Not sure when this happened, but I’ve just noticed it a few minutes ago and haven’t seen any announcements in the press or from Apple: the iTunes Australian store now has a TV Shows section.
The range of content is pretty small: a few shows each from ABC (US), ABC (Australia), Nine, Disney, and MTV. But it’s a nice start.
Now, if only there was some way to at least use fansubs with iTunes-purchased video content. Or, y’know, subtitles included.
Popularity: 13% [?]
Looking around for information on getting the VMware Server 2.0 beta running on Ubuntu Server 8.04 — I find it best to look online to see if people are having trouble before I waste time trying to make something work — I saw a fair few complaints about performance not being very good.
Well, I’m not quite sure what those people were talking about. I’ve set it up with a Windows XP VM on a machine that had previously been running Windows XP and as a test I hit it with my usual DVD-to-AppleTV process: rip to disk with DVD Decrypter, convert to XviD with AutoGK, convert subtitles using SubRip.
It’s been a little bit slower than the same stuff running natively, but not significantly so. I don’t have numbers — I forgot to collect stats before nuking the native XP install — but it’s doing the DVD->XviD at ~real-time, which isn’t a whole lot slower than when there was no VMware in the middle.
I’m happy enough with this, particularly given that this is batch processing — fire off a whole heap and forget about it — and that this is a beta with debug code.
Incidentally, I did try using dvd::rip from the Ubuntu packages, but the cluster support is failing — the final “put all the bits together” step barfs claiming there’s no video stream — and while I can indeed do transcodes one-at-a-time without using the cluster stuff, there’s no batch support without it. So while that would probably be faster, life is too short.
Popularity: 18% [?]
The latest addiction here is AudioSurf. Great fun, but I am a little cautious about making an unqualified recommendation because it seems to be a bit buggy.
The general drift, if you haven’t already heard of it, is that it creates a track from a music file, and then you drive along it doing a colour-match puzzle. Tracks and tiles (”cars”) are calculated from the music. So if you put on something like Joni Mitchell’s River you’re in for a smooth ride, but the Beasts of Bourbon’s Ten Wheels for Jesus is rather trickier.
Bugwise, we’ve so far come across one where minimizing crashes the game, and rather more frequently anything that needs QuickTime to decode doesn’t work from a network share.
Yesterday’s little experiment involved renting I Am Legend from iTunes. This works fine with store credit but you do have to tie the AppleTV to your US account — merely being authorised to play via your iTunes installation doesn’t suffice.
The movie itself was surprisingly good. I am always dubious about remakes, but this was (a) quite different to The Omega Man — Neville is believable as a scientist, for a start — and (b) better than it too unless you’re after a 70’s Charlton Heston strutfest.
Will use the rental service again. The experience was pretty straightforward. If more content were captioned — and captions on AppleTV weren’t tiny — we’d probably buy/rent a lot, but as-is it’ll do for cases where my partner is out of town and I want something to watch.
Popularity: 27% [?]
Been probably two weeks or so since I switched to using the old G5 iMac as a primary home machine, and my only complaint is that it’s a bit on the pokey side. Opera and Firefox each sometimes go bonkers and try to eat the CPU, and Opera in particular is prone to stuttering. Now that I’m using Airfoil to transmit iTunes (and in theory other things) to the Windows box that has the real speakers attached things are pretty nice. Except for the bit where Airfoil itself chews ~15% of the CPU.
Which brings us back to “pokey”.
The new top-end iMac is looking pretty tempting. I’m still dubious about the merits of a 24″ display, and I didn’t really like the aluminium iMac they got me at work last year, but then again this is a dimmer environment with rather less natural light so the reflection issues may be moot. When the time comes — whenever that may be — I think I’ll have to go and look at one in a store and see how the display goes with my eyesight.
For anyone who has been living under a rock, the big deal with the new iMac refresh is that the top-end model (selling for about AU$3000) has a real GPU. A 512MB nVidia GeForce 8800GS. Much much better than the fairly dreadful low-end ATi parts they’ve been using previously.
They also top out at a 3.0GHz Core2 Duo CPU, and you can now specifiy a 1TB SATA disk. With the biggest disk and 4GB of RAM that’s almost AU$3700…
Which is an awful lot of money.
Australian tax law being what it is, it’s still cheaper to buy a Macbook Pro. Those don’t have anywhere near as spiffy a GPU — though they do have a “real” one — nor as fast a CPU, but they’re rather more portable. And start, effectively, at under AU$2k thanks to the ATO.
Perhaps waiting to see if the next Big Apple Event includes Yet Another MBP Refresh, as I am beginning to see some merit to a portable machine.
In other “news”, I finally got around to hitting our AppleTV with a patchstick today. After installing Perian and copying some font files over, it now plays DivX/XviD natively, with extra bonus big-arse subtitles. Which is exactly what we want.
The motivator was fairly simple: sometimes converting DivX/XviD->H.264 results in loss of A/V sync. Which is rather irritating and seems to happen regardless of the tools I use. Not having to do the conversion at all is a nice bonus but not really the point.
Popularity: 30% [?]
Gave up on Synergy2, leaving aside the issues with daemonizing, having the server running on OS X was resulting in wacky Warcrack mouse behaviour. Have dug out an old Belkin USB KVM. It too has its issues — in particular it takes a few seconds for Windows to notice devices when I switch to that machine, and in the past it used to do annoying things like automatically flip inputs if the monitor was put to sleep. Which is a bit of an issue when you’re dealing with system reboots/etc.
Otherwise, so far so good. Except for iTunes+AppleTV. Streaming is fine, syncing video is fine, but trying to sync the 10k+ music files causes the system to eat itself after about 500-600 tracks. Suspect it may simply be that 1GB of RAM and a G5 is not exactly what you’d call “current” and iTunes is gnawing its eyes out trying to cope, but it’s tricky to track down when the system runs so slowly that you pretty much have to reset to get control back…
I had hoped to move the video encoding work over to the Mac. It’s a slower machine, but OS X is pretty good about running this sort of thing in the background with limited impact on interactive stuff. But the mplayer/mencoder bug which screws up subtitle support appears to be extant only on OS X and in every build I can find that’ll support H.264 as a target codec. Having tried a few randomly-selected SVN trees I’ve been unable to make it build at all, each time for different exciting reasons. Same deal with the ffmpeg kit. So for now that task is back on Windows too.
Will see how this goes. My experience has been that most computing environments irritate me within a few weeks at best, and while I’m quite happy with Leopard at the office this dual-system scheme is probably going to get on my nerves after a while. Longer term I may simply wind up buying a more modern Mac and putting everything on that, worst case with the video stuff would be a GUI-less Linux VM, and everything else I care about (WoW, Spore, Puzzle Quest) seems to have a Mac port. But that’s probably end-of-the-year stuff, so We Shall See.
Popularity: 34% [?]
Still happy with the decision to buy an AppleTV. Have a fairly straightforward process down for converting random downloaded AVI files (mencoder to the rescue), and Handbrake has been doing a good job with DVD content.
The unit has gotten confused once and refused to play protected content downloaded from the Australian iTunes Store. I suspect this is because of the shonky trick playing shared content from a US account, but it’s only happened once and it’s a bit of a “black box” solution with limited debugging options. A reboot fixed it, anyway.
“Vodcasts” from the ABC are pretty nice. I’ve got iTunes nabbing Good Game and Media Watch. There’s no technical reason they couldn’t be higher-quality video, so it’s a pity the ABC seem intent on building some sort of proprietary BBC-iPlayer-style system instead of simply using what they already have. As an end-user AppleTV is a pretty nice platform for this sort of thing, and the RSS+videofiles approach should work on just about anything. Presumably the issue is, as always, legal rather than technical.
My only real gripe with AppleTV is the size of closed captions. Too small. Probably OK for younger deaf people with excellent vision, but useless for anyone with poor vision. Wouldn’t be surprised if the largest-growing part of the deaf world is older people who are likely to also have their eyes crapping out on them too, so the tiny text seems like an odd choice. But at least it’s there, presumably increasing the size is the sort of tweak Apple can make later.
More captioned content would be nice, as would be video on the local iTunes store. Support for streaming video other than Youtube (e.g., the South Park freebies) seems like it’d be a winner in the US market where these things are available. My understanding is that while AppleTV is not what you’d call an open platform, it is reasonably modular. The potential is huge if Apple were to open things up a bit.
Good use of AU$500? Yes, provided you were already willing to spend that kind of money on something like a DVD player or one of the other networked media players.
Popularity: 28% [?]
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.
Popularity: 29% [?]
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.
Popularity: 31% [?]
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% [?]