert to WMV format for your Zune. I’ve outlined the steps required to do this using an example.

What I really like about the veoh.com and hulu.com sites, are the available video content for viewing and/or downloading. They have a lot of older TV Show episodes available (my favorite is The Time Tunnel), but also newer TV Shows and Movies. Here’s a short list of what I found on these sites:

Movies:

October Sky
Quest For Fire
Meet Joe Black
The Usual Suspects
Muholland Drive
Daylight
Sideways Read the rest of this entry »

Sorry for not posting much over the last several days. There doesn’t seem to be much happening in the Zune area lately. I did however, come across a few web sites that offer full TV show episodes for viewing on their site. www.veoh.com and www.hulu.com seem to offer episodes of old TV shows as well as repeat episodes of current shows which you can watch from your web browser. For example, I came across an episode of New Amsterdam which I had missed one evening, so I could watch it in it’s entirety from hulu.com. Most of these videos are FLV files being played in the web browser, so I’m trying to find a way to download them for converting for my Zune. There are a lot of utilities that can do this, (like “Download Helper” for FireFox), but I can’t seem to find one that will successfully download a FLV file from either veoh.com or hulu.com. If you know of a solution for this, please let me know!

The season finale for the TV show Jericho aired last night, and it was also the last episode for the series since the show was canceled by CBS. I actually liked the finale, as it gave some closure in certain areas, left a few openings for pondering, and didn’t give you a dissatisfying cliffhanger ending. I now have to think of Jericho as a two season mini-series, since we won’t be seeing any more episodes. It’s too bad, since it was a great show and I certainly would like to know how the US civil war pans out and how the people of Jericho survives.

Now, some fans are talking about doing more letter writing and sending nuts to the CBS executives (as they did when Jericho was canceled after the 1st season), but I don’t think any amount of campaigning will bring back Jericho for a third season. The networks are interested in viewership, and Jericho’s ratings were not much higher the 2nd time around. The only hope, is that Jericho might find a home on the cable network SciFi channel, so we’ll have to see if that happens.

So what show does CBS plan to fill in Jericho’s time slot? Looks like a new episode of CSI: Miami … oh boy.

I read today that CBS has canceled the TV Show Jericho once again. If you’re not aware of it, Jericho was canceled after it’s first season and after a big letter writing campaign (and tons of peanuts being shipped to the CBS studio executives) by fans, CBS brought the program back on the air for an abbreviated 2nd season. Apparently, the viewership was not enough the 2nd time around to save the show. So, another one of my favorite shows has bit the dust.

Fans are hopeful that Jericho could be moved to the cable channel, SciFi, which I hope is a viable option. However, I think that as more time passes after the show’s cancellation the greater likelihood it will not continue on (because the actors will have moved on with their careers, etc). As I’ve stated in a previous posting, I think the show, New Amsterdam will also follow the path of Jericho and Journeyman. Since all of my favorite shows seem to get canceled, you can expect Life, Lost, and The Sarah Connor Chronicles to go next. All to be replaced by mindless shows that entail dancing D-list stars, voyeurist big brother houses, and bug-eating contestants stabbing each other in the back on a remote island. Yipee, I can hardly wait…

I don’t watch a lot of TV, but there are a few good shows that I watch regularly. Jericho is one of my favorites, along with New Amsterdam and Lost. Jericho was canceled after one season, but was brought back due to a huge campaign by it’s fans. However, it seems that Jericho still has low ratings with weekly viewership, and appears to be on the path for cancellation again. Why is that? Who are the people or families that are determining the TV show ratings? Who are these “Nielsen Families” that are determining what programming stays on TV and what shows are canceled? I’ve never been asked what shows I watch on a weekly basis, so who are these people that are governing viewership of shows?

It seems that these Nielsen Families favor reality shows over other kinds of programming. Why are shows like Big Brother: Till Death Do Us Part, Dancing with the Stars, Survivor, and Paradise Hotel so popular? Are the majority of people watching TV these days only interested in mindless reality shows?

It seems that Jericho will be going the way of Journeyman, and I’ve been reading that New Amsterdam might also follow. Fortunately, Lost is still popular enough (or maybe it has a good time slot) for it to continue on for another year. So I guess I’ll have to accept the fact that most shows that I deem as being “good” will only last one season. I guess that’s truly reality.

For the last few years, my family heads down to a friend’s beach house for some much needed vacation during the summer. The house is somewhat secluded and thus doesn’t have very good TV reception, so this year I was thinking about using my Zune 80 as a miniature Digital Video Player. That way, my kids can watch some pre-recorded movies, cartoons, TV shows, etc. on the “Big Screen” and I don’t need to bother with bring a DVD player, burning DVDs, etc. So, I began the process of investigating how I can do this with my Zune 80 device.

If you don’t already know this, you can use your Zune to output a TV-Composite signal from the headphone jack using a special cable (it’s the same cable used for the newer iPods devices). My Zune A/V Kit came with such a video cable, so I had all the necessary hardware to pipe video from my Zune to a standard TV set. Note, that using a TV-Composite signal doesn’t offer you the best video quality (comparable to the output from an older VCR). If I was really picky and wanted the best quality possible, I could invest in a new Zune dock and use video component out signals, however, my plan is to watch videos on an older TV set so doing so would be overkill in this application.

The next step is to create video files that would playback reasonably well on a standard TV set. Most of my current Zune videos are in 320×480 resolution format (30 fps). This works great for playback on my Zune at 700 kbps video rate, however, it looks pretty grainy when viewing on a TV display. So as a test, I converted a partial TV show (Source: MPEG2, 720×480, 30 fps, 8000 Kbps, 7 minutes duration) with several different video settings. Read the rest of this entry »

As you may have read from my previous postings, I’ve got the whole PVR thing worked out to perfection. Using Vista Media Center, DVRMSToolbox and the PVR-150 TV Tuner Card, I’ve got my home PC set up to record TV Shows and automatically convert them to WMV format for my Zune 80. I’ve got certain TV Shows scheduled for weekly recording (e.g., Lost, Jericho, New Amsterdam, Stargate: Atlantis, Stargate: SG1) so I’ll never miss a show again.

With DVRMSToolbox, I’ve got a profile setup with actions that will do the commercial cutting on the DVR-MS file and save it to a 2nd drive in my system as an archive. That way, I can always reprocess the video if I want higher resolution (for maybe my TV set). Unfortunately, I’ve noticed that my backup drive (111 GB) is nearly filled with DVR-MS files. Each file takes about 3 GB of space per 45 minutes of show, so after a few weeks of regular recording this secondary drive is filling up very fast! As such, I’ve decided to not save the DVR-MS files, and just keep the WMV files that are created.

I’ll have to reconsider what I want to save to my hard drive, as I’m thinking I might convert the high-resolution DVR-MS files to a more compact WMV format (with TV-resolution) and save those files as an archive.

I wonder what people do when they have dedicated PVRs set up as a multimedia entertainment system? It’s nice to have videos on the hard drive ready to play (without having to fumble with DVDs), but they can take up a lot of space even if you have a modest number of movies and TV Shows. I can only imagine that people must have 500 GB or 1 TB storage systems for all this data!

I’ve got to rave again about my digital media center. Last night I laid in bed watching the pilot episode of New Amsterdam, and it was great watching a video that had excellent picture quality and resolution, great audio, and no commercials. Let me say that again, no commercials! As I was bracing myself for each commercial break, the video just transitioned into the next act of the show. No need to fast forward through a commercial, back up because I went to far, etc. And, using the DVRMSToolbox utility allows for completely automatic video processing. All I do is sync my Zune and I have my recorded TV show available for viewing.

Now, the software to identify commercials in a TV recording isn’t always perfect. I’m using a shareware product called Show Analyzer which does a very good job (worked perfectly for New Amsterdam), but sometimes it will miss a commercial for various reasons. Of course, I can always fine tune the Show Analyzer program using it’s SchoolHouse application, but I can live with a few commercials for those programs that I only want to watch once.

I’m sure glad I got a Zune 80 GB device, since I’m quickly filling it up with episodes of Lost, Jericho, Stargate Atlantis, and many more TV Shows to come!

I’ve got a buddy who has a TiVo, which is a Digital Video Recorder (DVR) for recording TV Shows. He’s got a special module that allows him to copy his recordings over to his PC, upon which he can edit out the commercials and archive the video or burn it to a DVD. I was always envious of him, since he could easily search for and select what he wanted to record very, very easily (while I had to fumble with the awkward method of defining recording times and dates for my DVD recorder). I never got a TiVo, since they require a monthly subscription service that I didn’t want to pay (because I didn’t watch a lot of TV at that time). Well, a few years has gone by and I find myself watching more TV Shows these days, but I still didn’t want to pay for a TiVo and monthly subscription. Thus, I was able to resolve my dilemma by purchasing a PVR-150 TV Tuner card and using Vista Media Center to drive it on my Desktop PC. So for the price of $70 US, I was able to have the same TiVo-like experience as my friend (and maybe better).

One feature that the TiVo has, is the ability to be connected to the Internet where by my friend can program it via a web-browser utility remotely. So, if he forgot to set his TiVo to record a TV show one evening, he could log into his TiVo from his work computer via the Internet, and make the necessary recording settings. A very handy feature if you’re on the road on a business trip and forget to set your PVR to record the season finale of Lost.

Also, there’s another device called the SlingBox which allows you to remotely control your Cable TV box so you can stream live TV to any web browser connected via the Internet. SlingBox isn’t a DVR (as it doesn’t record TV Shows), but it can stream a live TV Show currently being aired at your home location to a web browser. Very nice if you don’t want to miss a TV episode and you can’t wait to get home to watch it!

Well, I had a feeling that both of these cool features could be done using Vista Media Center with some 3rd party plugin or utility, and sure enough I was right. It’s a program called WebGuide which can actually stream a recorded video or live video from your home PC through the Internet to a web browser for viewing. So technically, I could be in a hotel room 2000 miles from home, and via a high-speed Internet connection be able to watch any recorded TV show or live TV show on my home PC. Read the rest of this entry »