With all the buzz lately around iPods, podcasting, podwhatevering, etc, people have lost sight of one of the coolest features that Windows Mobile has provided since the earliest days of Pocket PC... Windows Media Player.
I love music, I love TV. Some people have tried talking me into getting an iPod but I refuse to carry yet another device in my pocket. With the SmartPhone, I not only have my entire Exchange mailbox in my pocket, but also a camera, and a built in music player. While the SmartPhone may not be the best at any of these tasks, it certainly is the best at doing all of them.
But one thing that really bothered me about the Audiovox SMT5600 SmartPhone that I bought was the storage limitations. How on earth could I live within the confines of a 512MB miniSD card? Well encoding audio at 64kbps WMA is low enough. The quality is just fine for me for mobile audio through headphones but I wouldn't want to go much lower than that.
I thought about changing my audio more frequently but that is too much of a hassle for me and its too slow over USB. Instead, I started thinking about my GPRS data plan that gets entirely too little use. I also started thinking about my Windows 2003 Server that's got a huge 10 megabit internet connection to it.
Within a few hours, I had downloaded Windows Media Encoder and DVD Shrink and encoded some of my Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Futurama, South Park, and Simpsons DVDs. I posted them up on Windows Media Server in broadcast mode and set up a simple HTML page that can be viewed on the SmartPhone and links to various “channels” which are just all-day-long broadcasts of some of my favorite TV shows. So now I can just tune into streaming TV wherever I am. I am also working on streaming my music to the phone, but I'll have to work a little harder. Unlike TV where I really don't care which episode I am watching, music is different for me. I want to have more control over what is playing. So some type of HTML server-side playlist is necessary.
I won't give out the URL to my media stream cause if I did I'm sure several TV networks would have my head. (Not to mention my ISP.) But while this solution is a bit expensive and dramatic, it really works out great for my needs and it impresses the hell out of people. The benefit of keeping my media on the server and streaming it is that I have several hundred gigabytes of storage space on the server.
For those of you that are interested, I used the av32 profile to encode my video. Using the wmcmd.vbs utility, the command line looked a little something like this:
cscript wmcmd.vbs -input SomeDVDRip.vob -output SomeDVDRip.wmv -profile av32
Pretty simple... I'll maybe post some more step-by-step instructions later. I'm just rambling now.