NOTE — March 25, 2009: Moonplantation as a Blackberry TV site no longer exists — it now hosts my photoblog. Sorry!

So as part of my employment at Yahoo! I got a year of their hosting plan for free. Despite my resignation, this remains in effect, and I’ve been trying to come up with something to do with my (theoretically) unlimited bandwidth and space.

I’ve also been disappointed with the lack of a simple site for high-quality television downloads for my Blackberry, so I kinda put two and two together to solve my own problem (and hopefully other Blackberry users as well) and fill a niche.

I already use uTorrent to subscribe to several TV shows, and uTorrent has a feature that lets you run a program when a download is finished. Until now, I haven’t had a use for this feature. My idea was that I could create scripts that would take my newly-downloaded TV shows, convert them to a format suitable for Blackberry devices and FTP them to a site.

I spent a very long time trying out different video encoding programs with command lines interfaces, and finally decided to sit and learn the parameters I could pass to FFMPEG. I chose a dozen popular TV shows and created BAT files that would convert them (two different scripts: one for fullscreen shows such as The Daily Show and South Park and one for widescreen shoes such as Heroes and Dexter). I then set uTorrent to ‘subscribe’ to these shows which, when combined with my scripts, grabs the latest episode of each, runs my conversion scripts on them, and uploads them to my empty webserver.

I didn’t want to take a lot of time figuring out a content management system so, for now, I’m running WordPress on my Yahoo! host and posting the shows to that. I’m considering this my “proof of concept” website, which you can check out here. Yes, if I ever plan to promote this site at all, I will be purchasing a domain other than “Moon Plantation.” I’m still ironing out kinks in the automation process, but it’s 5AM already and I think I’m done for the night.

The way they’re encoded, Blackberry is just about the only platform that is going to run these (no iPod/iPhone, sorry). Does PSP run MP4s? Maybe they’ll run on PSP. You could also run them on a PC with a very, very small monitor.