Zen And The Art Of MPEG Formats

I watch a lot of TV. An obscene amount. I probably need therapy. I recently got a Slingbox, which affords me the ability to stream live and recorded video content to anywhere I have my laptop and a high-speed connection. But that wasn’t enough. Like any addiction, you constantly have to feed it. So my next big thing was to find a way to watch my recorded video while I was offline. So while I was at CES 2006 in Las Vegas, I saw a lot of different portable media players. The one I put my hard earned money down on was the Creative Zen Vision (30gb). It didn’t hurt that Creative had a show special price of $299, $100 below the MSRP. And it was a great looking device that handled a variety of video and audio formats.

I spend a lot of time on public transit in the fine city of Chicago. While not the speediest way go get from point A to point B, it does allow my wife and I to survive with only one vehicle. So the opportunity presents itself to use my idle time sitting on a CTA bus to catch up on my recorded shows. I had this whole vision, no pun intended, in my head: Download the MPEG-2 files stored on my ReplayTV DVRs to my PC, then copy them to the Zen Vision. No sweat. Naturally, it didn’t quite go according to plan.

I thought that if I was able to get the MPEG-2s pulled from my ReplayTV to playback fine on my PC with Windows Media Player (which they do), it would be fine on the Zen Vision. As fate would have it, while the Zen Vision supports MPEG-2 format, ReplayTV uses a variable bitrate MPEG-2 codec known as IIRC. The Zen Vision doesn’t understand that specific type of MPEG-2 codec. I was disappointed, but still determined to find a way to get recorded video onto the Zen Vision.

After doing some quick Googling, I came across a reasonably priced video conversion tool called AVS Video Converter. Before I invested any money, I downloaded the trial version, which is fully functional save for the watermarked banner it places on the resulting converted video file. After doing a couple trial runs, I discovered several formats I could use that would playback on the Zen Vision. I went ahead and purchased a license.

So now I have a process that works to get recorded video content from my ReplayTV DVR to my PC, then converted, then copied to my Zen Vision. The problem I now face is the length of time required to get the final converted file. For a one hour program, it takes about 15-20 minutes to copy across my home network to my PC. Then to convert it can take another 45-50 minutes (on a 2.8GHz, 1gb RAM Pentium-D). Of course, conversion times drop if you choose a lower quality file format, but when I tried that, the resulting file was barely watchable. I haven’t tried them all yet, so I may still find a format that’s a good balance between quality and conversion time.

But now the problem becomes one of time. The time it takes to get the video onto my Zen Vision now exceeds the time it would take to just sit in my living room and watch it. Do I let that stop me… heck no. That’s why we invented remote access. I can remote into my PC, download the program(s) from my ReplayTV, then convert them, all the while being somewhere else. By the time I get home today, I’ll have several programs ready to transfer to my Zen Vision (over USB 2.0, the transfer process is relatively quick).

Yes, folks, it is a sickness. And I am the poster child.

[tags]video,tv,television,creative zen vision,ces 2006[/tags]