EyePod Video

I recently acquired an iPod Video 30Gb, and having been an owner of several iPods I can safely say that this is the best one yet. Of course, the headline feature is being able to play videos - something which certainly makes my commute to work less painful. I also have an Elgato EyeTV - which I highly recommend. The new 2.0 software includes 1-click export to iPod, which suddenly opens up opportunities for mobile TV viewing.

With EyeTV 2.0 I'm able to schedule a program to record, click 'export to iPod', and leave it to do all the heavy work of converting the video overnight. However when I arise in the morning, there are a couple of problems that also arise ! :

1. My mornings are pretty hectic affairs - and copying several gigs of recorded TV down over the USB 2.0 to the iPod takes, well, too long.

2. My train journey is about 30 minutes - generally not long enough to watch an entire TV show. If I want to break off and listen to some music as I walk to work, then when I return to the video I have to hunt and seek for where I left off. That's a pain.

To illustrate, let's envisage a scenario: there's a show on late tonight that I want to record on my EyeTV, and watch on the way in to work on the train. It's a 60 minute show, and so I want to be able to break off from watching it, and pick up where I left off when I return. The show has got to be loaded on the iPod ready to rock by 7:00 in the morning, and I don't have the time to do anything except set the schedule and drop the iPod in the dock.

Can it be done ? With Applescript and Automator - yes !

Ok - first of all, I obviously need to set up my recording in EyeTV. That's simple, and the only thing to remember to do is check the "export to iPod" checkbox. EyeTV will automatically downconvert the video to the appropriate format, and save it into a playlist in iTunes called "EyeTV" (logical huh ?).

Now, Christopher Breen has some great tips on how to use smart playlists to ensure only the latest videos get copied to your iPod and anything you've watched gets deleted. He also mentions turning on bookmarking, although there's a better way of doing it than clicking manually through all your tracks. Remember, I want the iPod to be loaded up ready to go in the morning, but turning on bookmarking has to be done in iTunes, before you update the iPod.

Let's define a smart playlist that only picks up unplayed EyeTV recordings:

This will only choose video files that are in the EyeTV playlist and have not yet been played. Of course, we could get as sophisticated as we like here, if we wanted more complexity. For instance, you could also add a condition that checked the comments field - this would allow you to mark some items as "always keep" on the iPod - although you could of course synchronise a second playlist of "permanent keepers"

We need to make sure iTunes is going to synch our playlist, so in the preferences under the video tab, select the new playlist as one of those that will be updated.

Next, we need to make sure that the video in this playlist is marked as been bookmarkable, and that the whole lot gets dumped to the iPod before I wake up. Automator (with a smattering of Applescript), and iCal will help us do this. We need to define an Automator action that looks like this:

This will select all the tracks in our smart playlist, and pass them to an Applescript action which sets the bookmarkability. It then runs the Automator action to update the iPod. The Applescript section reads thus:

    on run {input, parameters}
        repeat with song in input
            tell application "iTunes"
                set bookmarkable of song to true
            end tell
        end repeat
        return input
    end run

Lastly, we just need to choose "Save as Plug-in.." from the File menu in Automator, and save it as an iCal alarm plug-in. iCal will open, and create an entry that will run this action. I normally move all such "system" actions to a separate calendar of their own. The last thing to do is to move this iCal event to an appropriate time - say 6:00 am, and set it to repeat every weekday.

Now I have automatic, bookmarkable TV content downloaded to my iPod whilst I sleep ! All I need is something decent on TV to record !

I hope this helps you if you want to set up a similar system. Good look, and leave me some feedback to let me know how you get on !

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Mac, iPod, EyeTV, Apple

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