After playing with it quite a bit over the weekend, here's what I've come up with. It is certainly
quite a bit less than perfect, but it works for now...
First of all, because iTunes is ridiculous, you need to pick ONE computer to be in charge of syncing your iPhone/iPod Touch. You CANNOT sync to multiple machines, because iTunes will stupidly erase everything on your phone if you switch to a different machine (even if the files themselves are identical). So, I chose my laptop since I almost always have it with me and that gives me the most versatile syncing options. The big downside is that my entire media library is generally NOT available on my laptop. So... The question becomes:
How do I get my media off of my home library (HTPC and other home machines) using MC and onto my laptop and into iTunes to sync it to my phone?1. Getting media to my laptop from MC. This has finally made me break down and decide that I need a secure wireless network at my house. Up until now, my Wireless network at home was Internet access only and was unsecured (rate limited so that my neighbor kids don't kill my access using it for Bittorrent). If you wanted to get access to any of the network shares on my LAN, you needed to plug into the network with a cable, which kept it pretty well locked down. Since I need to use my laptop though, always plugging in isn't very workable. I still want to keep my unsecured WAP (for visitors and my iPhone and other similar uses), so I'll need to buy a new one in order to run two in my house (one secured and one not).
Once this is done, I'll set up a new library on MC that connects to and uses my regular network library at home. Once this is done, syncing over to my "generic handheld" should be simple and can be done wirelessly as long as I'm at home. It'll also serve the secondary purpose of allowing me to access my movies and tv shows on my laptop from up in bed, which will be pretty convenient.
2. Generic Handheld to a Local Folder on my Laptop. So I went into
Tools --> Options --> Handheld and added a new handheld, named it "generic_iphone" and pointed it to
O:\Users\Shared\media\handhelds\generic_iphone\. I can then "sync" any files I want over to this folder and MC will copy them over for me. However, this currently has some really serious limitations:
a. I cannot set a size limit for this "handheld" from inside MC, so it always shows my total hard drive space available as the limit. I'd really like to be able to set this to 14-15GB so that I don't go over the limit on my iPhone. Currently I have to keep track of the size pretty much manually, which is bogus. I considered actually buying a 16GB USB Drive and using it for my "generic", but that seems like a lot of effort and expense to work around something that could be easily added to the MC generic handheld function.
b. Conversion options are highly limited for no reason. I complained about this above, but just to reiterate... I can convert my audio to the nice "High-Quality Handheld" LAME setting and resize Photos fine.
However, the Video Conversion options are completely useless in this instance. Why can't we choose iPod-compatible conversions for generic handhelds?? As is, the only way to get MC to convert video for iPod is to physically plug in and sync video over to my wife's iPod Nano, and then to copy the file over from the Nano's conversion cache. This is absurd.
c. Podcast support is all bunged up and I haven't really figured it out. For now, I'm manually transferring over the individual episodes that I want to watch/listen-to as though they are music. Then on the iPod they show up under Music with the Genre "Podcast" (rather than in the specific Podcast section). Also, video podcasts are very hard to transfer over. Many are already properly formatted, but some are not and the auto-conversion would be VERY handy.
d. I've also noticed that the auto-conversion of Video files doesn't properly respect Aspect Ratio. When I do use the iPod Nano trick outlined above, and choose an appropriate conversion setting, my widescreen video files end up all "stretched" into a 4:3 aspect ratio. This is extra ridiculous since the new iPods all have widescreen displays... I'd say a much better option for the default is to letterbox or pillarbox video as necessary in order to maintain the original native AR.
3. Ingesting new content into iTunes. This, at least, is pretty easy. I found a great little application called the
iTunes Library Updater (iTLU) which is free and works great. You can set a bunch of folders for it to scan, specify file extensions to import, and save these settings into a Profile. It allows you to automatically:
- Open iTunes.
- Add new media to iTunes (scans the watch folders and can include subdirectories automatically).
- Remove orphaned media from iTunes.
- Update track info to match new info in files.
- Once this is done, it'll start the iPod sync.
- And, if you want, you can have it close iTunes down when it is all done.
So this part works great. Once all the media is in the "generic_iphone" folder, you can simply launch iTLU (it has command line support, so I just wrote a BAT that calls it with my profile loaded and runs it automatically) and it'll do the rest.
The first time, you'll want to set up your iPhone/Touch to look in the proper folder for Images and Videos. I just set up my folder structure like this:
O:\Users\Shared\media\handhelds\generic_iphone\ ---> Music\[Artist]\[Album] ---> Images\<Fancy Date Expression that creates folders like: 2008\2008-06-20\> ---> Video\iTLU scans the Music and Video folders. I have the iTunes Photo Sync feature set to use the Images folder. One problem is that I haven't figured out how to get the pictures back off of my iPhone's Photo Roll (the pictures I took with the phone) and back onto the computer. Anyone have any experience with this on Windows? I hoped they'd just sync back to the folder in a "Photo Roll" subfolder, which I could have MC Auto-Import, but that didn't happen.
4. Future Stuff. I'd say mostly figuring out Podcasts and coming up with some way to solve the conversion problems. I really, really don't want to abandon using MC for Podcasts, but that is probably 90% of what I want to use the iPod feature on my iPhone for, and I'd really rather some more advanced options for transferring. Right now, if I transfer over all of my Podcasts, I could easily fill up the whole phone. I like to keep lots of back episodes downloaded (so I can play old stuff if I want to) but I usually only want the most recent unwatched podcasts to transfer over to my Phone.
If I use iTunes to handle Podcasting, it can do this (it has a "sync # most recent unplayed" sync option for Podcasts, along with many other options), but MC cannot. We need a LOT more options for syncing Podcasts that are SEPARATE from the options for what to download. If craptastic iTunes can do it, then MC should certainly be able to! And converting these video files should be so simple (and it works great for my Wife's Nano), but right now it totally is NOT if you need to use a generic handheld workaround because your device isn't natively supported.
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Topic: iPhone 3G support? (Read 34112 times)