I stopped by the post office to check my mail and what did I find in my box but the latest Photovision DVD. Right then a light bulb went on. Instead of having to carve out an hour or two to sit in front of the TV to watch the material, I can rip and encode it for the iPhone; then I can watch it segment-by-segment as I find the time no matter where I happen to be. When I got to the office I popped the disc into my computer and started the process. It took about an hour and a half to encode everything, but that's no big deal because I can start it and walk away (so to speak).

I did run into a couple issues, but nothing I couldn't overcome. It turns out that the Photovision folks mastered the DVD with no title 0. No big deal, it just took me a few minutes to figure out why the software was choking. The other issue (which turns out to be mostly a non-issue) is that the various segments are mastered as individual titles. This means I had to encode each one as a separate movie file to bring into iTunes. Inconvenient, but I can live with it. Now if I can figure out how to import the titles as individual episodes of a "TV show" I think that would make organization easier. I could have multiple Photovision issues on iPhone at once and keep them straight more easily than dumping them all into the Movie category and using a naming scheme to organize them. It would also be easier to get them from iTunes to iPhone that way since I wouldn't have to plug iPhone in, put a check next to each segment, and then do a second sync. I have iTunes set to automatically sync all unwatched episodes of all TV shows.