If you are [not so] patiently waiting for the new "post MediaFork" version of Handbrake to emerge, you're not alone.

No need to keep waiting for an update, here is a build from the SVN from April 7, 2007. Enjoy!

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NeoOffice is a variant of OpenOffice (think a free Office Suite similar to Microsoft Office). The icon sets in both OpenOffice.org and NeoOffice leave a bit to be desired. I ran across an icon set today which is a great improvement over the stock offerings. My appologies to the people who are responsible for this great work, I just don't know who to credit. I do recall that these are the same icons for Ubunto OpenOffice.org but the Ubunto icons were going to be tinted a bit to match the theme of the OS.

To use this great icon set:
1) Download the icon set zip file: images_hicontrast.zip
2) Close NeoOffice
3) Navigate to your NeoOffice application file on your Mac.
4) Right click on NeoOffice and select: Show Package Contents
5) Navigate into the Config folder: Contents / Share / Config
6) Replace the old "images_hicontrast.zip" with the new file you downloaded.
(Note you can replace one of the other icon sets, I just found HiContrast to be the worst so I choose it to replace.)
7) Open NeoOffice, select TOOLS | OPTIONS | VIEW. In the drop down box select HiContrast as the style. (I prefer large icon in the other drop down box)


Note, you can use this same icon set file with OpenOffice for Mac or Windows, the folder is in a slightly different place, but search for the images_hicontrast.zip file and you'll locate it.



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Many Mac & iTunes users aren't fans of subscription music services, they say that they prefer to purchase their music from the iTunes store. Well, some times you just don't know how good the alternatives are until you've tried them. Subscription music services are fantastic. I used to subscribe to Napster, and an a current subscriber of Rhapsody. It is amazing! I can listen to endless ours of music every month for around $10. It would cost me a literal fortune to buy all the music that I 'rent' from Rhapsody.

I don't have a lot of confidence that Apple will offer a subscription based music service. I have the same take on it as I do with Apple offering a PVR, Apple wants to sell you songs and shows and movies not help you record or subscribe to it.

Here is the link to the article talking about the rumored iTunes Subscription service on the way. I'd love to see it happen, maybe if iTunes offers subscription music then all the naysayers out there would actually try it and realize how wonderful it is.

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Review of Rogue Amoeba's Fission
by DJ Deckard

Fission is an audio editor which has a fairly narrow focus. It's feature set as found on developer Rogue Amoeba's website is as follows:

- Software that will losslessly edit MP3, AAC, Apple Lossless and AIFF files without any need for re-encoding
- Splitting a long recording into multiple files
- Removing unwanted audio such as commercials
- Adding fade in and out
- Creating mp3 and AAC cell phone ringtones

The program looks and feels like a slimmed down Sony Sound Forge. I mean that as a compliment as Sound Forge is my audio editor of choice. The controls are nicely divided at the top of the screen and grouped by their functionality.

My main use for Fission was to be editing a long recording into individual tracks I am a DJ and upon finishing up my latest demo mix I need to take the final WAV file and turn it into individual tracks for the CD.

To begin my task I use the cursor and player controls to figure out where in the mix I want to split the audio into tracks. Once you find the appropriate place in the audio file you zoom in, select the Split cursor, and click the audio where you want the split to occur. Easy. Really easy.

I repeated this process for each track and using their Inspector tool named each track and then to finish the process hit Save Audio. Presto you now have multiple WAV files instead of one big one.

Splitting audio into separate tracks couldn’t be easier

Performing all the functionality within Fission is just as easy. To create a ring tone you load an audio file and using the Select cursor select the portion of the audio file you would like to use. A nice feature here is upon holding down the mouse button and moving the cursor the audio plays from wherever the beginning of the selection is currently at. Find a desired audio selection, hit the Crop button, Save Audio and you now have a ring tone.

The bottom line is that Rogue Amoeba’s Fission does exactly what it says it’s going to do. The features all work as expected, the interface is easy to use and looks nice. For the features they advertise and the overall experience I would give this 5 stars.

For my final score I decided to drop it to 4 stars based on the relative value. There are freeware programs out there that will do everything Fission will do though probably without the nice interface and ease of use. I would be more comfortable recommending Fission if the price were a tad lower than the current $32 price point.

Finally I write this last portion hoping that Rogue Amoeba will read this and take it in to consideration for future versions.

I was disappointed to realize that if I closed Fission I would not be able to further edit my DJ mix. If I made any mistakes I would have to open the original WAV file and make the same edits again. Rogue Amoeba, please consider adding this functionality to your next version.

A second request, though beyond the scope of their stated feature set, is to add the ability to burn the audio to CD. Honestly, I don’t know how much work would be required to do this, but if it were possible (perhaps in a Fission Pro version at a higher price point) you would have a direct competitor to CD Architect for the PC and would make me very happy indeed.

spacespace
Cropping Audio is a breezespaUsing Fission's inspector you can fully tag your audio

Likes:
- Look and Feel
- Ease of use

Dislikes:
- See feature requests

Feature requests:
- Save functionality
- Ability to burn to CD




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Wikipedia tells me that Joost is pronounced like "juiced", I'll take that to be correct. But regardless of how you pronounce Joost, I finally got on to the Joost beta program.

If you're not familiar with it, in a few works, the guys behind Skype and Kazaa have come with a IPTV sort of product. There isn't a ton of content on Joost right now, but it's pretty cool. The quality of the videos is higher than I would have guessed.

My real interest would be to run Joost from an AppleTV into a TV, not on my computer. I'm not sure how well Joost operates from a remote yet, I guess I'll have to test it out with the Apple Remote.

I made a 5 minute video moving around in Joost so that you can get an idea of what it's all about.

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I'm testing out an Elgato EyeTV Hybrid on my iMac, and a Hauppauge HVR-1600 in my Windows Media Center. Both of these cards have ATSC tuners which receive free HDTV signal Over The Air (OTA). While I've not had the benefit of side by side comparing OTA to cable HDTV and Satellite HDTV, from what I've read on HDTV specific websites is that the quality of OTA can't be beat.

My TV is an old 35" CRT and is not capable of displaying HDTV, so I'm relegated for now to viewing the HDTV content on my computer. It's interesting how for so long people saw my 35" and would comment on how huge it was, many of these same people now have 42", 50", and even larger flat panel TV's. Perceptions change as TV's got larger.

The EyeTV Hybrid is an external USB tuner with both an analog and digital ATSC tuner, however, you can only use it as a digital or an analog tuner, you can't simultaneously use both analog and digital. The Hauppauge HVR-1600 is a PCI internal card with dual tuners, analog and digital ATSC which can both be used simultaneously.

I'm having fun testing out the two cards, in two completely different environments. I'll have more to say about them with more time under my belt. I'm doing a little live viewing and using them as DVR's to record shows and time shift for later viewing.

All this free HDTV testing sure has me itching for a new TV!

MKV and OGM files are audio video containers. They contain AV streams such as H.264 video and AAC audio. One of the benefits to an MKV file is the ability to have DVD like menus and chapter entries.

I've been downloading a series off of BitTorrent, Engineering the World Rally, I'm waiting until I get all 6 episodes before I watch it. It's a documentary of sorts with my favorite World Rally driver being featured, Petter Solberg and his Subaru WRC Team.

I don't care to watch TV shows on my computer, so I'll convert these to MPEG2 and play them on my AV system via Windows Media Center. I was converting the first three episodes to MPEG. Shows 1 and 2 were AVI's so that's an easy convert. But Show 3 was an MKV file and none of my standard tools like ffmpegX or MPEG Streamclip could successfully convert the file to another format.

Some digging led me to an awesome program MoKgVm2DVD (this stands for MKV - OGM). It is really just a frontend for MEncoder (or was it ffmpeg, I'm not positive) but it correctly identifies the audio and video streams and passes on the correct commands to convert them into another file format.

The developer of this freeware application cautions that it is in preliminary stages and far from stable, however, I had great success with it.

It can also play MKV files too, as well as VLC.

MoKgVm Screenshots:

Main screen after opening the MKV:





When you press the Convert button you are presented with this slide out option window:






And when you press the OK button from the above Convert option window, you are presented with this Queue / Status window:




Even though this application isn't fully developed yet, it is a great asset.




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You may know that HandBrake has been one of the best, and free, tools for ripping DVD's into either XviD or H.264 files. However, the developer pretty much stopped working on it around a year ago. Some new blood came along and was re-started efforts to move it forward, they used the name of the new application MediaFork since they weren't able to get in touch with the HandBrake developer for permission to use the name. They were able to use the HandBrake code as it was open source.

After MediaFork came out, the group received permission to use the HandBrake name. Soon MediaFork will disappear, and only the trusty, familiar old name HandBrake will remain.

The website is now showing the merger of these two variants of HandBrake, and there is a new 0.9 version of HandBrake due out any day now. Until that is released you can still use the 0.8 version of MediaFork.

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Check out Previous posts on MacSeven.com

MacSeven Posts from March 2007

MacSeven Posts from February 2007

MacSeven Posts from January 2007

MacSeven Posts from December 2006

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