I really hate the need to burn a CD from iTunes to get the music to mp3 format. Thanks to LifeHacker, here's a tool that looks like it can do it for me.

iTunes Export

• LifeHacker article here
• Tool and download here [ .NET runtime required - fine with me, of course ;) ]

Well, so far it looks like it doesn't convert to MP3 - rather just copies the music files to the output directory. Will keep looking ...

Posted 8:40 AM    |    0 comments    |    Permalink   

I finally have a decent process down for converting video to the Zune format.

Using Windows Media Encoder, and their Batch Encoder Sample from the SDK, I can batch up N number of videos to be encoded using a profile that I created for Zune (see earlier post about the settings for the no-conversion-during-Zune-sync video format). Since I'm not looking for uber-quality video on the Zune, I uncheck two-pass encoding to speed the process.

It's still just a little better than real-time conversion rate, so it takes a while to churn through a few vids, but it's at least a process.

Microsoft Windows Media - Automating the Encoding Process

(There are a few things I would change about the batch encoder UI. "Output String" is a string prepended to the output file name and is mandatory. Most often I'm not encoding batches that are related like that, so I'll make that optional. The "Title" should default to the filename of the video that you're encoding. And maybe ... I'll setup a way to feed a directory to this app, so I can just run it in the middle of the night after downloading from ReplayTV. )

Posted 7:50 AM    |    0 comments    |    Permalink   

Someday when it's time for a new laptop for home, maybe I'll get a MacBook Pro. Although they are expensive, you can run both OSX and Windows on a dual boot system - a growing trend in the software dev industry.

This will be well out of date by the time I'm trying it, but here is some info about it, just FYI.

LifeHacker walkthrough (Parallels plus Boot Camp)

Hands on: Running Vista on a MacBook Pro

Posted 10:30 AM    |    0 comments    |    Permalink