Pandora for Tivo

I’m a big Pandora user on Android so I was pretty excited to hear about Pandora for Tivo. I’ve spent the last few weeks playing with it and I’m really impressed. The log-in and setup was really easy and all of my stations were instantly available. There is only one minor user experience issue. When you come back to the app after watching TV, it is a little tricky to figure out how to get more details on the currently playing song. The solution is to navigate down to the currently playing station and select the station. You can then get to the currently playing song’s details from there.

Link to blog release here.

Stream videos to Tivo HD

If you have Windows Home Server there is an easy to use software package, Tivo Publisher, for streaming videos to your TivoHD. It’s like a free Tivo Desktop Plus for Windows Home Server. This is nice because you can store your videos on your home server, using it as a NAS, and stream directly from there.

Here are the steps to stream a DVD backup to Tivo Publisher:

1. Backup the vob set of the desired DVD using DVD Decrypter or your favorite DVD ripper.
2. Use vob2mpg to convert the vobs to a single mpg.
3. Copy the mpg into a directory shared by Tivo Publisher.
4. Once Tivo Publisher is installed and configured, go to the Tivo and and at the bottom of the “Now Playing List”.  The link to the Home Server should be there. Browse the Home Server to find your movie and select for download.
5. Tivo Publisher uses ffmpeg to convert to the Tivo’s format. This slows down the streaming considerably. It takes about 2 minutes to download from Tivo Publisher for every minute in the video. So for an hour video, it could take about 2 hours to download.

I haven’t tried Tivo Desktop Plus to see if it is any faster. Please comment if you have any experience comparing the two.

Conversion tools for mpeg2 to DVR-MS

The three tools out there that convert mpeg2 to DVR-MS are VideoReDo Plus, TSConverter and dvredit. Of the three I can only get VideoReDo Plus to work. This is slightly frustrating as it’s also the only one that actually costs money ($50). It does work well though.

For dvredit I get the following error: “failed to add pToTS filter to graph 0×80004003″.

For TSConverter I get a never ending series of blank message boxes which require me to close the program via Task Manager.

My system is running Vista Ultimate (which I’m sure is part of the problem). If anyone has a solution to the above problem or has another program to try, it would be greatly appreciated.

Add “Link to this album” to Whiist photo albums

As promised in the previous post, here is a way to add a hard hyperlink reference to all of your Whiist photo albums. This makes the album easier to share by adding the direct hyperlink to an e-mail or other web page/blog.

Here are the steps to enable “Link to this album”:

1. Download the new album script here. Unzip the album.ashx file to a known location.
2. For each of your photo shares you would like to enable this feature:
   1. Navigate to the public folder containing the photo share.
   2. Copy the new album.ashx file over the existing album.ashx file already in this location.
   3. If you view your website now, you will see a hyperlink in the upper right hand corner of the web page with the text “Link to this album”.
   4. If you select that link, the URL in the address bar of the browser will be a hard link to that album. The web page will not change, just the URL in the address bar.

Please comment and let me know how this works for you. To revert, just copy back the older album.ashx. I would obviously try this on a test album first to make sure it is what you are looking for.

Create hard link to Whiist album folder

It is convenient to e-mail direct links to Whiist photo albums located in sub-folders of the main album. Doing this is rather non-intuitive, but it is at least possible. The general format is as follows:

http://<domain name>/<album folder>/default.aspx?albummode=Folder&albumpath=<relative URL>

The formatting of the <relative URL> field is the standard URL format with special characters denoted with % and their ASCII integer value. A good resource that will format URLs automatically is here.

As an example, an album located in the “06.15.08 Father’s Day” folder of the album at http://mediaserver01/Summer2008 can be directly referenced as:

http://mediaserver01/summer2008/default.aspx?albummode=Folder&albumpath=%2fsummer2008%2f06.15.08+Father%27s+Day

Soon I will pos a modified album.ashx to always have a hard link directly to the album on the album web page.

How to add thumbnail images to Media Center video library files

In short adding thumbnail images to the Media Center video library is easy. Simply place a .jpg with the exact same file name as the movie file in the same videos folder. For instance to have the file “Bourne Ultimatum.dvr-ms” show a thumbnail in the videos section of Media Center, put a file named “Bourne Ultimatum.jpg” in the same folder.

The tricky part is getting the file to show up properly, it needs the correct dimensions or the image will be cropped. The dimensions Media Center displays are 320×240 (WxH). To find an image with those dimensions I go to Google Images and search the movie title. Google Images provides the dimensions of each image file. As long as W/H = 1.33 you’re good. So for instance a jpg with 1024×768 dimensions works just as well.

Stream DVD movies to XBox 360 Media Center Extender

If you want full DVD quality backups to be stored on your network and viewed by the XBox 360 Media Center Extender, DVR-MS is the best file format. DVR-MS supports 5.1 surround sound and it’s video format is mpeg2 so there is no loss in video quality. Since there is no transcoding, conversions are quick as well. Plain mpeg2 works as well but the XBox 360 Media Center Extender cannot fast-forward and rewind well with that format. For the full interactive experience DVR-MS works best.

Here are the steps to convert a DVD backup to DVR-MS:

1. Backup the vob set of the desired DVD using DVD Decrypter or your favorite DVD ripper.
2. Use vob2mpg to convert the vobs to a single mpg.
3. Use VideoRedo Plus to convert the mpg to DVR-MS.

VideoRedo Plus costs about $45 but it works very well with DVR-MS. You can skip the vob2mpg step and convert the vobs directly with VideoRedo but I have found at the vob transitions there can be skips. vob2mpg combines the vobs without the skips. Another option would be to create a single vob with DVD Decrypter.

Customize your WHIIST photo album title

There are a couple of quick and easy ways to customize your WHIIST photo album that I haven’t seen posted. The page default settings are located in default.aspx. To edit that file:

• Using Windows Explorer open the directory where the photos are placed for the album.
• Using Wordpad (or your favorite text editor) open default.aspx.

• To change the title displayed in the web browser’s title bar:
  • In between the <title> HTML tags, replace the “Windows Home Server Gallery” with what you would like displayed at the top of the viewer’s web browser.
  • Save and close the default.aspx file.
• To change the heading displayed at the top of the web page.
  • In between the <span class="LandingHeaderStyle"></span> HTML tags, replace the “WHIIST Photo Gallery” with what you would like displayed at the top of the photo gallery web page.
  • Save and close the default.aspx file.

Adding captions to WHIIST

I’ve seem a number of posts from Windows Home Server users asking to add captions to WHIIST. I’ve created a minor hack to enable captions to web pages hosted using WHIIST. This change involves replacing one of the ASP.NET script files found in the directory that photos are added.

Here are the steps to enable captions in WHIIST:

1. Download the new album script here. Unzip the album.ashx file to a known location.
2. For each of your photo shares you would like to enable captions:
   1. Navigate to the public folder containing the photo share.
   2. Copy the new album.ashx file over the existing album.ashx file already in this location.
   3. If you view your website now, you will see the caption for each photo is the file name of the photo. This is the default caption.
   4. To add custom title and caption edit the metadata for each photo.
   5. To edit the metadata, follow these steps:
      1. Right click on the picture file to add a caption in windows explorer.
      2. Select “Properties”.
      3. Select the “Summary” tab.
      4. In the “Title:” field, enter the title you would like displayed for the photo.
      5. In the “Comments:” field, enter any additional comments you would like displayed.

Please comment and let me know how this works for you. To revert, just copy back the older album.ashx. I would obviously try this on a test album first to make sure it is what you are looking for.

Welcome!

Welcome to the Media Serve blog. This blog will try to capture my experiences with distributing digital media locally over my home network and externally over Windows Home Server. I’ve found some tips and tricks along the way, hopefully others will find them useful as well.