Uploading Sage TV shows for personal use

[wayner]

Occasionally while travelling I would like to download shows to my laptop from my Sage server - I may want to watch these files on my flight home or while in my hotel room. While it is possible to do a straight download using WHS in a hotel with a broadband connection it often isn't that practical as you are limited by your home internet upload speed and you have to maintain a connection to your home PC - it doesn't seem to like it if your connection drops. If I was watching shows while connected then I could use Placeshifter but that doesn't help if you want to watch said shows on a plane or waiting in an airport without an internet connection.

This direct download from your home PC isn't always practical as you may need your laptop during the day and it requires your laptop to be on all night if you want to do it while you are sleeping (I have done this and thrown towels over the laptop to block the light).

I am thinking that a better idea would be to have Sage compress the show to a more efficient codec (if it is not a H.264) and then upload the show to a web storage area. You could then download the show when you get a chance - odds are that the download speed you get would be quicker then your home upload speed so while the bottleneck on the upload is still your upload speed you would not have the same bottleneck on the download speed unless the hotel and crappy internet service. Note that I am only doing this for my own use - this is not a way of sharing files with others so there shouldn't be a legal issue.

Does anyone have any good ideas on how to implement the upload portion from Sage? Are there any addins to do this? If not then how could I do this from something like SJQ - i.e. how do you write something like a batch file to upload a file? Would you use FTP scripting? http_put?

[dgeezer]

If you could compress the shows to less than 2 GB's then I think you might be able to use Dropbox. It would make the scripting much simpler since your home pc would have a dropbox folder that you would copy the file into. The dropbox software syncs this folder with their cloud server automatically. I've been using this for a few months to share photos with my wife and friends, but admittedly have never used it for video. Downloads do seem pretty fast.

[wayner]

I just realized that MS has something called Live Mesh that might work in the same way as Dropbox. It is limited to 5GB but I haven't seen anything about individual files having a maximum.

[kevine]

I have my shows set to autoconvert to Apple TV (non-widescreen) (500K max for 1 hour show). While getting ready for work, I copy my files from my server to my laptop. Using Gbit connection, it is very quick. I can easily get 10-15 shows done in a half hour.

If I forget to transfer shows, I use Logmein.com to connect to my Sage server and transfer the files that way. Much slower but I can get 2-3 shows while working during the day.

My train ride where I watch is only an hour long.

[wayner]

I actually found a solution that may work although it is in beta. The first step is to sign up for Microsoft Skydrive which gives you 25GB of storage. The next step is to install Gladinet on your PC - Gladinet allows online services like Skydrive (and Picassa and others) to appear as drives in Windows explorer. So I can copy files to P:\Windows Live Skydrive and they go to my Windows Skydrive area. This should be doable from a Batch file but I haven't tested it yet.

The Live Mesh methodology also works but it is limited to 5GB.

The one big constraint in doing any of this is that you are really limited by your upload speed. My ISP gives my 6 Mbps download but only 800 kbps upload. That translates to 360 MB per hour which is peanuts for video files.

edit - Just a minute - this may not work as Gladinet doesn't appear to let you upload files larger than 50MB.

[dgeezer]

edit - Just a minute - this may not work as Gladinet doesn't appear to let you upload files larger than 50MB.

I just went into Skydrive, I forgot that I had set this up some time back, and it looks like the 50mb limit is a Skydrive restriction. Dropbox may have the same restriction. I don't know for sure since I use it mainly as a sync folder between my laptop and my desktop. This is mostly for work so it's spreadsheets, photos etc. nothing big.

I'm sure that this restriction is designed to prevent easy file sharing using their servers. You could always go extremely complicated and use a .rar archive like is done on the news servers to share files. Time warner used to have a news server service on our local cable system. It would peg my download at the broadband max as soon as I connected. The slow upload vs fast download is of course why torrents work, since if I could connect to 20 people uploading at 360Mb per hour then I can download at 7200MB per hour.

I just tried 7-zip and it will archive a video as a series of files 50mb in size. I used .tar but I bet any compression method would work. You should be able to remote into your home server, have 7-zip archive the selected show into the Gladinet folder and each individual file would get uploaded to skydrive. Then you could download the entire archive to your laptop, unzip and you're done. 7-zip has a command line version so you should be able to create a script to automate this.

[sandor]

I do this with my .Mac iDisk.... 20 GB of storage for $99 a year, and i can automount the iDisk.

Now, i copy things in manually, but i could easily have autocompress set to have them moved in automagically.



yeah, upload speeds stink in the consumer realm, i really want symmetrical speeds - heck i would take 5 mbps/5 mbps anytime over 10 mbps/768 kbps.....

[wayner]

It looks like Live Mesh does not have this limitation as I was able to copy a 1 GB file up overnight. It has the added benefit of automatically creating a local drive that is then synched to the web - on Vista the drive is something like c:\users\johndoe\desktop\folder. If you copy a file into this folder it will get uploaded to the web. You could have Sage put the output of Transcode into this folder and you are golden.

The only downside is that you are limited to 5 GB but even that is about 14 hours of uploading at 800kbps.