Viewing Recorded TV on a Windows Mobile-based Portable Media Center
Published: April 12, 2004
By Barb Bowman, Windows XP Expert Zone Community Columnist
I have a Windows XP Media Center Edition system and use it to record a lot of TV shows, I’ve been struggling to figure out how I can take these recorded shows with me and watch them at a friend’s house or on vacation.
I record TV using the Best quality setting on the Windows XP Media Center Edition-based computer. This creates the largest files, but anything less just doesn’t look right to me. I can’t copy the TV files to a DVD because they’re too large for standard DVD+RW. I’ve tried software to split movies and save them on two DVD+RWs but I have lost the battle due to lack of time.
I’ve also copied the TV recordings to my laptop and used Windows Media Player when away from home to watch recorded TV, but a few of these files can quickly fill a 40 gigabyte (GB) laptop hard drive.
Watching What I Want, When I Want, Where I Want
The Portable Media Center solves the problem. Windows Media Player 10 takes my two-hour recorded TV file, roughly 5.5 gigabytes (GB), and transcodes it to make a 573-megabyte (MB) file that I can watch on the Portable Media Center. It’s a much smaller file, and yet the video quality is remarkable. You could carry 50 to 60 hours worth of recorded TV on the Portable Media Center. This is really going to be a handy feature for parents who take long trips with young children. I know a lot of parents who now carry a laptop or a DVD player and a couple DVDs for the kids to watch while traveling. But with a TV recording setup at home, and the Portable Media Center, they could take a huge selection of favorite TV shows to keep the kids entertained in transit.
The Portable Media Center also offers two ways to watch the shows. I can watch them on the 3.8-inch display with earphones attached, which is great for airports, airplanes, or doctor’s office waiting rooms. I can also watch them with sound coming out of the speaker on the Portable Media Center.
Alternatively, with a special adapter that comes with the Portable Media Center, I can plug it into a TV and watch the video on a full-size screen. The TV must have composite video and left and right stereo connectors. Some older TVs may not have these. The connectors are usually yellow, white, and red. Plug the adapter into the TV Out port on the Portable Media Center and into the TV to watch the video on the full-size screen.
To adjust the audio and video output:
1. | Press the Start button on the Portable Media Center to display the Start menu |
2. | Highlight settings and press OK. |
3. | Highlight Display and press OK. |
4. | Select TV out and press OK. |
5. | If you are in the United States or Canada, highlight TV display:NTSC and press OK as shown in Figure 1 below. |
6. | Press OK a second time to switch to TV display. |
7. | To return to the menus and content on the Portable Media Center, unplug the TV connector from the Portable Media Center and the device will recognize it. Or you can navigate back to TV out on the screen and select display on device. |
Figure 1: Setting up the Windows Mobile-based Portable Media Center to play recorded TV files on a connected TV..
A Quality TV Watching Experience
Video and image quality is visually stunning on the Portable Media Center. Even transcoded recorded TV is gorgeous on the small display. My digital pictures look great. And my music sounds terrific. I prefer to use Shure E5 sound isolation earphones rather than the manufacturer supplied earbuds. I recommend isolation earphones for any audiophile that adopts a Portable Media Center.
Watching the video on a full-size TV screen produced better results than I expected. Taking a device like this when I travel on business means I can watch the TV I want, rather than flipping through cable channels in a strange city. And why rent movies in a hotel room if you can bring your own this easily? A lot of things catch your imagination when you can carry this much digital media so easily.
Recorded TV playback looked pretty good on a 27-inch standard TV screen. It was better (a subjective opinion) than VHS. My experience so far has shown that TV Out quality is better on a smaller TV than a larger one.
You can also view pictures, videos, and recorded TV on the Portable Media Center screen and play the audio through external speakers with the right cables and connectors. To do this, you use the headphone/earphone out port. I have a D-Link DSM-910T Bluetooth wireless stereo adapter that arrived with all the cables and connectors I needed to connect to a Sony DA-4ES home theater receiver in my living room.
Transcoding from a Computer to a Portable Media Center
Windows Media Player 10 synchronizes recorded TV files on a Portable Media Center by first transcoding it to a much smaller file size. Recorded TV files are transcoded to Windows Media Video (WMV) format using a process that reduces the image from full TV size to a size more appropriate for a 3.8 inch screen. The following table shows the file size reduction that occurs when you transcode Eddie and the Cruisers II:Eddie Lives! which I recorded from Flix at the Best quality setting on my Windows XP Media Center Edition PC.
Transcoding TV Time Estimates
1 hour 49 minutes | 5.52GB (gigabytes) using “Best” quality | 573.85MB (megabytes) | 2 to 4 hours |
Transcoding the recorded TV files from my Windows XP Media Center Edition PC does take some time. A one-hour show takes about one hour to transcode and if the computer is busy with other tasks, it could take up to two hours to transcode.
My timings and experience are based on recording TV at Media Center Edition’s Best quality. With a lower original recorded TV quality setting (such as Good or Fair) the initial file size is smaller and transcoding should be a little faster. If you have a large collection of recorded TV shows, it may take a while to first synchronize your entire collection. Note that transcoding does occur in the background, so you can still use your computer while files are being synchronized.
How to Get Up and Running Fast.
Rather than synchronizing your entire collection of digital media, you can start by synchronizing selected music and selected images to get familiar with how the process works.
To synchronize selected files from a Windows XP Media Center Edition PC to a Portable Media Center device, start Windows Media Player 10 and then use the following steps:
1. | Click the Library tab in Windows Media Player 10. |
2. | Click the arrow next to Now Playing and select New List, Playlist. |
3. | Click to expand the All Music list in the right pane. |
4. | Add a few artists or albums to the playlist by dragging and dropping to Now Playing pane. |
5. | Click to collapse the All Music list and expand All Pictures. |
6. | Select Event or Date (Event corresponds to folders within My Pictures). |
7. | Drag your selection to the Playlist pane. |
8. | On the top of the Playlist pane, click the drop down arrow next to New Playlist. |
9. | Select Save Playlist As then type a name for your playlist in the File Name box. |
10. | Connect your Portable Media Center to your computer, and then click the Sync tab in Windows Media Player 10. |
11. | Click Start Sync and Windows Media Player 10 will transcode and synchronize files on the Portable Media Center. |
To see how recorded TV displays on your new Portable Media Center, if a list of recorded TV shows is not already available in the Library, you can quickly add them to the library:
1. | On your home computer, open Windows Media Player 10, and right-click on the Menu bar. |
2. | When the Shortcut menu displays, select Tools, then Search for Media Files. |
3. | Click the Browse button. |
4. | In the Browse For Folder window, expand Shared Documents, click Recorded TV, then click OK . |
5. | Click Search. Any recorded TV files from your home Windows XP Media Center Edition PC will be added to the library. |
You can drag shows you wish to sync to the Now Playing list or you can right click a show to add it to a playlist (such as "TV to Sync").
To set up automatic synchronization on the device:
1. | Start Windows Media Player 10. |
2. | Click the Sync tab. |
3. | Click Set up Sync. |
4. | In the Synchronization Settings dialog box (see Figure 2), click to select the Synchronize device automatically check box. |
5. | Click to select the check boxes for the playlists that you want to synchronize, and click to clear the check boxes for the playlists that you do not want to synchronize. |
6. | After you have selected the check boxes that are next to the items that you want to synchronize with your Portable Media Center, click OK. |
Figure 2: Choosing playlists to synchronize with Windows Mobile-based Portable Media Center
The TV shows you’ve selected will be transcoded and synchronized with the PMC. (This may take some time if you’ve selected a 2-hour movie.)
My Quest for the Perfect Portable Entertainment Device
It seems like I’ve been looking for ways to take music and other entertainment with me for most of my life. It started with my old Channel Master radio on which music selection was limited to the AM dial.
Figure 3: My old Channel Master radio
I’ve owned several Sony Walkman cassette players, and the last one, a Sports Walkman (shown below) ran on a single AA battery for about 5 hours. I had to carry a briefcase sized cassette carrier with me.
I’ve owned a few Sony Discman players but I still had to carry a wallet full of CDs.
I’ve also had a few digital music players, the Creative Nomad II, the Creative Muvo 256 MV USB player, and a Creative Zen Xtra 40GB hard drive player. Digital music on these players is a great convenience, but it’s still only music and not video or pictures.
And then the ultimate portable device arrived in the form of the Creative Zen Portable Media Center (Figure 4 lower right). All of my music fits on this device, plus my digital pictures and my recorded TV. I could navigate using readable color menus. Battery life is 7-8 hours for music, and approximately 3 hours for TV or videos.
Figure 4: Some of the players I've tried pale next to the Portable Media Center (lower right)
A few college bound students who’ve had the opportunity to see my Portable Media Center are already planning to buy one (or have their moms and dads buy one) for the start of the Fall semester.
You can visit the Portable Media Center Web site http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/portablemediacenter/default.mspx to learn where you can buy one.
Barb Bowman enjoys sharing her own experiences and insights into today's leading edge technologies. She is a product development manager for Comcast High-Speed Internet, but her views here are strictly personal.
