2 posts tagged “mac mini”

Following up on my last post: my buddy Todd (Mr. Foxmarks) pointed out that to connect the FireWave to my receiver I just need three mini-jack-to-RCA cables. I didn't realize that back before the digital days, these inputs were how you got surround sound into the receiver. But when I looked, there they were, lonely, forlorn and a little dusty. Now I'll have something to plug into them. Whoopee! I ordered the FireWave via next-day air, so I should be watching movies off my Mini in full 6-channel glory before the week is done.

Saturday morning I was digging through the stack of Netflix DVDs on my stereo looking for something to put on while grinding hunting quests in Nagrand and found this great Coheed & Cambria concert DVD, Live at Starland Ballroom. It was sort of scratched and beat up, and the thought occurred to me that if I ripped the DVD, I could store it in my iTunes library and play it through Front Row. That would be handy.

I recalled using MacTheRipper once before, so I grabbed that again and ripped the DVD to my desktop. Super easy. Then I did a little research and found HandBrake, a tool for encoding DVDs. I used it to convert the ripped DVD to a Quicktime ready mp4, anamorphic, with AAC 5.1 surround sound. This took a few tries and some experimenting with settings based on a few threads in the HandBrake forums. The presets in 0.8.5b1 helped a lot. Now I have the movie in iTunes and can play it anytime I want without having to walk to the other end of the house where my CDs are stored (the DVD was part of a CD/DVD set) or leave the DVD lying somewhere around my stereo as I had been, letting it get abused.

I'm pretty stoked about this and am considering ripping all of my DVDs - I have a couple hundred. The biggest issue with that is adding storage capacity. My iTunes library is using about half of a 200GB hard drive, and I'd need at least that much more space for all of my DVDs, not to mention room to grow. I'm not sure how well iTunes handles spreading library media across drives - when i add a track or movie to iTunes, how does it choose which disk to copy to? Something to look into. Then again I need to back up all that media, and the theater Mini's disk, and my laptop's disk, so it's starting to look like I need 700GB or more in total. I wonder if single disks are approaching 400GB yet.

Then of course, there's the question of whether or not to replace the Mini with an Apple TV. Right now I can download audio, movies, YouTube videos and rip CDs and DVDs directly on the Mini and write them to locally attached storage with several hundred gigs of space. If i used an Apple TV, I'd have to download and rip on my laptop, copy them to network storage (USB 2.0 drives hanging off my the Airport Extreme), and then have the Apple TV copy the 160GB worth that I deem most likely to watch back across the network (or I could have the Apple TV stream from network storage, but I'm skeptical of the WoW latency that would introduce). So I think I'll stick with the Mini for now.

And of course there's the fact that I don't get true 6-channel surround sound from either the Mini or an Apple TV. There's a relatively cheap ($99) analog decoder called the Griffin FireWave that claims to overcome Quicktime's (or is it Core Audio's?) downmixing of AAC 5.1 audio to stereo (read more here, here and here), but the FireWave outputs 6 channels over 3 mini-jack outputs, for which my 2001 Marantz receiver doesn't appear to have the appropriate inputs, so it looks like I'll be out receiver shopping if I want to hear movies or concerts in surround off of any Apple product. Luckily I have an XBox 360 to tide me over until then, but it makes so much noise, and then I have to get off my ass and put the DVD into it, which is what I was trying to avoid in the first place...