In response to yesterday's item about media-shifting, Jason Burton reports that he uses a free tool called Sermonex, written by Chris Lundie, to extract audio tracks from Channel 9 videos.
I tried it, and it works as advertised. You drop your video into a folder, it extracts the sound track. There are a couple of issues here, though. First, a typical video might weigh in at 150MB or more, which is less of a problem than it used to be now that I'm at 3Mbps, but still way more data than I want to haul in just in order to throw most of it away. Second, the audio track that comes out of a WMV (Windows Media video) file is a WMA (Windows Media audio) file -- which my Creative MuVo will play but my iPod won't. So there's one more conversion step needed.
Sermonex is handy, and I may wind up using it for things I really want to listen to, and if so I'll make a Paypal donation to thank Chris Lundie for the tool. Wouldn't it make sense, though, for Channel 9 to produce a separate RSS feed with MP3s in its enclosures?
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2005/04/07.html#a1210