Syncing to a portable device

[GlenR]

Santa brought me a shiny new Toshiba Gigabeat S30.

Very happy with it overall and I have moved most of my MP3s over to it without too much effort (some album art needed to be massaged, but nothing much).

Anyway, aside from music, I want to take TV shows on the train with me. As the Toshiba uses Windows Portable Media Center software, it is supposed to sync with MCE2005 no problems. Just go to sync to portable device select what you want to sync (Recorded TV) and the MCE box will transcode it and put it on the Gigabeat, or so the theory goes.

This works fine for music, pictures and video, but not recorded TV. I try this and it just errors out.

I have installed the WMP10 updates supplied with the unit and, when that didn't work, upgraded to WMP11 and still no joy. If you try and update using WMP, the error message is "The server threw an exception".

Anyone had experience with these devices?

[bella]

Glen,

See if you can find anything in here:
http://search.microsoft.com/results....-US&FORM=QBME1

[GlenR]

Thanks Eddy. Those resultsd seemed to be for everything except syncing from MCE. Stupid MicroSoft!

I did search the MicroSoft support, but I haven't found anything useful yet. Just advised me to install PowerDVD.

[GlenR]

Been scouring the net and can't get any good info. No-one here used the Gigabeat?

[parrotter]

I get similar error message when sync'ing to my Gigabeat from MCE and Windows Media Player. Have since installed MyTVToGo and am using this to convert to PocketPC format to disk in 'My Videos' folder. I then use Windows Media Player to sync this folder to the Gigabeat. Have been using this for around 2 weeks and have watched several recorded TV shows successfully on the Gigabeat S30.

[seinfeld]

i think this is my q as well, i want to sync from computer in bedroom which holds some movies can i use the sync device from mce or what do i have to do to be able to veiw files from my videos folder as all i can veiw is dvd drive only ????

[Astrotoy7]

PMC suck - I hate to say it. They are just so damn buggy. Sad to hear the gigabeat is a bit funny too in this aspect - my iriver PMC-120 refuses to encode/sync anything over 10mb

it still works as an mp3 player so, that is the only thing that has saved it from the sledgehammer.

Im happy to wait for the next gen of windows mobile devices. There's something rotten in denmark about this current cadre

astro

[imelda]

I've got the Creative Zen PMC, the chunky one, and nothing else has come close to it yet in my opinion. When someone puts out something smaller, with a 16:9 display, but most importantly, same or better battery life, I will consider moving.

One of the biggest things that will help the satisfaction with these devices, apart from finding out what it is that is stopping yours from working, is to either dedicate a decent amount of disk space to allow background transcoding in WMP, or to have a damn fast CPU to load what you want when you want. Without either of these filling the drive with video takes a while. The positive though is good use of space on the device, and good battery life.

I've been able to synch everything from HDTV (including the correct processing of AC3 5.1 sound), through to WMV-HD samples from MS, as well as various other file formats that things float around in. If only the WMP transcoder was usable by other apps...

i.

[Astrotoy7]

Originally Posted by imelda

... If only the WMP transcoder was usable by other apps...

WMP uses windows media encoder, which has been used by numerous apps. One I used to use alot was a PSP(mpeg4) video converter. There are even a couple that have a dvrms focus like "TS Converter"

cheers
astro

[imelda]

Maybe things with standalone WME have improved since the last time I tried it out, but from my very foggy memory I was sure that tools based on WME had problems with 5.1 -> Stereo sound, but WMP itself didn't. It seemed like the WMP transcoding engine had some extra tricks up it's sleeve versus the standalone app.

cheers
i.