Watching live TV on my iPhone 4

At home, I’ve got an EyeTV HD device connected to a Comcast digital cable box for recording TV shows on my iMac desktop computer. The system is entirely automated, where scheduled shows are recorded, commercial removed, and finally converted to iPhone format and placed in iTunes for syncing. This allows me to watch my favorite shows at my leisure, usually at night on the couch or in bed. A few weeks ago I was on a business trip and I forgot to schedule my EyeTV to record an episode of Stargate: Universe, and it was not playing on any local station in my hotel room. What was I suppose to do?

Luckily, I have an app on my iPhone that allows me to control the EyeTV HD software on my iMac at home and also watch live TV through it via the Internet. So, I decided to give it a try, even though the hotel’s WiFi connect speed was incredible slow and virtually unusable. So instead of trying to use WiFi, I decided to just use my cellular connection via Verizon to stream the Live TV from my iMac at home to my iPhone.

Surprisingly, the video stream worked great! I was able to watch my show with no pausing or dropping of the TV streaming image. On a few occasions the image got a bit grainy (heavy pixels), but for the most part it looked just like watching an mp4 video file on my iPhone.

If I do switch to an Android phone in the near future, this will be one thing that I’ll miss. I don’t use this feature a lot, but when I do it works great.

Script for combining PDF files

I often have to combine mutiple PDF files into a single file for convenient storage, and I found a really easy way to do this using an Automator script with my iMac. This web site explains how in a few simple steps you can create such a script and have it available as a “Service” in a right-click popup context menu. So to use it, you select which PDF file you want to combine then do a right-click and select the “Combine PDF Files” service in the popup menu. Easy!

Note, that this only works for the Apple Mac OS system. Below is what the script looks like in the Automator GUI:

Applescript for renaming my video files

For certain TV Shows I like to save them in my “archive” for viewing later, so I try to label them in a logical fashion. With my current automated system of recording TV shows, removing commercials, and adding in meta data to the mp4 video file, I’ve created a new Applescript that will help rename the video file for my personal archive.

The script is a bit lengthy to post here in text form, so I’m making it available for download from this link. I’m basically using the freeware program called AtomicParsley to extract some meta data from a specified video file (e.g., show name, episode title, season number and episode number) and use that information for defining the file name. For example, my script will take the video recording of an episode from The Walking Dead and will format the name as:

The Walking Dead – Guts – S01E02.mp4

So it has the TV show’s name, episode title, season and episode number all contained in the name of the video file. Again, it is getting all this data from the metadata contained inside the video file (which was added by my recording script).

I’ve got my Applescript set up as an application icon which I can double-click to bring up File Chooser Dialog Window or you can drag video files onto the icon to process the files. This script makes it much easier for me to rename my videos quickly for storage.

Note, that I tried to do the renaming of these videos in this manner after I processed them in my video recording script, but iTunes renames the video file to only the show’s episode name (e.g., “Guts.m4v”) when it automatically processes the file for syncing.

Applescript for deleting watched shows and podcasts in iTunes

Since switching from my Zune HD to an Apple iPod Touch, I’ve noticed that the iTunes software behaves differently than the Zune Software so far as removing deleted shows. For example, after I watch a TV show, movie, or podcast on my Zune HD I can delete it from my device. Then, when I sync with my PC using the Zune Software the application will see that I deleted the video and will also delete it from my PC as well.

With iTunes, it doesn’t work that way. If I delete a video from my iPod Touch after watching it iTunes will copy the video file back on the iPod Touch when I sync again. The only way I’ve found to have iTunes not sync a watched video on my iPod Touch is to configure iTunes to not sync “watched” videos. As such, I manually have to delete the video from iTunes to remove it from my system. I guess this is better, since you may not want iTunes to accidentally delete a video from your system if you really didn’t fully watch it (or in my case, fall asleep in bed while watching a video and have it run to the end!).

So, I’ve written an Applescript that will search out all the videos marked as watched in iTunes after connecting my iPod Touch and remove them from my Mac. Note, that I’m defining that a video has been “watched” if it has been marked by iTunes to have been played and also has a bookmark of 0.0.

My script also does the same for podcast videos and does a final syncing operation. It seems to work pretty well. Below is the full script that I’m using:

I’ve compiled this script to an application and it sits on my desktop where I can launch it by clicking the desktop icon. As I work more and more with nifty things like Applescripts controlling apps, I really appreciate moving from the PC over to the Mac world.