poniedziałek, 22 listopada 2010

Make Internet Explorer Feeds/podcasts available in Windows Media Player DLNA server with names instead of GUIDs

Last time I found that you can download podcasts using Internet Explorer.
Reasonable next step was to make it available to DLNA Player, so I can watch videocasts on my SONY Bravia KDL-40EX700, or listen podcasts on Nokia Home Music (which I will have soon) in my bedroom.

Windows Media player can share folders, this one is simple to setup. Problem is that Internet Explorer saves all feed attachments in folders named as GUID numbers and it seems that it’s hardcoded and not configurable.


On the other side Windows media Player cannot rename folders it shares through DLNA.

But Uśmiech.

NTFS has ability to create junctions – which means hard link to folder – which means shortcut but on file system level, not a file with .lnk extension.
So we can cheat WMP by creating “podcasts” and “videocasts” folders than create a junctions in it pointing to each podcast or videocast GUID named folder.

Seems simple - but how?

Fortunately I found Link Shell Extension which make it stupid simple. Just “right click” + “drag& drop” GUID named folder to our podcasts folder, choose option to create junction and rename it.







 

And now I can listen/watch my podcasts on TV or Nokia Home Music



 

Simple, but only when you know what to do.

Dear Microsoft – can you make it a little simpler?

Podcast client that can use BITS – IE8

For two years I was looking for some podcast download client that I will be happy with. After few tries I
1) Started to realize what I want,
2) None of available alternatives gived me what I wanted.

So first, my requiremets:

  • It should download podcasts/videocasts correctly – sadly it’s not so obvious.
  • I want to be able to set up how frequently it should check for new podcasts
  • I want to be able to set how much old podcasts should be in download folder (older should be deleted)
  • It should use BITS to download podcasts, so that I use internet for other things also.

I was trying few clients and their quality was really bad. I was so frustrated that almost wanted to create a such.
Then I bought PSP for my son and found that it’s a great podcast client/downloader/viewer. The minor drawback is that it is downloading with full speed, but in exchange you can set it up so that it’s doing it at night (let say at 4:00 PM). The bigger one is that you can only watch MPEG4 AVC videos.

Until now I’m using PSP, but 2 days ago I found that Internet Explorer has everything I want from version 7.
Uhh.

So how to do it

  1. Subscribe to podcast – add it to your Feeds
  2. Right click on it and choose Properties

  3. Check  “Automatically download attached files” and change the number of items that will be stored on your machine to some reasonable value (to avoid filling up your HD)


  4. Now your computer will download podcasts/videocasts in the background using BITS. You can check status of your download by clicking on the feed and reading gray text next to file link. When it changes to (Downloaded), link will point to your disk.


  5. If you receive error “File size exceeds download limit” check this MSDN documentation for FDE_DOWNLOAD_SIZE_LIMIT_EXCEEDED error code and set appropriate value in registry.