Handbrake 0.91 emerges

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)
As always, for the complete list of changes, see the Trac.
iPhoto Buddy
What is iPhoto Buddy?iPhoto Buddy is a Mac OS X application (Universal) that allows you to easily create, manage, and switch between multiple iPhoto Libraries. The advantages of splitting your One Huge Photo Library into multiple, smaller ones include improved iPhoto performance, increased flexibility in organizing your digital photo collection, and a consistency with most other Mac applications that allow their respective data to be stored in as many documents (in this case, "Libraries") as you like.iPhoto Buddy uses a simple, streamlined interface that was inspired by iPhoto itself. Anyone that has used iPhoto will immediately feel right at home using iPhoto Buddy. It truly is a companion application--a real buddy!
A free Mahjong Game
The object of the game is to build complete suits - or melds - usually of threes, from either 13 or 16 tiles. The first person to achieve this goal wins the game. The winning tile completes the player's set of either 14 or 17 tiles.
Mahjong games can be fun, unfortunately most of them are not free.
MyMahj is well rated over at MacUpdate, and is... Free!
MakeiPhoneRingtone
iPhone Unlock Tool, AnySIM, now has GUI
If you've decided that a hacked iPhone to work outside the World AT&T is just your cup'of'tea then you'll be pleased to know that a new GUI unlocking tool is now available from the iPhone Dev Team. If you must have, a quick search should yield satisfying results.
IBM is flexing it's muscle for Open Source again.
It looks like IBM is now getting into backing open source movements again as it starts to lend it's muscle, might, and money to the OpenOffice group.
This is fantastic news, and comes on the heals of the OpenDocument Format winning out over Microsoft. It certainly looks like the Open community is gaining ground in the Office environment. I for one am damn glad to see this happen.
More details on this news story available here from Yahoo.
iUnlock released: the first free, open source iPhone SIM unlock software
Growl update
It's been a long time since the last update, but Growl was updated today.
What are Notifications?
Notifications are a way for your applications to
provide you with new information, without you having
to switch from the application you're already in.
What's new in version 1.1?
* There is now a global positioning system built into
Growl (took 2 years to make!).
* There are now close buttons available on
notifications when you mouse over them.
* Multiple performance enhancements/memory leaks
fixed up. The only problem at this point should be
webkit message views.
* Totally redesigned applications tab.
* There is now a sound option available per
notification.
* Application level positioning. #657
Nighty, Night: Sleep Display Widget
Thankfully LineStreet come up with a drop dead simple Widget that you can press from Dashboard and it will put your monitor to sleep. Very handy.
And if you're not fond of Widgets, it is available as an Application too.
If you have a beautiful new iMac, you know how nice and bright the screen is. Thing is...sometimes a bright screen isn't what you're going for. Enter this widget. It allows you to IMMEDIATELY sleep just your display so that you can continue running your background jobs. It doesn't permanently affect your energy settings, so when you start working again, your monitor will not sleep immediately. It's a simple widget, but it solves an annoying problem.
Burn, baby Burn
Burn is actively developed and updated, the most recent version 1.71U saw some nice improvements.
Burn can burn data discs in a variety of formats, it can create redbook and mp3 discs, it can re-encode your video into all video disc formats, mount images, and more.

iStat Menus Update
Art of Office
HandBrake 0.9.0 Released!
We’re proud to announce the public release of
HandBrake 0.9.0. Download it here.
This is a major release. The changes cannot really
all be summed up, but here’s a try:
* User experience is improved through a re-envisioned
Mac interface and a Windows interface that’s
been rebuilt from the ground up.
* Picture quality is improved through better image
scaling, better deinterlacing, new filters for
denoising, deblocking, inverse telecine, and new
presets devoted to high quality settings.
* Speed improvements due to updated copies of x264
and ffmpeg. This includes improved multi-threaded
encoding for the iPod.
* Compatibility is improved through new presets for
devices like the iPhone and PSP. As well, HandBrake
now supports DTS as an audio source and has limited
support for .VOB and .TS file containers as input.
Most excitingly, HandBrake can now output to the
Matroska (MKV) file container.
* Stability has been improved due to countless bug
fixes. (Including audio drop and mp2 issues).
Handbrake also has optional support for MP4 files
larger than 4 gigabytes.
TED = Torrent TiVo
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.
Combine PDFs 2.1
A great solution to this task is Combine PDFs 2.1 from MonkeyBreadSoftware.
It allows you to drag and drop PDFs onto the
application, re-arrange page, rotate, trim, crop and
more before combining them into a single PDF. I've
tried a few solutions before, but Combine PDFs is the
best I've used yet.
Hot Damn! Transmission Double Header
Transmission has been my day to day BitTorrent client
ever since I found it. It isn't as full featured
(bloated) like Azureus is, but it worked
great for most things.
All of a sudden Transmission has checked off two
important features that I've been hoping would happen
for a long time now. Creating torrents and selective
downloads. These two new features can be found in the
most
recent build of Transmission, they warn that
it may be unstable, but it's certainly working
well for me.
If Transmission is your torrent client of choice then
you know that it wasn't ever able to create torrents.
Well that has now all changed.
I'm not sure if the news that uTorrent is heading for
the Mac had any impact on these two features getting
completed all of a sudden, I guess we'll never know -
but whatever the reason I'm certainly very happy that
we've got these features now.
You can see here that
I've customized my icon bar to include Create
[Torrent]
If you select Create
[Torrent] here is the screen window you are presented
The next great feature that has been implemented is
the ability to selectively download. Say a torrent
has 3 files, 1, 2, and 3. And each is 1GB big, if you
only need 2, then you would have previously had to
wasted a lot of bandwidth and download all 3 files in
the torrent - even though you only wanted file 2. Now
you can selectively choose which files in the torrent
you download. Additionally you can set priorities for
individual files at Low, Normal, or High.
If you go to the Inspector window for a torrent that
you are downloading, you will see checkboxes to the
right of each file, you can uncheck the box if you do
not want to download that file, additionally, there
is a little pill looking icon if you mouseover the
file, this is the priority setting.
Priority Setting &
Selective File CheckBox
Now, more than ever, is the time to check out
Transmission for ALL your torrent duties.
Admittedly, I do wish that Transmission were a single
window application, not the main window for torrents
and a separate window for Inspector information. I
think a condensed version like they show now is good
for some and maybe that should remain an option, but
it would be really nice for many other people if they
gave you more information on a single unified window.
But I promise I won't complain about that what with
the two nice gifts!
Latest
Build, Home page.
Throttle the 'duck
I've certainly got nothing against Panic, developers of Transmit,
or Transmit itself. These guys are pretty cool
when you get right down to it, effective software
that is elegant - how Mac.
But the thing is, I'm not too excited to pay $30 for
software that I only use occasionally, especially
when CyberDuck is a damned good FTP client in it's
own right. The Duck is opensource, and while they
don't require money for it, they do ask for
donations. If you use it and like it I would suggest
throwing a few bones their way, they work hard to
develop CyberDuck - and there are frequent updates.
One area where the developer and I don't see eye to
eye is in regards to multipane for local and ftp
server. I prefer ftp clients that display your local
volumes as well as the remote ftp volumes like
FileZilla does. However, I'm
willing to live with the fact that the Duck only
shows the remote ftp volumes, because it is
otherwise excellent in it's design and
implementation. I don't think FileZilla is in the
same league as CyberDuck. By the way, I always
thought that FileZilla was a blatant rip off of
FlashFXP, the best ftp
program I ever used on Windows.
Oh, and here's a great update on CyberDuck, they
recently built in the functionality to be able to set
specific upload and global throttling. Throttling is
limiting your up/download speeds. Throttling your
upload speeds is necessary in my opinion because if
you max out your upload speed you will affect your
download speeds in a bad way. With maxing out your
upload speed you will get very slow download speeds.
So by enabling throttling at a speed under your max
upload speed, you will preserve speedy downloading.
Great stuff.
If you need a nice FTP client, certainly take a look
at the Duck.
NeoOffice compatible with Office 2007
Aren't we all fortunate then that NeoOffice keeps on improving their very nice Office Suite for your Mac. Here's the goods on the new update:
This release includes support for the Mac OS X Spellchecker and Address Book and experimental support for Office 2007 Excel and PowerPoint files.
This update is for Early Access only right now, but all you freeloaders can download it on August 27, 2007 without having to cough up any money.
NeoOfficeŽ is a full-featured office suite for Mac OS
X created by Patrick Luby and Edward Peterlin
How to mount network and FTP filesystems
How to automate the mounting of filesystems of any of the following type AFP, FTP, HTTP, NFS, and SMB. How cool to be able to easily mount a volume on your desktop for not just network drives off various computer flavors, but also FTP and HTTP. Slick!
Disclaimer, I had great success and ease using this to mount my Windows LAN, I spent about 1 minute trying to mount the MacSeven.com ftp site just to test it out, and I wasn't successful. Since it was only a test I didn't pursue further - your mileage with FTP mounting may vary.
Update: AutomountMaker actually connects great to the MacSeven.com FTP - I had a setting wrong, on the "Volume" Setting I had an incorrect entry, by just leaving it blank it connects great and puts the mounted drive right on my desktop, very cool.
AutomountMaker is just
the tool to make this happen. I used
AutomountMaker to automate the mounting of a
volume on a Windows computer on my LAN, so I used
the SMB protocol. It's very easy to save
pre-defined connections that you can run on
demand, or you can launch any of the presets so
that you can mount the volumes when you boot.
New Remote Desktop coming
I have been using CoRD daily since installing it, and
it works fantastic, it's so much more nimble than
Microsoft Remote Desktop (PPC via Rosetta) on my
system. It will be interesting to put it up against
the new UB of Microsoft's version in a few weeks.
Until then, I'll have no regrets using CoRD.
CoRD: A better Windows Remote Desktop
I decided to poke around and look to see if there was any news or other solutions and I ran across a fabulous alternative to Remote Desktop, CoRD. It connects to my WinXP box just the same way as RD did, only it does it better! It's faster, does full screen correctly. It's a real gem, and it is also freeware.
If you have the need, I highly recommend CoRD.
This sums it up pretty well: CoRD is a Mac OS X remote desktop client for Microsoft Windows servers using the rdp protocol. It is easy to use, fast, and free for anyone to use or modify.
Perian's Type Installer
Grab the updated installer and file type Perian't Type Installer here.
Get the proper icons for Perian media files
Well done!
You can snag the applescript here to fix your icons.
A look at iStat Menus
Their new utility is not a widget, but instead it
runs on your Menu bar, iStat Menus. A similar
utility has been out for a long time, MenuMeters. I have been a
user of MenuMeters since coming back to the Mac.
Like iStat Menus, it also runs in the Menu bar,
and it is able to display system information that
you may like to be able to easily monitor. Things
like network upload and download rates, hard drive
activity, cpu load, memory usage, etc. As I looked
at iStat Menus today, I bring with me a
familiarity and fondness for MenuMeters, I think
that this gives me a good background instead of
never having used this type of program previously.
Here are my initial impressions of iStat Menu:
It is an elegant implementation, the Preferences are
simply gorgeous.
It also looks great on your Menu bar.
You have a high degree of customizability with
regards to what you choose to show on your Menu bar.
I have mine setup to show the Hard Drive icon, and
there are arrows for drive activity, an UP arrow on
the drive indicates a read, and a down arrow a write.
Next is my CPU temp, the Date and Time information,
network transfer rates, and CPU usage. There are many
other items you can choose to show as well.
I like the date and time section so much that I
turned off the Tiger Data & Time section that I
had previously been showing on my Menu bar, iStat
Menus shows the same information more concisely, and
you can also click on the Calendar icon / Time and
you will get a quick drop down calendar.
While I really like the look of the calendar above,
the fact that it matches the look of the Menu bar,
I'm not so crazy about the look of the other drop
down information panels. They look great in their own
right, but they contrast with the Menu bar, and the
Unified look coming to Leopard.
There are really only two things right now that I
kind of miss from MenuMeters, one is that MenuMeters
CPU usage showed System and User usage on the graphs
while iStat Menus only shows total in the graph,
though it does show the breakdown in the drop down
panel. The other item is that I liked being able to
configure red and green lights to represent drive
read/write activity. The arrows on the drive icon
represent the same thing, I just prefer the larger
color icons from Menu Meters. I'm sure I'll get used
to the arrows though. Yes, that's correct, I've
switched over to iStat Menus, and I'm not using
MenuMeters any longer. This is a really nice utility
and I'm already enjoying it quite a bit!
By the way, I just got a note from the developer and
they are considering having a different look for the
drop down panels in the future, I would guess with a
color scheme that more represents the Calendar drop
down. Great news.
iStat Menus is freeware, but remember that donations
for all this hard work is greatly appreciated. I'm
donating $5 right now - this is really nice and I'll
use it every day. Maybe more would be fair? At least
it's something.
Mac & iPod, meet BART
There is also an official iPod BART
QuickPlanner that is put out that can be very
helpful if you're not at your computer (or soon to
be released iPhone.)
BBC Motion Gallery Search Widget 1.5
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
Significant CenterStage release, 0.6.2
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
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Mozy revisited
Good news, there has been a refresh on the Mac beta, and at least for me, it's working great now.
If you're not familiar with it, Mozy is a free online backup service for a 2GB account, and for only $4.95 you have unlimited storage. It's a really slick setup that I use and recommend. Click this link or the image below to signup with my referral, this will give you an 2.3GB instead of just a 2GB account.
XLD, the Lossless audio decoder for Mac OS X
XLD is Universal Binary, so it runs natively on both Intel Macs and PPC Macs.
CenterStage Printable Demo PDF Booklet
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.
CenterStage is making nice progress
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.
........................................................................
TVShows (auto snag TV shows via Torrents)
TVShows is a helper application for the Mac that automatically grabs your shows for you, in Tivo speak, it's a season pass that works via bittorrent. TVShows doesn't do the actual downloading, it hands off the task to your preferred BitTorrent client. There is some intelligence to TVShows in regards to what it is supposed to download, and what is available - it will loosen the restrictions if it doesn't find exactly what you want (quality settings) in a reasonable time, and it will download the next best alternative.
If, like me, you have epileptic seizures at even the thought of having to watch commercials, then this is even sweeter because the torrent rips of TV shows on the net have all of the commercials stripped out already.
All popular (and many not so popular) series are
listed, you go through and select which ones you want
to snag, and set your criteria and off it goes and
does its thing. No more checking and rechecking to
see if a show is available for download, TVShows
snags it as soon as it's available. TVShows also
tracks which show you've most recently downloaded and
only grabs new material.
I don't have an AppleTV but think it would be cool if
there were an option to feed this into iTunes for
your aTV automatically.
........................................................................
Free Stopwatch application
The program is very easy to use, self explanatory.
There are three main functions, Stopwatch timer,
Countdown timer, and an alarm clock. Hard to not
recommend this, and at the price of Free, you have
nothing to lose.
........................................................................
Gas Prices and File Shredder Widgets
I appreciate useful and well designed widgets. Here
are two great ones from Interdimension.
They are free, donations accepted.
Interdimension
has 6 widgets in total at this time, check out
their website for details on them all. I'm going
to show two of them, my favorites.
GAS WIDGET
I always pay attention to gas prices, especially now
that gas is at astronomical prices. This Gas Price
widget shows you the cheapest gas stations in your
area.
File Shredder
Some times you want to securely delete a
file so that it can't be recovered, maybe it's that
digital pay stub with your pay information, or that
incriminating picture... Regardless what it is, File
Shredder Widget is a super simple and effective way
to securely delete a file.
Click the image
below for a move showing it in action.
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