Some stuff to check out

1) Open Media Library - Another movie interface for Media Center that supports transcoding to extenders. It's free and under development. It appears to use a different transcoder than transcode 360 so those of you with transcoding issues might want to check it out.

2) PlayOn - PlayOn lets you watch Netflix, Hulu, CBS, YouTube, CNN, ESPN and more on your TV (using extenders). PlayOn supports Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, and I assume other extenders like Linksys. PlayOn has a 14-day free trial. The product costs 39.99.

3) vmcPlayIt - Let's you use PlayOn on your Media Center. I was looking for something like this so I could watch Hulu and such without having to use the extender. The developer takes donations.

4) Super - a GUI for mencoder and ffmpeg that is very tweakable and has preset profiles too. Free, but donations are accepted.

5) VideoRedo - Want to quickly turn your ripped .vob files into an .mpg or .dvrms file (other filetypes are spported too). This tool will merge the .vobs and fix the time indexing and finish a movie in about 5 minutes. It does not re-encode. I'm not really doing the product justice in my description. For example, you can use it to remove commericals from a recording. Free trial is available.

Want to use the Super encoder tool but cannot find the download link?

The download link is here:
http://www.erightsoft.biz/GetFile.php?SUPERsetup.exe

On this page:
http://www.erightsoft.com/S6Kg1.html
down near the bottom.

I don't know why...that website is difficult to navigate and the actual download seems to be obscured.

Good instructions for encoding a movie for the zune

Good instructions here and they don't tell you to buy something, instead it has you using Windows Media Encoder:
http://www.zunethoughts.com/news/show/625/convert-your-videos-for-the-zune-with-windows-media-encoder.html

Extender Account Login Script Tool Results screenshot on Windows 7 RTM

If the UAC is on, remember to always run this tool by right clicking it and choosing 'run as administrator' or else it will not work right.

Click the image to see it larger.

Proposal for a new tool, requesting your input

I've been using transcode 360 to stream movies to my extenders for a while now. For the most part it works pretty good. But here lately my girlfriend says the last 4 movies she watched on the extender just stopped around 20 minutes before the movie was over.

So I've been considering eliminating t360 and converting my movies to an extender supported format, like .mpg or .dvrms. I've been looking at ways to do this. I've also been contemplating the best way to do this.

The first thing I did was make a VB application where you pointed it to your movies root folder. It then looked through all the subfolders and built a list of all your movies. It only looks at VTS_01_01.vob and higher. VTS_01_00.vob is ignored (that's the menu). Also, when I rip I only take the movie, none of the other stuff is included. I also only take one audio track. So once the app built a list of your movies, you then selected a movie to process and first it ran copy /b on the .vob files in order to concatenate the files into one file. Next, I used mencoder to re-index the movies and output a single .mpg file. It worked ok, but it was way too time consuming. The concatenation takes a good while, and then the indexing takes a long time.

Next I started looking at just encoding them. I looked at Windows Media Encoder, Expression Encoder, mencoder, and ffmpeg. All take a long time.

My goal was to use software that is free. But, a blog reader pointed me to Videoredo. Videoredo does a great job with this, and it is impressively fast.

I've talked with Videoredo about licensing and they have no problem with me making a Media Center tool, or something else that utilizes their program as long as the person owns the program.

Now I am trying to figure out how to do this. Should I try to make is something you do throug Media Center? Like go through and pick and movie and have it joined and output as say a dvrms file? Or how about a program you can point to your movies folder, and it just runs through them movie after movie and converts them? What about the original files? Delete the .vobs or keep them? Or keep them for a while, and then have them deleted? It would really suck if you ran this tool and went to watch a movie only to find out it didn't work, or didn't work right, and your source files were gone. On the other hand, do this to a bunch of movies and your disk space will be wasted if we don't get rid of the original files.

I really don't know what would be the best way to make a tool like this. I could make something that I would want to use, but if I am going to spend the time doing this, I might as well make something that others could use too. And therefore, I'd like to hear what you think. Or, maybe I am reinventing the wheel and you can just point me to something that already does this.

I'm hoping that by doing this, we can watch movies on the extender and not have issues like the movie stopping before it is over. It would also be nice to be able to fast forward and rewind.

Want to test your bandwidth for free?

Here's a great site for bandwidth testing:
http://www.speedtest.net/

It's slick, it lets you choose a node (you can test someplace close, or far), it gives your latency, up, and down bandwidth.