With this tweak Safari 3.1 on Windows becomes a reasonably usable browser. It’s not that I dislike Mac-style font rendering — I quite like it — but on Windows it looks weird.Now, if only they’d use native widgets…
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Some people I know are into rock climbing, and today they were expressing some distress over a recent tribal claim to one of the most difficult climbs in the Grampians — sorry, I can’t find anything about this online. It was suggested that as the people making the claim hadn’t been seen anywhere nearby for 50 years, perhaps their connection with this particular bit of land wasn’t as deep as they claim…
Which reminded me of another group who claim a deep connection with a particular bit of land which they had, in large part, vacated some hundreds of years previously. They then swanned back in, supported by the military might of a waning superpower, and kicked those who’d moved in since back out again.
The “they haven’t been here for ages” line is pretty common when a native title claim affects our lifestyles, but somehow it’s not an argument which typically holds much water when the Israel situation comes up.
Is that because the Israelis are more like us than the local natives? Is it OK to boot people out of their homes if the people doing the booting have had a rough time of it, or if they have (better) weapons, or if they’re white Europeans, or they have a pretty effective set of lobby groups that aren’t constantly suffering from corruption and mismanagement?
But if they’re black or — more importantly I suspect, as these blokes aren’t particularly racist — it’s us they’re evicting? Even when the “eviction” is pretty tame by comparison with what they copped a few hundred years back when our ancestors showed up with guns, booze, and disease?
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I’ve confirmed that the approach outlined here works — you can create a US (or presumably any other country) account without needing to provide a credit card number.
It’s then possible to buy/grab content (e.g., some of the free TV show episodes).
If, like us, you already have a non-US account the trick to using content from both is to have two iTunes instances. In our case we’ve got one linked to our Australian account and that is the “master” instance — AppleTV syncs from it. The other is running on our old G5 iMac linked to our shiny new US account, and while you can’t sync you can stream, even protected content.
I’ve checked that it works with a free TV episode and may try buying one of the very few movies that include closed captions. As and when TV shows start being captioned it’ll become more relevant.
Expectation is that rentals won’t work. I think they probably have to be synced to AppleTV not streamed from a shared iTunes library. No great loss.
Popularity: 30% [?]
A quick update with respect to AppleTV’s disappearing act. It did it again this afternoon. Quitting iTunes, killing iTunesHelper.exe and iPodService.exe, then restarting iTunes made it come back.
For now we’re syncing everything we want to play (we got the 160GB model) so it’s not the end of the world, but hopefully Apple will release a fix in the next iTunes revision.
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Came home last night to find that the AppleTV had disappeared from the iTunes Devices list. Happy-fun web search suggests that this is a “known” problem, possibly with the Take 2 software, possibly with iTunes 7.6.1.
Suggested remedy was to power off the AppleTV and then reconnect, but that didn’t work. Rebooting the Windows PC running iTunes did. I suspect killing off the iTunes-related services probably would’ve done as well and will give that a try if/when it happens again.
Still, it’s not great. Part of the appeal of the AppleTV/iTunes combo is that it’ll happily stream anything it hasn’t synced yet — or for which there isn’t room locally — but if it loses track of iTunes, well, that isn’t going to work so well. Here’s hoping Apple fix it.
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Good: when you change basic metadata like name, genre, video-type, iTunes simply syncs that change to AppleTV without re-transmitting the file.
Bad: when you change the artwork it retransmits the entire file.
This is particularly irksome if you’ve just gone out and found movie posters for your DVD rips to pretty things up and now it’s resyncing everything…
Popularity: 29% [?]
In lieu of hacking our shiny new AppleTV for the moment I’ve been playing around with ways to convert Random Video Files to something it’ll happily digest. I have the basic process down for taking xvid+subrip and turning it into something iTunes will treat as an episode of a TV show and am now running the single-file-encode script one last time to make sure the automation is all set.
The basic gist of it is that you use mencoder (on Win32 in my case) to encode the audio (FAAC) and video (x264) seperately to raw streams, then use MP4Box so mux them, and finally AtomicParsley to set the appropriate metadata bits to make iTunes and AppleTV happy.
This results in the files Farscape [3x01] - Season of Death.avi and Farscape [3x01] - Season of Death.srt turning into Farscape [3x01] - Season of Death.mp4 and appearing as Farscape season 3 episode 1 in iTunes/AppleTV.
At present I’m simply burning the subtitles into the video as we only ever watch stuff with subtitles on anyway. I’ve experimented with MP4Box’s .srt->TTXT conversion but it results in very jittery playback. Not sure what’s up with that, it isn’t just the specific subtitle files I’m using as I also let SubRip do an OCR from DVD and the result still wouldn’t work.
I will do the hack anyway, but suspect that once I’ve got this basic script plus a wrapper (so it’ll do a big batch job) I’ll probably keep on doing this for things we’ll want to hang on to — it’s nice having everything sorted by show-name/etc and if ever the hack “breaks” we’re not left up that creek without that paddle.
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Having decided that what we wanted was a reasonably simple networked media player with local storage and minimal noise, we opted for an AppleTV. This despite there being little video content available for it here.
Running unhacked it’s a pretty neat bit of kit. With no iTunes Store account tied to it the complaints online about it putting all the iTunes Store content first don’t really apply. Plugged it in, powered it up, answered the couple of questions about the TV and network, told an iTunes instance to talk to it, boom, everything’s syncing.
The remote is a cheap bit of crap and at some point I’ll probably program our old Harmony unit to replace it, but it suffices for now.
Video-wise, the couple of music videos from iTunes that were already in the collection played very nicely, as do the movie trailers. Youtube is predictably bad-looking but it does Just Work.
The couple of movies I encoded with Handbrake work properly with no hassles. They even stream acceptably over the network, though I don’t expect to watch much that way. The Farscape episodes I encoded with a combination of Avidemux and MP4Box (to remux as Avidemux produces bogus MP4 containers) haven’t fared so well — Quicktime on the deskop is happy to play them but iTunes refuses to sync them to the AppleTV.
Same episodes encoded with FFmpegX on OS X work fine, but there’s a bug in the mencoder binary shipped with current FFmpegX that makes subtitles too small for our liking. I’ll pursue that line by building my own mencoder and see how that goes.
Just need to get a USB memory doover (on order) and hack this thing, then I’ll get Perian installed and most of these things will be moot.
Overall, fairly impressed, though I kinda wish they’d just ship them with Perian and be done with it.
Popularity: 30% [?]