MDL: Home Theater Meet PowerShell

Intro – Part I – Part II

As I mentioned in the last post, getting video to my wide array of end points can be a little challenging.  You may have been surprised when I said that getting video on a Zune was a challenge.

Well, it’s not that it is hard per se – after all the Zune software will go discover all that media from any Windows share just like it does for music.  The problem is that it needs to transcode all of that media before it can copy it to the Zune.

The other issue is those large video files aren’t optimized for playing on such a small screen.  It all works, but waiting for an hour or more to copy a single movie to your Zune isn’t my idea of a good time.  And I’m not always prepared enough to do it ahead of time.

So my solution was to couple HandBrake – a fantastic program for converting video files – with PowerShell.  I had to teach myself PowerShell along the way, but in the end I have a powerful script that converts all of my video files to smaller formats optimized for the Zune.  The good news for you is that the exact same process will work for iPods or any device that can play video with a couple small tweaks.

Step one is to download Handbrake and the Handbrake CLI (command line interface).  Launch Handbrake and create a profile that will convert videos into a format that your portable device can play.

There are a couple of items in this script that will need to be modified for your particular situation.

1. Your preset – on Line 4 I’ve called mine simply ‘Zune’, change this to whatever profile you created for your device.
2. The location of the Handbrake CLI on Line 2.
3. The location of your source videos – you can have as many as you want, just make sure that they are separated by a comma – Line 7.
4. The destination for your converted movies – Line 9.

   1: $HandBrake = New-Object System.Diagnostics.ProcessStartInfo

   2: $HandBrake.FileName = "C:\Program Files\Handbrake\HandBrakeCLI.exe"

   3: $HandBrake.windowStyle ="Hidden"

   4: $HandBrakeOptions = " --preset='Zune' "

   5:  

   6: foreach 

   7: ($SourceVideoFile in (Get-ChildItem @("D:\movies\", "D:\TV\") -recurse -include @("*mpg", "*.mp4", "*.mkv", "*.avi", "*.mpeg") | sort-object name)) 

   8: {

   9:     $ZuneOutputFile = "D:\Zune\" + ($SourceVideoFile |% { [IO.Path]::GetFileNameWithoutExtension($_) }) + ".mp4"

  10:     if (!(test-path $ZuneOutputFile))

  11:     {

  12:         

  13:         $HandBrake.arguments = $HandBrakeOptions + "-i " + '"' + $SourceVideoFile.fullname + '"' + " -o " + '"' + $ZuneOutputFile +'"'

  14:         $HandBrakeProcess = [System.Diagnostics.Process]::Start($HandBrake) 

  15:         $HandBrakeProcess.WaitForExit() 

  16:     }

  17: }

In short, the script:

1. Compiles a list of all video files in the locations specified (and, conveniently, all of the subfolders too).



2. Checks to see if the file exists in the destination.



3. If it doesn’t already exist it converts it based on the profile that you set up.

Some items of note:  the script hides all of the conversion process so that it can be scheduled without interrupting any other activity on the computer it is running on. 

It will also take forever to run the first time since it needs to convert all of that video.  But if you schedule it on a routine basis it shouldn’t take too long.

Pretty cool, huh?

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