Synchronizing Media Center TV shows to an iPod Video

Part of my justification for getting a new iPod would be that it would have video support, and I could use it to watch recorded TV shows while I'm on the bus or waiting in line somewhere. I figured that somebody in the world must have written some software to automatically synchronize TV shows recorded on a Media Center PC to an iPod Video. I mean, right?

Apparently not. Or at least I couldn't find any software to do that, free or commercial. Sure, there are various tutorials for converting MCE videos to iPod-compatible files, but they all involve manually running 3 different programs and then importing the video into iTunes by hand. There must be an untapped marked for an MCE plugin that automatically converts and syncs TV shows to an iPod. Somebody could make a killing here!

In the meantime, it looked like I would have to write my own program to do this. These were the requirements I had:

1. Plop the iPod into the dock
2. Go to bed
3. Wake up, the iPod automatically has all the TV shows I recorded the day before

I wrote a small C# program that does the following things:

1. Check if I have deleted any recorded shows from the Media Center PC. If so, delete the iPod versions out of the iTunes library.
2. Find all of the new TV shows that the MCE recorded since last syncing to the iPod.
3. Take each new show and convert it from a .dvr-ms file to a .mpeg2 file using DVRMSToolbox.
4. Convert the .mpeg2 file to an MPEG-4 file using ffmpeg, shrinking the video to 320x240 at 512 kbps.
5. Delete the temporary MPEG 2 file.
6. Save the .mp4 file into the iTunes video library folder.
7. Force iTunes to update its library database and sync to any connected iPods (using iTunes Library Updater).

Next I created a Scheduled Task to run MCEiPodSync every day at 3:00 AM:

Now all I have to do is plug in the iPod and go to bed. Sweet! Here is a pic of the iPod playing Full House (it was on while I was testing):

Here's a link to the source code for my little program if anybody's interested: MCEiPodSync.cs. You just have to switch the const strings at the top to point to the correct path to your Recorded TV and iTunes library folders.