I'm really enjoying the new interface on my AppleTV. I rented a movie last night to see how fast it downloaded and it was quick. I got to 2% downloaded in about a minute and a popup appeared saying that it was able to begin playback. This was an SD movie not HD, I'll test HD soon enough.

Aside from buying HD content on your AppleTV with AC3/Dolby Digital soundtracks, how else can you get great 5.1 audio on to your AppleTV?

Well there are two ways already. VisualHub has been updated to 1.31 which is able to include AC3 5.1 audio into the AppleTV files that it creates. I would assume this is mainly used for people who are downloading illegal MKV's off the internet and converting them for viewing on their AppleTV.

If you have a DVD collection that you've been waiting to convert for your AppleTV, and preserve the 5.1 audio, HandBrake now has some beta releases that can do just that!
WARNING: This is a beta build from the HandBrake SVN, and should be used for testing only - not production use.

Select your ISO or DVD source, then on the "Audio & SubTitles" tab, select Codecs: AVC/H.264 Video / AC3 Audio.

By the way, I highly recommend that you use Constant Quality with a setting of 66 instead of specifying a bitrate and either single or double pass settings.

NOTE: you will need to change the extension to M4V in order to play the files (or just save them to M4V in Handbrake instead of the MP4 default.)

You can download the beta build of HandBrake here.

MetaX seems to be tagging these files just fine, the cover art and other text info shows up for me great!

Red [HD DVD] has seemingly taken it in the shorts recently with Warner Bros. going exclusively with Bluray. But might they both take it in the shorts by Take 2 (AppleTV Take 2) or other video on demand services?

I recently upgraded my entire AV system and a part of that upgrade was the cheapest HiDef DVD player I could find - a Toshiba HD-A2 HD DVD player. Admittedly I was pulling for the HD DVD format but it looks like a long shot now for it to become the dominate format over Sony's Bluray.

My consolation in buying the HD DVD is that it was very inexpensive at $140, came with 5 DVD's, and NetFlix has a really decent selection of HD DVD's that I've been watching. After I've watched all the HD DVD's from Netflix that interest me, what is my next choice? I ask this with the assumption that Bluray will be the dominant HiDef DVD format out there.

Well, actually, I don't plan on picking up a Bluray player in the near or medium future. Now that Apple has upgraded the AppleTV software to the 'Take 2' complete with HD movie rentals - I'm quite likely to hang up my long standing NetFlix subscription and simply rent HD movies from Apple directly to my AppleTV. Yes, a Bluray disc would have higher quality than an AppleTV HD movie rental due to the enormous capacity and high bitrates used. However, I have a feeling that the HD movies will look very good via the AppleTV. I've transcoded some HD rips that were on the Usenet, purely in the name of research. The resulting AppleTV compliant HD files are around 2.5 - 4GB in size and look awesome. I'm assuming that the AppleTV HD movie rentals will be encoded in similar or better quality, especially since they aren't going through multiple encoding steps (HiDef DVD -> MKV -> AppleTV MP4).

5.1 Dolby Digital audio will be offered on the HD movies, this is fantastic. As of now we're all waiting to see exactly how this is being accomplished since the MP4 format does not accommodate AC3 sound. It would be great if they are taking a 6 channel AAC audio stream and transcoding it to AC3, this would save a tremendous amount of disc space since AC3 is so very inefficient with regards to size.

The new menus for the AppleTV rental screens are simply gorgeous, well done, I can't wait to check it out very soon and rent an HD movie to scope out the quality.

I'm a Rhapsody subscriber and I love it. For less than the price of a CD per month I can listen to virtually whatever I want, all the time, three concurrent feeds.

TiVo and Rhapsody just struck a deal which I think is a cool way for a lot of people to get their Rhapsody music to their AV system. Kudos. It's too bad that AppleTV would never support this. I do hope that at some point Apple offers a subscription service, it's so much nicer than 'owning' your music.

The following is from Engadget.com

TiVo picks up Rhapsody support, learns to love music
Posted Oct 9th 2007 12:01AM by Ryan BlockFiled under: Home Entertainment

Really though, who isn't supporting Rhapsody these days? Real's hardware integration list, which includes iRiver, Nokia, SanDisk, Sonos, etc., now gets another notch in the bedpost with TiVo's newfound Rhapsody playback support. While you can thumbs up and down your selection (thanks, TiVo peanut), it doesn't sound like you can do much more than stream tracks and Rhapsody radio from the cloud, so if you're expecting some crazy TiVo-centered device syncing or portable media integration, think again. Unfortunately, the Rhapsody update launch date wasn't provided, so unless TiVo is going to flip a bit and turn it on today you may wind up wait a short while to get this going. And while we're on the topic of TiVo updates, not that we want to look a service-supporting gift horse in the mouth or anything, but we're still waiting for TiVoToGo and TiVoToComeBack for our Series3s and HDs, y'hear TiVo?

HandBrake 0.9.1: Released!
"Mistakes? We don't make mistakes."
We're chagrined to announce the public release of HandBrake 0.9.1. Why chagrined? Because 0.9.0 wasn't as stable as it should have been, something 0.9.1 rectifies.
Download it now.
This minor update squashes a number of glaring bugs. Most notably, HandBrake will no longer hang at the end of encoding MKV files with chapter markers. This means the Animation, Bedlam, Constant Quality Rate, Deux Six Quatre, Film, and Television presets are now usable.
Additional improvements:

• Impressive performance enhancements
• Significant interface prettification (Mac more than Win)
• Color subtitles now show up in color
• Changing dimensions in Picture Settings no longer causes a crash (Mac)
• Forced subtitle support
• More robust exception handling (Win)
• Closing the main window no longer causes HandBrake to crash (Mac)
• Using "Slow" deinterlacing no longer doubles the chapter count.
• MPEG Stream support is now case-insensitive (.VOB as well as .vob, etc) and more compatible
• No more error messages sent to standard out instead of standard error
• Bigger buffer for the activity log (Mac)
• Proper display of fading subtitles
• On-completion options to shutdown, suspend, etc (Win)
• "Same as source FPS" now works correctly when the end-credits of a progressive film are interlaced.
• Add-to-queue fixed (Win)
• Target size fixed for the umpteenth time (Mac)

...and assorted other changes.
As always, for the complete list of changes, see the Trac.

First two major Torrent Tracking sites, IsoHunt's TorrentBox and Podtropolis sites were banned from traffic in the USA. And now it seems that Demonoid, the second largest torrent tracker site, is at least temporarily shut down.

Here's more information from TorrentFreak.

I tried TED, which stands for Torrent Edition Downloader, several years ago and at the time I wasn't very impressed. However, it has been making progress and is now at a stage where it warrants a serious look. TED is a Java app and works on OS X and Windows, Linux should be working if not now, soon.

Legalities aside, torrent versions of your favorite broadcast shows are great because they're commercial free and are highly compressed - most are HDTV sourced, some are even 720P these days (HD). When you add a show to TED it will begin looking for that edition, and all future shows, in other words it's does the equivalent of TiVo's Season Pass. And to avoid getting themselves in trouble, TED only downloads the .torrent file, but you can have it work with your torrent client of choice to actually download the torrent show.

Here's what TED looks like in your menubar



Here is the main window of TED




Here is the ADD show screen

The other Edit show screens are equally well done. You can also create a custom show setting if the one you want isn't in the predefined list, which is constantly updated - you can set your preferences to automatically update the show list. You can also create custom filters to help filter which specific torrent you want.

Take a look it it interests you.

The HDHomeRun device has been very well received. It's a dual tuner HD OTA, Over the Air, and unencrypted HD cable tuner. It is not a DVR device but can work with one. This tuner gets rave reviews, even saying that it is the best OTA tuner available.

I wrote the guys over at CenterStageProject just two weeks ago asking that they consider looking at integrating the HDHomeRun function with their Media Center project using some drivers that an enthusiast had created to get the HDHomeRun working on the Mac.

Well now Elgato has come along and done all the hard work for us. They have made their Eye TV software compatible with the HDHomeRun dual tuner, and they are selling two licenses to the software, and the dual tuner device for $199 total. Here is the Elgato package.

This bodes well for the Mac community. Keep it coming!

From Elgato:

I've been a NetFlix subscriber for a very long time, I always wished that I could drag and drop items around in the Queue instead of numbering them and selecting update.

Guess what finally happened....

Wahoo!

If you are a real NetFlix fiend, you may want to check out NetFlix Freak. Despite it's brushed metal appearance, it's a great alternative to going to NetFlix.com, it costs $15.

IneedFlix is a freeware alternative to NetFlix Freak. It is more basic in what it offers, but you may find it useful.

Here is a little humor to break all of the iPhone tension. A funny Music Video Rap parody of I'm a Mac, and I'm a PC commercials.

Some heavy hitters in the content business are now choosing sides. Recently the porn industry said that it was backing HD DVD. Today Blockbuster Online announced that based on recent history they are going to back BluRay and not support HD DVD at all.

This battle is something I choose to view from the sidelines until the market makes a decision on which format is going to be the predominant format. While I tend to favor HD DVD, in reality either format is great and far superior to the old DVD format. But I don't want to join the HiDef DVD party until things are a bit more decided.

When it comes to searching, there’s no such thing as too fast.

And now, if you're a Mac user, you can search the entire online archive, including royalty-free, without ever opening your browser.
With our efficient Search Widget, you have almost instant access. You can scroll through thumbnail search results, preview your clips, choose between rights-managed and royalty-free, even download motion comps—all in seconds.
And because our Search Widget is so fast, it’s a defacto idea generator. A fun way to discover the unexpected shot or spark inspiration.
Apple has built powerful, easy features into Mac OS X, like Spotlight and Dashboard, to expedite production workflow, and we intend to take full advantage of these innovations to make your creative life as easy as possible.
DOWNLOAD

I recently blogged about the exquisite Demo UI video, I also gushed about the well done PDF booklet detailing the thought and design of the upcoming UI.

Over the past few days I've had a great email dialog with David McLeod, graphic designer for the CenterStage Project. I was very pleased that David reached out to me for my input to take into consideration for the upcoming TV features for CenterStage. My guess is that he read some of my DVR/AppleTV/CenterStage posts here on the site and could tell that it's an area that I'm both very familiar with and passionate about - and that I feel that most solutions are not complete for a variety of reasons. David is a great listener and we had a nice discussion on the topic. It sounds like CenterStage will at first have very basic TV viewing and DVR functions, but hopefully it will ramp into a more fully featured offering as time and energy permits. I did let David know that I think it would be a terrific feature if CenterStage could incorporate and integrate TV Torrent downloading, sort of a DVR Setup without a Tuner Card for the pure time shifters (or consumers of non-local programming). As I think about this, David must be more than Graphics Designer for CenterStage if he's working on specs and features.

Btw - I told David that what I saw in the Demo UI Video for CenterStage is in my opinion what the AppleTV interface should have looked like.

Here is a new press release that David sent me on a significant new release of CenterStage.

PRESS RELEASE
===============
It's the eve of the World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC), so we thought we would get everyone into the 'sprit of excitement', before the forthcoming announcements from Apple. CenterStage 0.6.2 has been released and represents a milestone in the alpha cycle of our Mac Media Center project.

This substantial update should be considered our most fully functional and usable release to date. It is now a 'proper' media center, allowing you to playback Movies, Music and view your Photos. The required framework is in place and the next step is to begin adding our proposed user interface.

Talking of our future and the proposed interface. Hopefully, you will have seen a couple of new pages added to the site recently. The Current Progress page charts the progress of our work and communicates where we are now, and where we are going. Current Progress page includes a demo movie of where the project is headed, and numerous supporting downloads to show exactly what has been happening behind the scenes and what we the future look of CenterStage will be.

As always, the more developers we can get on board the greater this project will become as we move toward the Beta at a faster pace.

Download 0.6.2

Current Progress

The Future

Dealzmodo: DivX Pro Free Today

Saw this notice over on Gizmodo today, free DivX Pro for Mac and Windows, get in on it now before they close the offer.

IPTV is Television delivered over the Internet. There was some speculation today that the Apple + AT&T partnership may extend past the iPhone and could lead to getting IPTV for the AppleTV some time next year.

MacSeven doesn't run with all the Apple rumors, I prefer to work with what we have today and what we know for sure. But this story really piqued my curiosity. The thought of an AppleTV [fully supporting 1080P or 1080i and 5.1 audio] running CenterStage as the main interface, and having full Television & DVR through IPTV really, really interests me. Lets hope this, or something equally as fascinating plays out.

The All Things Digital Conference is going on, and Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher interviewed Steve Jobs and Bill Gates together.
I really enjoyed watching it, it's about 90 minutes in total, or you can opt to watch the highlights video. There is also a full transcript, but I'd highly recommend watching the full video, you get so much more out of it than just reading the transcript.

Video of the complete Steve Jobs and Bill Gates interview.

At the risk of sounding like a complete CenterStage fanboy, I want to point you to the new Demo PDF booklet that they have put together.

Stylish! Beautiful! I'm getting really anxious to see CenterStage hit 1.0 because I love the look and feel of what this team is doing.

Consider how poorly documented most software is, they guys are doing it right. And CenterStage can also be run on an AppleTV, which is exactly how I would run it. On a side note, lets hope that a remote with an alpha/numeric keypad comes out for the AppleTV, entering text is otherwise very cumbersome. From the online Demo, and this Demo PDF I have to say that I am extremely excited to see how CenterStage is developing. I'm just praying for a kickass DVR integration to round out the offering.

From TUAW. very interesting that the DRM free iTunes tracks contain the purchasers name in them! DRM may be gone, but there are some traces in the songs. I'm sure this can be stripped out somehow, but the data is there from iTunes.

Sure, you can now download music from the iTunes store without DRM but that doesn't mean you should just willy nilly start sharing that music with your friends. For one thing, it's illegal. For another, your account information is embedded into that m4a music file. Don't believe me? Try this yourself.

1. Launch Terminal. You'll need to be comfortable at the command line to perform this check.

2. Navigate to one of your iTunes plus downloads. If you have a US iTunes account, you can download the iTunes plus "Ooh La" single of the week.

3. Use the UNIX "strings" command to look at the text in your data and grep to search for your name. e.g.
strings 01\ Ooh\ La.m4a | grep name
Alternatively, open all the strings in TextEdit:
strings 01\ Ooh\ La.m4a | open -f.

Bottom line: DRM-free doesn't mean that Apple suddenly supports piracy.

I'm a fan of media (music, movies / videos / TV), and interested in better ways to consume my media. Before AppleTV there was very little in terms of a "Mac Media Center", and I argue that without a fully functioning DVR and better codec support that the AppleTV doesn't go very far in satisfying this need.

CenterStage is an aggressive Mac Media Center project that I've briefly mentioned before. The team is coming close to releasing a new alpha so the excitement and tension mounts (I'm teasing.) But honestly, this looks like a really promising interface. There is a new demo of CenterStage released, I'm hosting a copy of it on my site for your viewing pleasure, and to help offload a little traffic from them. Do watch the interface if you are interested in this space at all, CenterStage is quickly become a really impressive interface - I think it far exceeds the AppleTV interface. While the TV function isn't ready for demonstrations, it will have TV functions via the Elgato EyeTV Hybrid device. I'm not sure how it will integrate into CenterStage as far as the GUI and DVR abilities, but it's a start. For me to be seriously interested it's going to have to be a far better DVR than the EyeTV Hybrid can offer.

My fingers crossed, this is shaping up nicely.

You can check out the demo video here.



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Streamer provides the ability to listen to Internet Radio through your AppleTV. It works by acting as a wrapper for MPlayer (the popular Unix media player). Additional functionality has been planned, and will be introduced in new versions.

This is still in beta, but an encouraging new development for the AppleTV nonetheless.

Streamer


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I've got a ton of Joost invites available.

You can check out my 5 minute look at Joost here.

Send me an email and give me your:

First Name
Last Name
Email

(I need that info to send the Joost Invite)


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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!

PandoraMan is a nice easy way to enjoy streaming music from Pandora to your Mac. It uses the Apple WebKit in a minibrowser which only works with Pandora, you don't have to leave your browser of choice open.

Pandora is a great music service, from the Music Genome Project read more about it here. I don't think Pandora is perfect, but it's nice enough that I use it frequently.

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Admittedly, this is not a Mac specific post - but it is a really cool video of actions shot in high speed and played back in slow motion. I particularly liked the bullets going through soda cans, and the water balloons. Maybe this will inspire some of you to try some high speed video action of your own.

Slow Motion High Frames Compilation

Add to My Profile | More Videos


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There are three Get a Mac ads on the Apple Japan Get-A-Mac website, for whatever reason I think these are kind of cool.

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I am a subscriber to MacAddict, yes - people do read print still. I much prefer a good magazine to the web any day.

Mac Magazines are hard to come by these days, I support both Mac World and Mac Addict with my subscription dollars. In return I get great publications.

Here is a smokin' less than $6 deal on Mac Addict. I use BestBuyMagazines all the time, they're completely legit, take advantage now in case this deal goes away when Mac|Life is in place. Click on this link for the $5.95 annual subscription deal.

Mac Addict
Mac Addict is designed for the people who love their Mac computer! Each issue features product reviews, ratings, how-to's and recreational uses. Mac Addict not only tells you about the latest Mac-compatible software and peripherals but also provides you with information on how and when to upgrade your computer and troubleshoot errors. You'll find step-by-step guidelines on how to use your Mac to its complete abilities, reviews of software ranging from home office to intense gaming fun and fun tips on using the latest Mac programs. If you are a Mac user then Mac Addict is for you!
Price Due: $5.95

Your Comments appreciated.
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The Woz was on the Colbert Report a couple days ago, I finally made the time to encode it and post for your enjoyment.

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The BBC (Beeb) has a lot of great content, a lot of that content in Radio based. I've recently been using a dashboard widget which has turned out to be the most drop dead simple way to listen to Beeb content. The only improvement I could suggest would be to have a station select button on the font of the widget instead of clicking the "i" and selecting from the back side of the widget.

The BBC Radio Widget by HawkMan at Phantom Gorilla is really nice. Treat him nice and donate a pint of ale for his efforts, as he requests. You can download the widget right here. Full list of available stations through the BBC Radio Widget right here.

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If you have a website and want to easily turn any picture into a FavIcon then here is your saviour.

Chami offers a free web service to create static, and rolling animation FavIcon's.

I've used this site several times in the past, very simple and great results.

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PodCasts are a great way to easily get audio information on topics of interest to you. I listen to several Macintosh focused PodCasts, give them a listen and if you like them you can subsribe to them in iTunes.

The MacCast - This is my favorite, great all around PodCast. While I do enjoy all of these PodCasts, if I had to narrow it down to just one - this would be the one.

Weekly Roundup - Nice weekly roundup of Mac news for the past week, as well as in depth talk on the topic de'jur.

Mac Geek Gab - What is happening Mac, with two hosts this meanders but has good info.

MacFanatic - This tends to be shorter than the others and generally features a program.


You can discuss this topic here.

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