I download a lot of poker torrents. Australian television is so far behind the states with poker shows that I am forced to get them from torrent sites. (thats my excuse and I’m sticking with it). The big problem with this is I hate watching videos on my PC. Mostly because I have a shitty desk at home with possibility the most uncomfortable chair ever….mostly.
So I have been forced to burn the AVI’s to a DVD using Nero to watch on my DVD player. This takes so long to do and really isn’t worth it as it wastes DVD-R’s. Then I got an Xbox 360. I had heard you could stream media to it from a PC over a network. When I first looked into it there was a requirement to have the PC running Windows Media Center XP Edition. I tried to upgrade my PC to this but didn’t have much success as I only had an OEM version of it.
After giving up I went back to watching the videos on my laptop which was a bit better then just watching them on my PC. Oh how I longed to be able to download a file and be able to watch it on my couch once it had finished.
Then as I was screwing around with some settings in my Xbox console, I found out that in a recent software update release, Microsoft have included support for streaming only .WMV from a PC. I already had setup streaming of photos and music from the PC so the Xbox discovered some videos automatically and I was ready to go straight away. The only problem was most of the video’s I download are in .AVI format. Oh ohhhhhhhhh.
So the search began to find a free video converting program. I hunted around and could only find shareware type software that would only encode the first 20 minutes or something shit like that.
I was heartbroken.
Then I came across this article. It explains how to encode using VLC. The author has also included a batch file which makes the process very easy. VLC seemed to encode a lot quicker then anything else I had tried and worked perfectly every time. Needless to say this isn’t what I expected as video conversion usually is a big fuck around with heaps of stupid errors.
Now look at me, I’m on easy street watching torrents on my TV and laughing at all you suckers.
Posted by midge 