Clip Roundup April 28, 2007
Posted by Drew in : Miscellany , add a commentWhen my Apple TV arrived as well as sorting out the actual content I also took the opportunity to have a good old sort out of some of the video clips I’d collected over the years. Of course these days it isn’t really necessary for the most part to collect clips as they are repeated ad nauseum on YouTube. However, I thought I’d collect some of my favorites here.
Local news x local authorities x whale = funny
My favorite ever Soccer AM clip 
Apple TV - First Impressions April 22, 2007
Posted by Drew in : Reviews, Technology , add a commentAt MacWorld Expo last year everyone was talking about the iPhone. However, of more interest to me was the announcement of the Apple TV. Now, I’m not normally one for buying a version 1 product but this really appealed to me so I went ahead. I’ve now had the device for a couple of weeks so I thought I’d share some of my initial thoughts.
To start though, it may be better to take a step back and look at why I wanted one in the first place. I’ve used iTunes on my Mac to stream my music to my stereo via an Airport Express for a couple of years now and whilst it worked OK most of the time it was prone to dropping data either when my network was being heavily used or especially when there were lots of people in the house. Which is of course a time when you’re likely to want to play music. However the point remained, I like the ability to listen to whatever music I want without having CD cases strewn across the living room. Apple TV offered to improve on this situation as it allows me to sync my iTunes up and then the music comes straight from the hard drive so no problem if the network is busy or however many people are in the house. The second attraction was the ability to view video podcasts on my main TV. I’ve become something of an addict where video podcasts are concerned (Geekbrief TV, Diggnation, Cranky Geeks, dl.tv to name but a few) but watching them on the MacBook Pro, while nice, isn’t quite the same as watching them on the big screen. The final reason was really extending the first reason. I have a lot of DVDs and at the moment they are starting to overflow the small storage unit that sits in my living room so the ability to stream DVDs from another machine and de-clutter was appealing.
The Apple TV comes in a pretty standard Apple box. Everything is clear and set up is a doddle. Picked up my WPA-PSK 802.11n AP without a fuss and connected first time. I have gone with HDMI for the main connection to the TV which obviously provides video and sound but I have also added an optical connection into my home theatre system for added oomph on the sound front. Again, as expected everything worked first time and was up and running before I’d had time to make a cup of tea.
The first step was to sync the iTunes library from my MacBook Pro for music and podcast purposes. This is a straightforward process and was fairly quick even the first time. One of the criticisms of the Apple TV was the small hard drive and this would indeed be a problem for anyone wanting to sync any decent amount of movies but for my purposes it hasn’t been a problem as my entire CD collection only amounts to a little over 300 albums which stacks up as about 14Gb. Podcasts added another 10Gb as there were quite a few to catch up on but even so, it’s a long way from the 32Gb reported as the capacity for the Apple TV.
Once syncing had finished it was time to take it for a run and everything works fine. The interface, known as Backrow, is as the name suggests a version of Frontrow that anyone using a modern Mac is probably used to. It’s a pretty easy interface but we’ll come back to this later. From the standpoint of music and podcasts I am happy with things. The sound pumped through the home theatre system is pretty much the same as it was coming from the MacBook Pro via Airport Express. One small gotcha was that in iTunes I have used the Party Shuffle feature quite a bit and over the years had set a number of tunes to skip when shuffling (mainly classical tracks) and of course these same settings are transferred over to the Apple TV which caused me some confusion when I selected my 3 hour long classical playlist and set it to shuffle and 15 minutes later it had ended! In fact one of the things to consider whether syncing or streaming is that items are ordered within Backrow based on the metadata within iTunes so spending a few minutes tidying up or adding additional info may be helpful.
So, two out of three reasons for my buying have been satisfied. So what about the third? Well here we have some good and some bad.
Firstly, let’s say what this isn’t about. It isn’t a criticism of the “quality” that I have seen elsewhere. Whenever you rip media you make a trade off between quality and file size. This seems to have been missed by several reviews I have read. There is no doubt that the movies I am watching on my Apple TV aren’t necessarily the same as they were on the DVD but this is because I have chosen to go for a lower file size. I accept the trade off.
In a fit of excess I decided on the day that my Apple TV arrived that I needed something to stream movies from. MacBook Pro’s are very good but with “only” 110Gb of hard drive space they aren’t that well suited to housing your entire DVD library. So I will confess at this point that I bought a Mac Mini for this purpose. As I already had a xxxGb Firewire drive I decided to add the two together as a starting point. The Mac Mini only has 802.11g wireless but so far this hasn’t been a problem.
Which leads me neatly on to the Apple TV streaming. When I first saw the product I saw the syncing and didn’t think too much further. But as I’ve already said, the hard drive isn’t big enough to deal with movies in any real sense so streaming is the only option unless you want to replace the drive and even then a single hard drive isn’t going to take anyone’s DVD library. I was slightly sceptical. Streaming to me meant one thing. That nice “buffering” message. Didn’t matter whether it was Real Player or M$ Media Player the result was the same. Buffering. But Apple have got things nailed. The streaming so far has been faultless. I’ve watched a couple of feature length films streamed from the Mac Mini without a single judder or dropped frame. The Apple TV even has a menu entry on the Movies to stream over the Internet movie trailers which again thus far have been delivered in all their high def glory without so much as a stutter.
At which point I’ll get my first gripe off my chest. OK so this isn’t actually an Apple TV issue, it’s an iTunes issue - specifically an iTunes store issue. When can the billions of people who don’t live in the US get to buy movies and TV shows? Come on Steve, you’ve got EMI to drop DRM from music surely you can allow the bulk of the worlds population to buy movies and TV shows. I know the MPAA will do anything it can to reduce the audience for it’s members products but someone needs to take a stand and frankly unless Microsoft of Google decide to buy a major studio then it’s down to you.
So having found that the streaming works well and having a “library” to stream from the next step is to bung some content on. Now here is the first of my main gripes. It is in two parts. The first is that everything has to be in iTunes to show up on Apple TV. Frontrow for the Mac will use the Movies folder, including links to content on other media contained within the Movies folder and this would have been really useful for Apple TV. This is a minor issue but it does make things less than simple when content is already available in this fashion. The second is the lack of CODECS that come with the Apple TV and the complexity of adding additional CODECS unless Apple decide to help. Within days of release the Apple TV had been hacked and various CODECS added but this is diametrically opposed to the whole ease of use concept that Apple products exude. How Apple can release a “media centre” that can’t play Divx and XVid movies is a total mystery. Even my Sony DVD player can do this. What’s more, fairly obviously, all of my existing content plays in the Mac Quicktime player and yet a lot of this won’t play in Apple TV. This is entirely down to the lack of CODECS. This is the second most shocking decision Apple made in the design in my opinion.
What does work? Well basically MP4 files encoded using the H.264 CODEC with AAC sound. Luckily on the Mac there are plenty of tools that can convert any existing files, my personal favourite is MPEG Streamclip which is actually available for Windows as well. This allows for many formats and if you also make sure you install the Mac CODEC pack then you’ll have a pretty comprehensive conversion kit. The output from MPEG Streamclip is pretty good on Apple TV, I choose a 16:9 ratio output for those items not already in that format and have converted several previous DVD rips to 720P format which creates a decent trade off between quality and file size.
At this point I’ll also state that everything ripped to stream from my Mac Mini to Apple TV I already own. Just saying. I’ve bought your product, not going to buy it again for a different device. Not that I can at the moment anyway.
To get my already purchased DVDs streaming ready I’ve been using MediaFork which is a, well, fork of the excellent Handbrake open source ripper. I’ve done a few, but by no means exhaustive, experiments and am currently ripping at 1500 kbps, audio at 192 kbs and setting the video into the 16:9 format closest to the original DVD. This seems to be producing decent quality files with very few artefacts and a sound quality that works perfectly well in my living room which lets be honest isn’t the best acoustic environment in the world so the subtlety in the audio that some of the complaints about Apple TV have been raising are kind of moot. Another issue I’ve seen raised regarding audio is that the Apple TV doesn’t output 5.1. Now I’m not an expert so I wouldn’t want to say one way or the other, all I can say is that to my ears in my room the sound from what I’ve so far compared sounds the same through the Apple TV connected to the home theatre system as the DVD connected to the same system.
Now if you’ve read so far then well done, I’m impressed. You’ve probably seen a “but” coming. So here it is. Of the items I’ve put onto my library thus far a large proportion are TV shows. This has highlighted a massive flaw in Backrow. The menu system has a TV Show entry and selecting that, as long as you have tagged your file properly, brings up a menu of TV Show titles. If you select a show you are then presented with a list of episodes. And this is the problem, there is no grouping by season. So if, as I do, you have 5/6/7 seasons of a show you are presented with one massive list (5 seasons x 22 episodes per season = 110 episodes in a list!). This is a huge flaw in the software. It ruins the otherwise smooth user interface experience. Bizarrely the original Frontrow software can make this sort of distinction but the issue appears to be with iTunes. Frontrow can make the distinction because it is reading a folder structure and taking it’s groupings from that, Backrow takes it’s groupings from iTunes which is much less mature. Within iTunes, even when the grouping element of the tags is set it still shows TV Shows as a long list. I think this is something Apple need to take heed of pretty quickly if they want the product to sell beyond the enthusiast market.
So how do I view things overall? Well actually I am pleasantly surprised at how good the Apple TV is. At the start of the process I had the 3 reasons to buy. Two were ticked off straight away and after three weeks I’m still happy with these aspects. The third I am broadly happy with and if Apple can sort out the TV show classification issues then I will happily say that all 3 criteria have been met and the product is a success.
Foundphotos April 21, 2007
Posted by Drew in : Miscellany , add a commentI recently came across the Foundphotos website. In a nutshell they have accumulated a shed load of photos from various P2P shared folders.
The photos are totally random but the site is oddly compelling. There are some really good photos amongst them. To be fair there are also some pretty dodgy ones as well!
Now, must go and check my P2P clients aren’t sharing any photos :-).