2 posts tagged “os x”

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...

So I'm goofing around on WoW Saturday morning, killing time before a run. I'm on my blood elf rogue, running through the Ghostlands. I look away from the screen for a minute, and when I look back, I'm being ganked by a couple spiders and a lynx. WTF. Sprint's up and I'm not high enough level yet for Vanish, so there's no escape. I'm dead. A flash of blinding rage overcomes me. Without thinking I punch my laptop screen. The display goes black, and then it's filled with an array of thin, weirdly colored vertical lines, except the spot which my fist contacted, which is still black but with weird grey streaks, kinda like a bruise. Oh great. Nothing I try helps. It's dead Jim.

Of course this is an OSAF laptop, so now I have to email my boss and be all "Hey dude, I did something very baaaaad". Of course he's totally cool and doesn't give me any shit for it, even though I can tell he's thinking that I'm a retard. And now I need a new machine immediately, cos I've got a raid on Sunday night, and I need to be able to work on Monday without going into the office - imagine going into the office... the horror... So I hop Muni to the Apple store and pick up a Macbook Pro. Nice. I've been wanting one of these for a while. In fact I've been begging Ted to have work get me one, but we've got this 3 year depreciation cycle, and I've only been at the company for 2y 3m. But now I have my own, and while there are many like it, this one is mine.

I spend much of Saturday setting up the machine, and it's super easy, like Macs always are. The only thing that's missing, STILL, is out of the box sync with my Treo 650. Luckily a few years back I bought The Missing Sync and was able to re-download it. Now I have my contacts synced between phone, laptop and .Mac. Didn't bother with calendar, though, cos I'm perfectly happy with Google for that.

All's well that ends well, except my credit card balance. And I'm mighty impressed with how easy and quick the Apple store made it for me to spend that money. No waiting in line, just some dude with a little handheld device asking for my email address so he can send me a receipt. That's how all shopping experiences should be.