Link to blog release here.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

• 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.

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.