andy vt's tools & blog

Thanks in advance for any help you're able to provide.  I'm fairly well-versed in Media Center, but a relative newbie with DVT.  I've got Windows 7 converting everything to DVRMS, and through that learned most of the basics of how the tool operates.

Here's the goal:  Keep a directory (ideally on a network share on my home server) synchronized with the an iPod version of the content in my recorded TV folder.

Why:  I travel a fair amount, but I primarily watch my television on media center.  If I am going to hop on a plane, I'd like to copy over all of my unwatched content to my iPod (without waiting for overnight conversions).

Here's what I've figured out so far:

• I can use DVT to convert all TV recordings to iPod Touch format (thx to the user who contributed the profile and instructions)
• This will leave me with an iPod directory that will grow indefinitely, based on my limited understanding so far
• I can't figure out a way to mirror deletes that happen on the recorded TV directory over to the iPod directory

Put another way, the MCE Recorded TV folder is the master.  I will manage all of my TV through the MC interface, and want the iPod directory to be a mirror of the Recorded TV folder at all times (but converted to MP4).

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Pete

That's a really cool idea.  Unfortunetly there's not a way to do that currently with DTB, you should be able to do something with a bat/powershell file if the relationship b/w the files is structured.

How do you maintain the relationship b/w the MC file and the ipod file?

There was an app that used to accomplish something similar for WMV files and the Zune, called ZuneTVwatcher.  The author went awol on the project awhile ago.  A fairly simple compare between input and output directories for filenames would accomplish the task.  If there's a file in the input directory (WTVC or DVRMS extension) that doesn't exist in the output directory (MP4 extension) then launch conversion.  If there's a file in the output directory with no match in the input directory, then delete the file.

I came here to the site looking for exactly this.  I'm a new iphone convert, but have been using MCE/VMC for quite some time.  I've never used DTB, but have been researching conversion tools, and I think this will do what I need. 

I'll stick with simply automating an exported directory of iPhone compatible files for now, but the OP's idea is eventually what I'd be looking to try to do via some scheduled bat file or similar...

 Thanks for the valuable tool in DTB, I'm looking forward to figuring out how to get it running on my VMC!

-Steveo

Of course, the filenames have to be the same, just with different extensions.  Assuming that, just run this in a batch script every night:

For %%X in ("c:\ConvertedVideo\*") do (IF not exist "c:\RecordedTV\%%~nX.dvr-ms" del "%%X")

Change the paths to your paths, natch.