Abort, Rephrase, Ignore?

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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Tags: Tech, appletv by matt
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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.

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Tags: Tech, appletv by matt
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