I got a little jealous about my friend’s new digital video recorder. You know, the set top box that is able to record TV on a harddrive. Therefore I thought that I should create something a bit more interesting so I wouldn’t look so old fashioned with my old VCR :). And this is what I created: Mobile TV Recorder.

This kind of a system has been in my mind for a long time but until recent years the technology has not been mature enough. I have had many situations where I have not been around the house or otherwise near a TV and I remember that an important program is just starting but I’m not able to watch or record it. Now I was able to buy an used TV adapter for my PC for as low as 40 euros (~48$) and I already had my mobile phone and a DSL connection for my PC so I was ready to start building the system.

First I thought that I implement this system as a web service but that turned out to have too much overhead for midlet and transfer part as I would have needed a third party library for SOAP protocol, like kSOAP, that takes up something around 30 kb of memory. Then I found a handy tool from NetBeans IDE called Wireless Connection Wizard. With this I was able to create a servlet and midlet with automaticly created connection to the servlet’s function. Now the midlet is only 10 kb in all including all the graphics.

I was quite amazed as the whole system turned out to be unexpectedly easy to build as for a first working version I only needed to write ~20 lines of code for the server part and the IDE handled the rest.

So how does it work? The mobile client connects to server’s servlet that executes a batch file that starts recording TV with Hauppauge’s WinTV2000 software. Here is a simple diagram of this system.

In case you are interested about the system, I have made the source code available under the LGPL license. Please leave a comment if you have eg. any improvement ideas. Check it out.