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It's Friday, I am trying to finish up a million things before going to San Fransciso and Apple's WWDC. I have the schedule here somewhere and it looks like there are a few sessions on mobile development with Apple's tools.

I ran across this while looking for something else, as is always the case. I know it is really old news, but again, it's Friday, and I haven't posted anything in a week.

Note in the last paragraph the "portability and playing on handheld devices". Using a Dynebolic selfboot CD, you could turn any PC with a WinTV card into a little streaming server. Yes, it is streaming ACSII, so any browser can see it, including a cell phone browser. It is cruddy resolution, but that may be it's charm.

It did get me to thinking, though. I just bought a Vbrick mpeg-4 encoder, which is essentially a Un*X flavor box with video encoding hardware, which is remotely manageable. I have seen Linux distributions that turn a PC into a HTPC, but I have not seen one yet that turn a PC into a remotely manageable (complete with web interface) video encoder, or video streaming server. What a handy thing this would be.

VideoLan client can utilize the mpeg-1 and 2 hardware encoder in the Hauppauge PVR series of cards, so this might be a place to start. This would allow the actual encoding box to be fairly lightweight -- you may even be able to use a fairly low-power ViA processor based motherboard. Or perhaps something could be built around the Plextor box that can encode MPEG-4 and Divx.

The problem is that the pieces are out there -- but it still takes expertise to make it happen. I certainly don't have the expertise to build a Linux distro that would do all this, but it sure would be cool.

CyTV will almost do what I want. I use it at home now with my Mac Mini in the living room to record programs that I can watch elsewhere in the house. It is servicable, and you can't argue with the price. It will transcode video into mpeg-4 in software from an EyeTV box, and is remotely manageable. However, it can't currently talk to a streaming server -- such as Darwin Streaming server, but who knows?

The nice thing is that it would not be hard to transcode into .3gp on the fly, which would then allow me to watch TV programming from my home on my cell phone, simply and easily. There are of course other things that will do this for you, but most are centered around the Windows platform. I ran a PC using Snapstream in my livingroom for almost a year, and dismantled it after it became apparent that they would never fix browser compatibility issues with their remote management interface (it requires IE). In addition, there was no simple way to archive shows I have recorded directly to DVD (I ended up using Nero to burn stuff, but there were too many steps). In contrast, while the EyeTV I am using now does not have a remote interface (but now has, thanks to CyTV), it will work with pretty much everything I have (including my PC). Putting shows on DVD is simple. It saves in a bunch of formats, including 3gp.

I like this approach because I don't screw with things, and it works. I do wish that the EyeTV software could control my DirectTV box. If that happened, my Tivo would be gone.