The other day I read a commentary from Linus Torvalds boldly claiming that Linux was the do-it-all desktop OS everyone is dreaming of. It went something like this:
Nope, I don’t use either [Windows or Mac OS X]. OS X is kind of pointless (pretty much anything it has, Linux can do better) and Windows offers stuff that I don’t much care about (mainly games – and I’ve got games machines for those).
Note: This information is geared toward advanced users. Don’t try this at home. This weekend it was time to perform some maintenance on my main server. Its single IDE hard drive had developed the metallic whine indicative of bearing failure, and the power supply began the constant whistling telling the world that it was doomed. Original storage/power config:
Western Digital 200GB 8MB cache ATA-133 Onboard AMD-75xx IDE controller 250W ATX PSU (Yikes.
Another great article from Fortune magazine - it outlines issues people are experiencing with the Apple TV. Apple TV could have been much more than it is, but it has glaring problems and omissions which just make it unusable as part of an entertainment system. This article went so far as to point out some things I wasn’t aware of. Why Apple TV is a dud And there are other issues which the article doesn’t mention, but which would break the hearts of home theatre lovers everywhere.
Got a Windows Mobile device recently, the HTC P4000 “Titan”. Nice little device that lets me do a lot of Internet related activity (oh and also it’s a phone). I was going to do a writeup on this but someone went ahead and did it for me already - with the added bonus that they’re using a free service through which to sync, rather than running their own Exchange server. Good find!
This is a guide designed to help you convert video to the new H.264 codec. Special attention is paid to keep the video stream compatible with QuickTime, which is something I find sorely lacking in other HOWTO’s. This HOWTO has been updated! The quality of the result is now far superior. Check it out. The following tools are required:
faac gpac mpeg4ip x264-svn libdvdread libdvdcss mplayer Audio
rm audiodump.pcm && mkfifo audiodump.
Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.
Most of the Apple TV mods I’m seeing out there are designed to fill a need, but some of them seem quite misplaced. I think those involved in the modding frenzy should step back a bit and evaluate what they want from a modded Apple TV unit. Support for formats like XViD and DiVX, and higher disk capacity are by far the most popular two. Unfortunately most people want to make the mod as radical as possible simply for coolness factor.
Since the Apple TV is running MacOS X, it is possible to install arbitrary codecs and have it play. To my knowledge however, it will only identify .mov, .mp4, and .m4v as playable (and you can’t load .avi or .wmv into iTunes anyway, so no sync of those files to it). The first portion of this is for advanced people only, but I imagine a cottage industry will arise for Apple TV box mods.
For the past two weeks I’ve been researching on how to convert DVD subtitles to MPEG-4 TTXT (Timed Text) using both Macintosh and Linux tools, and arrived at a curious realization when reading various HOWTO’s on the Linux side of things. The interesting thing about most of them is that they advocate the use of .ogg or .mkv containers. For those of you who don’t know, a ‘container’ is the file format that stores the video sound and text components of a movie.
For everyone making a legitimate backup copy of your purchased DVD content, cough cough, I have a suggestion. I see a lot of people using DVDShrink or DVD2OneX (under Windows and MacOS respectively) to shrink dual layer DVD’s to the easier-to-find 4.7GB variety. Invariably they select the entire content of the DVD and shrink it, causing a quality reduction ranging from 40 to 70%. Figure out what you’re going to use the single-layer copy for.
