Transpodder: Automatically Get Your Shows Into Your iPod
Transpodder monitors all of your tv shows and puts them on your iPod automatically. With no effort or interaction. Bittorrent + RSS + iPod!
Transpodder is a combination of simple tools and simple technologies. It uses FFMPEG to transcode your content and podcasting to get it onto your iPod. With the right setup, all of this is automated and happens transparently in the background.
The Setup
It all starts with your broadcatching setup. Point Transpodder at the folder where all of your shows are downloaded to. Next point it at the folder you want all your new iPod videos to save to. You need to point it at a folder that will be served from a webserver. If you’re on Os X, simply make your receiving folder reside in your ~/Sites folder. Then your shows will be available at http://localhost/~username/ipodfiles. Lastly specify which shows you want it to put on your iPod. You may just want a small subset of your favorite shows added.
You have the option to control the audio and video bitrate, among other options as well.
How It Works
Transpodder parses your specified folder for the shows you have told it to look for. When it finds a show, it transcodes it to an iPod safe format and saves it to your specified folder. Each show has its own seperate folder with all of the episodes named very nicely. Transpodder then reads that folder and creates a podcasting RSS feed for your show containing all of the available episodes. By adding this feed to iTunes, all of your future shows will be downloaded by iTunes automatically.
The Specifics
Transpodder uses FFMPEG to do all the transcoding for you. It works really fast and very reliably. I haven’t had a single problem yet with my setup. Transpodder handles dimension size automatically for you. You have the ability to set the outputted file’s dimensions as well as its bitrate. It uses avitype on linux to query the originating file for its dimensions, and qt_info on Os X. Its kind of a pain, but I couldn’t find a precompiled binary for avitype on Os X. And I was too lazy to do what I need to to get one compiled.
Transpodder will only transcode an episode to an iPod format if it hasn’t already been done. Its smart like that. It also creates an index.html file at the root of your receiving directory that will list all of your RSS feeds. This makes it simple to click and drag your feeds into iTunes. Use your browser to access it, and drag them into iTunes.
Technicalities
There are a few dependencies to using Transpodder.
- ffmpeg
- avitype or qt_info
Transpodder uses FFMPEG to transcode all of your shows. Its a freely available open source project. On Os X, I suggest just grabbing the binary for it out of the ffmpegX project and storing it in a folder. Compiling it from source will need configuration options like this:
./configure --build i486-linux-gnu --enable-gpl --enable-pp --enable-zlib --enable-vorbis --enable-libogg --enable-theora --enable-a52 --enable-dts --enable-libgsm --disable-debug --enable-xvid --enable-faac --prefix=/usr
If you’re using linux, you’ll need the transcode package installed to have access to avitype. If you’re on Os X, you’ll need to download qt_tools. Depending on your OS, these apps will be used to determine the video dimension of your originating files.
Getting Jiggy With It
What you get after setting everything previously mentioned up, is a fully functioning script that has to be executed manually. With a little bit of cron skills, you can have your script working hourly or by the minute to enable total automated loveliness.
To be even cooler add a host name to the server and podcast your content like a pro. For me, everything is located at http://www.tvserver.com.
Denouement
Combined with my broadcatching setup, my shows are all downloaded automatically, converted to an iPod format, downloaded by iTunes and placed on my iPod. All of this is totally automated. Once a show is setup, I have absolutely no interaction whatsoever. My content just appears when its available. My shows are available in full resolution for viewing on my Xbox media center, or on the go on my iPod. I may not watch all of my shows on my iPod, but the beautiful part about all of this is that if I want to, my show is already there waiting for me to watch it. I don’t have to waste the time in transcoding it and placing it on my iPod. Its already done. This is how our content should be.
Happy Links
FFMPEG: http://ffmpeg.sourceforge.net/index.php
Transcode: http://www.transcoding.org/cgi-bin/transcode
ffmpegX: http://homepage.mac.com/major4/
qt_tools: http://www.omino.com/~poly/software/qt_tools/
That’s totally slick.
Comment by Pete — March 20, 2006 @ 1:30 am
Something you might want to add to the end of the process is to get automator to make the video bookmarkable (so you can break off watching it, and it resumes at exactly the same place), and automatically update the iPod once a day.
See http://onemanandhismac.blogspot.com/2006/01/eyepod-video.html for some ideas how to do this.
Comment by Andy — March 20, 2006 @ 11:10 am
Thats the whole point of it. By podcasting your shows to your iTunes, the video files become bookmarkable, and are updated automatically. The end setup requires no user interaction.
Comment by Jon — March 20, 2006 @ 11:12 am
I don’t have a video iPod, but I wonder if a similar process could be used to turn audio captured via the radioSHARK into podcasts? They would be a bit more convenient to listen to as a podcast.
Comment by FreeiPodGuy.com — March 20, 2006 @ 1:21 pm
Thanks! This is perfect. Pardon my daftness, but after I have the script edited how do I go about executing it? I’ve tried to drag it into Terminal and pressed return, but get a permission denied error. Sorry if I missed this in the instructions.
Comment by Joe — March 20, 2006 @ 1:35 pm
I guess i was a bit presumptious about that part. Its a ruby script. So execute it like this: #/ruby transpodder.rb
Comment by Jon — March 20, 2006 @ 1:37 pm
thanks, just googled that too.
Comment by Joe — March 20, 2006 @ 1:45 pm
Success! thanks again, man. this is effing sweet!
Comment by Joe — March 20, 2006 @ 2:32 pm
oh sweet, so glad you got it going. Heh, its so different when YOU”RE the guy that made it.
Glad you like, it really is a setup of dreams.
Comment by Jon — March 20, 2006 @ 2:45 pm
This is amazing… I want to implement this on my Windows web server. Anything I need to be worried about using windows and apache?
Comment by Keith — March 20, 2006 @ 3:31 pm
This is really slick, but like comment #4 I would like to do this with audio files, preferably aac files that I automatically create everyday using audio hijack. Is that possible? Thanks btw for THIS workflow.
Comment by mike — March 20, 2006 @ 4:04 pm
#10: getting apache up on windows shouldn’t be too much of a problem. There are lots of tutorials out there to get that done. One thing that might be tough is getting the Ruby environment and the other dependencies working in windows.
Thats why I keep myself surrounded in a Unix environment for all my fun :)
Comment by Jon — March 20, 2006 @ 4:06 pm
Mike, something like that could be whipped up easily. I’ve made a lot of scripts that will automatically scan folders and create RSS feeds of the content inside them. Specifically my Xbmc new meda feeds. Do a search here and you might find something you could modify to work for yourself.
But it sounds like what people would like is a nice generic import script for iTunes. Something that scans a folder (or folders) for content and tosses them into a feed which could be subscribed to by iTunes. Something generic. I’ll see what I can do about that. That might be nice.
Comment by Jon — March 20, 2006 @ 4:09 pm
Hey Jon, you have hit the nail on the head with the audio thing. The radioSHARK saves files either in AAC or AIFF; unfortunately the bookmarkable files it saves in AAC don’t play well with the iPod. So I save them all in AIFF, transfer to iPod, convert to AAC, run the “make bookmarkable” script, and then delete the AIFFs, all manually. So I go through all that trouble, and it still isn’t a podcast. The feature I’d like the most is the deletion of the original file and the converted podcast file once it’s been listened to. I’m gonna have to learn me some Applescript or something!
Comment by FreeiPodGuy.com — March 20, 2006 @ 10:54 pm
Thanks Jon. That would be truly fantastic. It sounds like freeipodguy on me both kinda want the same thing. It’s much appreciated.
Comment by mike — March 20, 2006 @ 11:18 pm
Hi Jon-Great script/tutorial
Is there any reason why this wouldn’t work on MPGs? I have Beyond TV (PVR) and it creates DVD style MPG2s. I have it’s directory shared across the network, the script is seeing that, but it’s not seeing the episodes that are in there. They’re just labeled MPG. Everything else seems to be working.
Thanks for any thoughts!
Comment by Andy — March 21, 2006 @ 1:42 am
Andy - well its really made specifically for broadcatching, and all of those files are always AVI (xvid) files. So i’m using some avi specific tools in the script to find the dimensions and what not.
Theres no reason this couldn’t be modified a little bit to make it work though. Dive in and see if you can get it going… report back ;)
Comment by Jon — March 21, 2006 @ 3:16 am
Hi, I would like to know where you get the content in the first place. I mean the tv shows. Could you get us a little hint on that. What hw + sw do you use? You also mentioned you have full res shows on your Xbox. How do you do that? Thank you.
Comment by timmy — March 23, 2006 @ 2:41 am
Simple, http://www.jonsthoughtsoneverything.com/2005/02/28/rss-bittorrent-xbmc-bliss/
Comment by Jon — March 23, 2006 @ 3:24 am
I have a ReplayTV unit at home and I was just completely and utterly frustrated at how long and involved the process is to convert to an MPEG2 that the Replay understands(so it shows up on the Replay as a recorded show). Now I really wanted to make my own sort of channel that I DL indie films, have it convert, and show up as a channel on my Replay but it wasn’t realistic without some kind of automation. It can obviously be done, but it didn’t exist. Can anything be altered with this program to make it work?
Comment by s8ist — March 23, 2006 @ 11:15 am
I am trying to do this but I’m getting an error. Does anyone know what’s wrong. Here’s the console output. I’ve tried this on two different files.
Encoding file Now:
Title: cfh
Season: 03
Episode: 45
Filename: CFH34520060324.avi
Bitrate:
Dimensions: 320×176
‘/usr/local/bin/ffmpeg’ -i ‘/Users/stephencupp/Desktop/downloadedfilesCFH34520060324.avi’ -vcodec xvid -b 600 -qmin 3 -qmax 5 -bufsize 4096 -g 300 -acodec aac -ab 96 -s 320×176 -title ‘45′ -author ‘Cfh’ ‘/Users/stephencupp/Sites/ipodfiles/cfh/cfh_03_45.mp4′
ffmpeg version CVS, build 3277056, Copyright (c) 2000-2004 Fabrice Bellard
Mac OSX static build for ffmpegX
configuration: –enable-mp3lame –enable-gpl –disable-vhook –disable-ffplay –disable-ffserver –enable-a52 –enable-xvid –enable-faac –enable-faad –enable-amr_nb –enable-amr_wb –enable-pthreads –enable-x264
built on Dec 1 2005 03:50:24, gcc: 3.3 20030304 (Apple Computer, Inc. build 1666)
/Users/stephencupp/Desktop/downloadedfilesCFH34520060324.avi: I/O error occured
Usually that means that input file is truncated and/or corrupted.
Comment by lvthunder — April 12, 2006 @ 1:00 am
I forgot. All I want to do is have the videos show up in the podcast section of quicktime so they show up in Front Row with a blue dot in front of the ones I haven’t seen yet.
Comment by lvthunder — April 12, 2006 @ 1:02 am
well, honestly, your input filename is not really to spec. This was designed to read in files that are distributed over bittorrent. Those files have a specific naming scheme that transpodder uses to identify things like the season and episode number.
Using a file without those naming conventions will most definatly screw something up.
Comment by Jon — April 12, 2006 @ 1:06 am
Thanks for the nudge in the right direction. I can’t believe how easy it was to fix. The problem was I left the last slash off the download directory. Now that I added that it seems to be working. Thanks for a great script.
Is the default encoding options good for viewing on an HDTV? I have my mac mini hooked up to the TV like you do your Xbox.
Comment by lvthunder — April 12, 2006 @ 8:48 pm
no, this isn’t even close to good enough for HD.. these files are 320×240 and 320×176. Thats 1/2 NTSC, regular tv standards.
The point of this is to encode it to work on your iPod. The files it is transcoding are suitable for your hdtv,use those to watch tv in your home, and the result of transpodder for your iPod.
Comment by Jon — April 12, 2006 @ 8:52 pm
I feel really stupid here, I tried to put all the stuff in the script but felt unsure about it already. However I wont even get the terminal part correctly, I never coded on mac so I always try to avoid direct terminal input but this just sound too easy not to work for me.
So I got the script and I type #ruby /Users/myname/Documents/Transpodder/transpodder.rb
but all I get is that he jumps into the next comand line without even giving a comment or any.
If I just drag and drop I alteast get an error message or something but nothing … what am I to do?
Comment by Mario — May 14, 2006 @ 5:43 pm
Success! thanks again. see you.
Comment by Strafverteidiger München — April 30, 2007 @ 5:44 pm
Didn’t get to bed last nigh. Dayaram Thurayya.
Comment by Dayaram Thurayya — August 17, 2007 @ 10:53 am
When I run the script I get the error
/Users/robbiet480/Documents/transpodder.rb:150:in `+': can't convert nil into String (TypeError)
from /Users/robbiet480/Documents/transpodder.rb:150:in `run'
from /Users/robbiet480/Documents/transpodder.rb:147:in `each'
from /Users/robbiet480/Documents/transpodder.rb:147:in `run'
from /Users/robbiet480/Documents/transpodder.rb:418
When I change the colbert report directory to colbert.report from creport it causes it.
Comment by Robbie Trencheny — September 13, 2007 @ 10:01 am
you had me suicidal, suicida. Corrina Eudora.
Comment by Corrina Eudora — September 19, 2007 @ 5:49 pm
Robbie : I have the same problem with “The Daily Show” and by looking into the ruby script, I understand this is caused by the fact it can not determine the season and episode number. It’s looking for those information in the filename. Maybe I’ll modify the script to take care of episodes which are named with a datetime and not something like S03E05 or 3×05
Comment by Mallox — October 23, 2007 @ 5:46 am