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So I was up last night playing around with some new software I bought. On a whim, I picked up a copy of Popcorn 3. Apparently I've been living under a rock because I've never used this software before and every other Mac user on the planet apparently drank this stuff instead of milk when they were babies.
I don't know about you, but there are a truckload of videos sitting on my TiVo series 2 that are waiting for me to watch them. Unfortunately, the TV to which the TiVo is attached isn't one that I'm normally near. What I really wanted was to be able to take my TiVo recordings to go with me... but I also didn't want to have to whip out the 17" Macbook Pro on the train just to watch my recordings.
So I fired up the TiVo2Go. If you've got a PC then you're used to having this available but apparently it's only available to Mac users through Popcorn. I transferred a few episodes of "The Universe" (awesome new series on the History channel) to the Macbook Pro. Then, I literally just dragged the episodes into Popcorn and converted them into iPhone format and it automatically stuffed them into iTunes.
I plugged in the iPhone and now I've got several episodes worth of "The Universe" that I can watch in the palm of my hand while I'm on the train. I'm sure everybody reading this has already realized how cool this ability is, but I'm new to the whole video conversion thing.
So with the addition of a fairly cheap piece of software (Popcorn) to the hardware I already own, I was able to add a lot more value to my TiVo recordings. From TiVo to iPhone took me about 40 minutes for an episode, but that's because the TiVo is wireless and the Macbook Pro is admittedly not the fastest at video encoding. Either way, if you have a TiVo and an iPhone, you need to go buy a copy of Popcorn.
if you do a lot of this sort of thing, you might want to pick up elgato's
turbo.264, which is an H264 encoding chip on a USB stick. Popcorn will
automatically take advantage of it.
I noticed that it was using that turbo.264 when encoding the video for the
iPhone. Is the one on the USB stick faster or better than the one Popcorn
has internally?
Can Popcorn be set to somehow automatically convert your shows after they
record, without manual initiation? I use a Tivo-like program (Beyond TV)
on my PC for use with my TV card, and it can be set up to automatically
convert recorded shows to iPod or other formats "while you sleep."
