Offline viewing of courses (iPhone/iPod/similar)?

Hi,

I've recently started learning to play the guitar using this site, and it's amazing. The instructors' style is entertaining (contrary to the guitar course I bought on dvd, which is only useful if I can't fall asleep at night - 5 minutes of that stuff does the trick), the lessons move at a pace that's just right, and I'm happy with the progress I've made in just two weeks.

One thing that would make the materials even more useful for me is if I could download a course for offline viewing on my iPhone (which doesn't play flash videos) and thus could be learning new stuff even when I don't have internet access (holidays, business trips, etc.). I tried out downloading a flash-video, recoding it to an iPhone-compatible format with handbrake (http://handbrake.fr) and transferring it to the iPhone, and it worked just fine. But doing that for a whole course takes a lot of preparation time (waiting for the downloads, converting each clip individually, ...).

Is this something you would consider providing on the guitartricks website directly? I'm thinking of "download this course for offline-viewing in format XYZ"-buttons on a course's starting page. (XYZ being a selection of common video formats).

I don't know if anybody else would be interested in this, but for me it would make guitartricks even more usable, and available all the time.

i'd definitely be interested in this. it would be perfect for me to view on the train to and from work.

Download what you want, "Add to Queue" in Handbrake and then start it, walk away and come back and later they will be done. You could convert every single video on the website (might take awhile!) and only have to set the instructions once.

I know this doesn't replace the possibility for a built-in function on the website, but that might help you until something like that comes available.

I guess all I'm saying is you don't have to convert them individually, you just set it up once and add to queue and when you get everything you want you can start it up and it will convert them all for you. :)

Rob,

Somehow I made you think that I'm sitting idly waiting for my computer to finish encoding one clip before starting the next download, and that I am not familiar with the concepts of batch-processing etc. ;)

What I was trying to say in my original posting was that the whole process of getting a course ready for a mobile device is a lot of trouble for the individual, whereas it would be a piece of cake for the site administrators.

Getting a course ready for offline viewing involves going through the whole course ("next", "next", "next", "next", ...), clicking on "download this video" on every page, waiting for the download to finish (at least my experience seems to indicate that the download-server does not process simultaneous requests from the same client, if I already have a download running, a new download does not start until the current one is finished), and finally encoding the downloaded clip. The clips can of course all be encoded in one go, but as outlined above, that is just one step among many inconvenient steps, and I guess since the downloading is the real bottleneck, I'll already be done encoding the videos I already have before the next ones arrive, so batch-encoding isn't a great help here.

Looking at it this way, I guess it would already help having a "download all videos for this course"-link, so one could get the whole course in one go and then indeed batch-convert them.