Better ways to watch the MIX11 videos, Part 2: PowerShell

I just posted about my favorite way to watch videos: streaming the playlist at high speed using VLC. But there are times where you'd like a local copy of the videos, too, e.g. watching them while commuting without internet access.

I previously posted a PowerShell script to download the mvcConf videos from Channel 9. I got some great feedback from Albert Weinert and added some new changes of my own to prompt for media type and location. There are other (simpler) PowerShell downloaders out there, but this has some features I wanted, like skipping over files you've already downloaded, assigning good names to the files, etc.

Note: Remember that these are big files, especially the WMV High and MP4 High feeds. We're talking like 4GB for the keynotes.

There was one feature I wanted to add, but didn't have the time to figure it out: the different videos have categories assigned, and it'd be cool to filter the videos based on category. Here's a start of the code - it grabs a list of categories from all videos in the feed. Next step would be to prompt and filter. Fork my gist if you're interested, it'd be cool to see if someone adds that.

$categories= @()
$feed.rss.channel.item | foreach { $categories += $_.category}
$desiredCategories = PromptForInput "Enter desired categories (options: $categories)" ""