I’ve been having fun with technology this weekend, so, here’s some usefull and fun tech stuff.

A confluence of factors led me portable video. I want a new video iPod, but I’m not ready to invest just now. I do have a palmone LifeDrive equipped with 4 GB of storage. This device has pretty good resolution, and I thought it should play video at least as well as the iPod, if not with the coolest design.

Then, this post bubbled up on digg. The post describes using The Democracy Player along with a simple yet clever hack of TVrss and feedburner to turn the entire internet in to a DVR. I won’t rewrite the post, but basically pulling these three together you can get all the TV you want on your computer, not quite on demand, but almost.

So, now, going mobile. I downloaded The Core Pocket Media Player for my LifeDrive. It seems this media player is broader than the built in media player, even if the controls don’t look as fancy. The last step is to compress and encode the media files for playback on the go.

Normally, I try to go for Free/Open Source Software. I’d rather offer a donation for software that works well than deal with a crippled trial version until I know that it works. But, I couldn’t find any F/OSS option for what I needed - something could be out there, but I didn’t find it. I did choose Pocket DVD Studio which seems to work well, for less than $30 US. This software has a number of options to determine the output resolution and file size for the video. I like it.

Ten to fifteen minutes after beginning the encoding the smaller, Palm ready file is ready. With the options I am using the file comes out 25% to 30% smaller than the source .avi - not too bad. This leaves a 30 minute TV program at about 100 MB, good size to be able to bring 5 - 10 shows along with me anywhere. Last step is to copy to the LifeDrive using the Palm software, and try it out.

The video plays smoothly and with enough brightness and contrast I think it will be very watchable on a plane. Perfect for those times when I’m too tired for my serious reading material, but not tired enough to sleep.

Now I just need to find some TV shows I’m actually interested in watching. So far, The IT Crowd, The Daily Show, and The Office are on the list, suggestions welcome.