HOW-TO: BroadSnatching to a Portable Media Center

Getting video on a Portable Media Center is a fairly complicated task, but not because it's all that hard, it's just because no one has ever shown folks how. It's a lot easier if you have a Media Center PC (MCE), but even if you don't have an MCE, we showed you how to put DVDs on your Portable Media Center when we reviewed the Creative Zen.

Walt Mossberg's most recent Personal Technology column smacked hard on the complicated nature of this as well, but instead of just complaining, we're going to show you yet another way of getting some pretty amazing, scary, and completely random videos from around the web automatically uploaded onto your Portable Media Center.

On a related note, we do think if people don't know how and where to easily get content on their devices, they'll likely turn to file sharing networks and become pseudo-pirates, and now with broadcasting flags stopping any type of recording, this will happen more and more, but that's another story-content _is_ the destination.

This week's How-To will use a video feed (RSS) from BlogDigger, WindowsMedia 10, iPodder, and a Portable Media Center to "BroadSnatch" video from many sources. A couple weeks ago we used RSS and Bittorrent as a way to download large files, to do something similar, but this is entirely new and different. We're calling this BroadSnatching, we'll see if it gets picked up.

Walt says you're only stuck with old baseball and bad movies, which isn't true, at least not for our readers. With our first How-To about getting DVDs onto your Portable Media Center and now with this one about BroadSnatching, you'll fill that 40GB monster up in no time.

For this How-To you'll need a Portable Media Center, we're using a Creative Zen, you'll also need iPodder and WindowsMedia 10. That's about it, as an added bonus you can also add MP3 and other types of feeds as well.

WindowsMedia 10
Download and install WindowsMedia 10, if you haven't already it can be found here.

You can check the version you have by going to Help > About WindowsMedia Player while using Windows media.

iPodder
Download and install iPodder. The good news is, you don't really need a Portable Media Center you can use this How-To and watch all these videos on a Mac, PC or even Linux, as more video players become available this How-To can serve as a building block to add video to most likely any device, any way—time to configure iPodder.

Download folders
Configure iPodder's downloads to go to a folder called downloads, start up iPodder or double click the lemon in the task bar and click the Preferences tab.

Click browse and add the folder "downloads" if it's not already selected.

Scheduler
Click the Scheduler tab and choose times that make sense based on your connection and likeliness to sync up.

We choose 2 hours, also select "Check for new podcasts automatically" while these are not podcasts (audio files) it doesn't matter, iPodder will work with any files, including video.

RSS (Video feed)
Add the BlogDigger WindowsMedia Feed by typing the following in the Add field:

http://www.blogdigger.com/media/wmv.xml

This a RSS feed, or "Really Simple Syndication", it basically has a list of videos from around the web, other RSS feeds have text news, some have music, other have images or all of this, but this one specifically has WindowsMedia videos ripe for the snatching.

Click Add and then click "Check for new Podcasts". This will go out on the web, check the RSS feed on BlogDigger and then download the videos.

For more about BlogDigger visit their site.

Set up Smart Plalists in WindowsMedia
First, open WindowsMedia Player, click Tools > Options, click the Library tab, click the Monitor folders button and add "downloads" which is in the iPodder directory, this will make WindowMedia look at this folder and fish out the videos that download.

Click the Library Tab. Right click the Auto Playlists and click New.

Name your Playlist "BroadSnatch" hilight (click) "Music in my Library" then click remove.

Click the plus to add criteria, choose "Video in my Library" from the pull down list.

Click the plus, to add criteria, scroll down and click more in the pull down list. Choose Keyword, click add criteria and type "Downloads" where it says click to set. This will pull in all the videos in the Downloads folder. 

Click OK, you'll see all your videos now appear in the library.

Right click the BroadSnatch Auto Playlist and click "Add to Sync List".

This will add the files in a new panel called, you guess it, the Sync List.

Sync the Portable Media Center
When you plug in the Portable Media Center it will usually present you with a list of options, if you haven't already choose the following.

Now depending on how much video you have this may take up to an hour to transfer and/or convert the videos.

Watch the weirdness

A bit of warning, perhaps we should have said this sooner, but there's no way to know what you're going to get. Usually we get Daily Show clips, video game trailers, Japanese anime, music video mods, home made movies and many of the popular videos people send each other or post about around the web, oh, and once we got topless boxing.

So, all this being said, it's likely not something you want to play for your kids, but hey, maybe you're kids are cool.

Want a taste? Click here to watch a video (WindowsMedia). WARNING: NOT SO SAFE FOR WORK.

This video is what we recieved on our Portable Media Center last night! The weird thing is, this will show up on our device tomorrow.

Each day we get up to 8 hours of video, it's almost like a video pulse of the world, from videos shot in the Middle East to clips from comedy shows, it's random, creepy and amazing all at the same time.

Extra Credit
If you're thirsty for more geeked out videos, here are a couple other feeds. The first is from Microsoft's Channel9 which usually has some great interviews with the engineers and product people from uber-blogger Robert Scoble and the other feed is our test feed here that has a robot dance party, really we're not kidding, it's a dance party with robots.

Also, feel free to post up other feeds you find in the comments here!



Channel9 video feed:
http://channel9.msdn.com/rss.aspx?ForumID=14&Mode=0

Engadget Video feed test:
http://media.weblogsinc.com/common/videos/pt/vrss.xml

So there you have it, with a Portable Media Center you can sync TV with a Media Center PC or something like SnapStream, transfer home videos, watch DVD movies you've converted and now "BroadSnatch" videos, images and music from around the web. So go fill up those drives with RSS on your PMC, ASAP.

Update: There's another application that you may want to try as well, we will cover this in another How-To, but do check it out since it automatically makes playlists.

Doppler can do the same, but without setting up a smart playlist. Doppler will create the playlist for you in Windows Media Player just like it does in iTunes. Basically in Doppler it means: go to the website hosting the video feed. Drag the URL to Doppler, click ok to subscribe. And Doppler 1.1.1 also supports al kinds of other nice goodies, like spacesavers, which can help you to manage your precious disk space.

Doppler is freeware. As in free.

http://www.dopplerradio.net

---

Phillip Torrone can be reached at http://www.flashenabled.com

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 19th 2005 2:27AM]

At first I thought this "BroadSnatching" had something to do with cameraphone voyeur technology or something of that sort-- then seeing the picture for the article I was like o_O -- needless to say though I was pleased to find out Engadget wasn't doing a story on how to spy on "broads"

Heh

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 19th 2005 2:27AM]

I used to have ipodder download the random movies on my work PC so I had something interesting and random to watch at lunch. But yesterday it downloaded a video of some naked girls pooing in each others mouths. I deleted it, emptied my recycle bin, uninstalled the program but still managed to eat my lunch.

As the review says be very careful.

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 19th 2005 2:27AM]

ida kept it sounds tastey

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 19th 2005 2:27AM]

This is soo cool, I really really like the "you never know what you gonna get" factor. It is just like you have yourself a personal TV- Radio - Discussion Channel.
Did you came up with this yourself Philip?
BTW my compliments for your PodCast, always listen to it on my Tungsten E.
Cheers!
Jelmer

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 19th 2005 2:27AM]

Jelmer- Agreed! Though I don't even have a PVP I just like the idea of having random cool videos to check out.

Though for some reason mine only downloads 1 video and then launches iTunes and then quits. It never goes onto the next video in the feed.

Any ideas?

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 19th 2005 2:27AM]

Yeah I got this also! but I probably know why this is... because when you add a XML feed, it will only donwload the latest video/audio file from that point and the files that are added after this point. Get the picture? So i checked the xml feed manually (in firefox) and from there i downloaded the earlier files, in my case from the Quicktime MOV XML feed. (Files I can view on my Palm Tungsten E, because I haven't a MVP either. :D

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 19th 2005 2:27AM]

BroadSnatch? You have way too clean a mind, my friend... Just please don't call your next invention DudeDong, k? ;-)

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 19th 2005 2:27AM]

Huh!

Well thanks for the tip Jelmer, I guess we'll just have to wait and see!

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 19th 2005 2:27AM]

Nope. This happens even when automatic. I found on the sourceforge site some comments that this is happening to others as well.

Hmm.. maybe downgradet to iPodder 1.0? Can anyone else shed some light on this?

Thanks

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 19th 2005 2:27AM]

The frame of the video on the front page of the zen looks like a porno.

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 19th 2005 2:27AM]

wow thanks. now i have videos showing suicide bombers and dead americans.
(im not saying its your fault, just jk)

quite interesting how random the stuff is.Looking fwd to seeing what it has for me in the morning.

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 19th 2005 2:27AM]

Jelmer and others who are having the problem where iPodder only downloads 1 file from the feeds:

I've figured out how to make it so that iTunes does not launch after every file is downloaded (and only 1 file downloads from a feed at a time because of this)! Ahh!!

Here's how (in windows XP atleast)

1)QUIT iPodder! (Don't just close it, quit it)

2) Go to C:documents and settingsUSERNAMEApplication DataiPodder where USERNAME is the user account you installed iPodder under

3)Open the ipodder.cfg file in notepad

4)Change the line that says player_type = 'itunes' to read player_type = ''

5)Delete history.txt and ipodder.db

6)Restart iPodder and recheck all of your feeds and iPodder will download all of the videos/mp3s you've missed!

Hooray!!

I guess they haven't addressed this problem yet (where iTunes doesn't handle video feeds)... but if your only using iPodder for podcasts/mp3s then you won't need to make this tweak, its only for people who want to download video and have iTunes installed and are having this problem!!

Good luck!

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 19th 2005 2:27AM]

alternatively you could use:

http://www.blogsnow.com/dotmov.xml

as a source. And, yes, this IS a shameless plug.

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 19th 2005 2:27AM]

In the log screen of iPodder, for each time it tries to download new podcasts I see "error connecting (getaddrinfo failed). Any ideas on that one? I can't seem to find a troubleshooting/help/FAQ section. I have four feeds set up and get the error for all of them. I can connect to the feeds with a regular browser....

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 19th 2005 2:27AM]

Another simple way to get TV content to your portable is to use a product called Snapstream to bring cable TV to your computer. Once you have TV to the computer record the TV show which is saved as a file, run it through a conversion for your specific portable then just drag to your portable via explorer.

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 19th 2005 2:27AM]

Hi Phillip,

I wanted to share another video feed with you. This one's from the Videoblogging.info bunch, who have been developing a community of videobloggers for some time now:

http://me-tv.com/watch/nav.php?feedid=5

They have a new site/web app called me-tv; it's an aggregator they call a vogbrowser (or videoblog browser). Check it out at:

http://me-tv.com/

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 19th 2005 2:27AM]

Hi

Nice article - just one thing concerns me however: How likely is it to end up with illegal video on your computer as a result of doing this? The last thing I would want is to be demostrating this to my friends only to get something that could wind us up in jail.

Mike

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 19th 2005 2:27AM]

wow thanks. I badly need it!

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 19th 2005 2:27AM]

Mike,
The whole idea behind using RSS feeds instead of something like Kazaa is that you are using a trusted person as a channel for your exposure to media. This is opposed to the idea of blindly sucking down content labeled as something by someone you can't even track down. Unfortunately with RSS going commercial in some areas you are not guaranteed to be be free of adverts, but the nice part is that if the adverts begin to be more like spam or displaying questionable content, you just delete the feed and you really don't ever see it again. By limiting the channel to people and topics you might be close to, especially web sites you may have already visited in the past, you can be a little surer of the content.

[(Unverified) Posted Dec 19th 2005 2:27AM]

Does anybody know of any way to automatically convert .MOV files to .WMV after they're downloaded from iPodder? I see a power user section in the preferences where it looks like you can execute a command line statement with a reference to the downloaded file. I haven't found any command line utilities that will do a quick conversion though...

any suggestions?