In Memoriam: Dell Computer

Fake Steve Jobs wrote a fantastic essay on why Dell is on its way down:

To think Michael Dell can do at Dell what I did at Apple is like thinking that if you give Michael Dell a striped shirt and put him in Picasso's old studio and let him buy supplies from Picasso's supplier then you'd have another Picasso. No. Apple is just that -- it's my paint store, the place I get my brushes and canvases and frames and smocks and the metal or clay or whatever Picasso used to make his sculptures. Apple is the loft where I do my work and make love to my nude models. Figuratively speaking. It's the kitchen where I pose for wacky photos with loaves of bread.

The truth on Dell? Dell is Gateway. Dell is Kaypro. Dell is Osborne Computer. It's DEC and DG and Apollo. It's a flower that bloomed and now must die. It's roadkill. It's mulch. Nothing wrong with that. In fact, it's a good thing.

[From Fake Steve Jobs]

I have a love-hate relationship with Dell computers that goes back more than ten years. It always frustrated me that their servers and desktop machines were so good, while their laptops, well, at least every single Dell laptop I have ever used, are shit. My last Dell laptop was less than one year old when handed to me at work, it was twice as thick as my previous laptop, a 15" Apple Powerbook G4. It also weighted about 10 pounds and its battery was already fried. The LCD screen eventually died, but at least it was replaced under warranty. The chassis CREAKED (I had an Apple iBook, which was mostly polycarbonate shells around a magnesium space frame, and that damn thing was sturdier than the Dell).
Still, it bothers me to see the company sucking on it, because they are my preferred source for cheap and reliable servers.

Coding Horror: Re-Encoding Your DVDs

I bought my first DVD about 10 years ago. At the time, they were a technical marvel:

* 8.5 Gigabytes per side
* 720 x 480 MPEG-2 video at 30 frames per second
* Dolby Digital (AC-3) or Digital Theater System (DTS) digital multichannel sound

Today, those specs are rapidly becoming pedestrian in the face of high definition cable, broadcast, and Blu-Ray discs. A few of the video sharing websites offer something perilously close to DVD quality already.

I say the DVD is the new MP3. We’re going to start tossing these things around like candy.

Unlike audio CDs, DVDs are already compressed digital data. You could extract the files from the DVD as-is, and play them back to your heart’s content. No re-encoding required. But like The Six Million Dollar Man, we can rebuild them better than they were before. Video codecs have advanced tremendously since the heady days of MPEG-2. These new codecs take a lot more playback horsepower than MPEG-2, but offer comparable quality in about one-fourth the size. We can turn our digital DVDs into better digital DVDs through superior computer science.

[From Coding Horror: Re-Encoding Your DVDs]

The article is right on the money. I am going through that exact experience: I have tons of DVDs scattered all over the house, and (exercising my fair use rights) I am slowly converting them to h.264 for our two AppleTVs. Once you get used to picking your DVDs off a menu, there is no turning back, especially if you use MetaX to pull the DVD’s cover and main information off Amazon. It looks no different than browsing for movies through the iTunes Music store.

The main problems to doing this are logistics:

1. Using my particular settings for Handbrake, it takes about 1.5GB of disk space for each hour of DVD video. Thanks God 1TB external drives are affordable now.

2. Limitations of the Mac Book Pro Superdrive. It is a bit too slow to do a real time rip + encode. That means using Mac The Ripper first, to rip the movie, then Handbrake to convert it to h.264.

3. Some DVDs are using protection schemes that are not part of the DVD specification, so these may not be ripped consistently. Not the end of the world, all it means is I have to keep the DVD at hand instead of buried into a closet.

4. I have a hardware accelerator for h.264, but it doesn’t allow me to do AC3 passthroughs. This means if I want to use the encoder, I will lose 5.1. Not cool.

5. 3GB per movie is kind of large when you are trying to move it across a home network to a different machine. My piece of shit wireless G router would choke on it, same router with everything on 100MB ethernet seems to work OK. I expect this to stop being an issue once I upgrade to wireless N.

The Other New iPhone?

Remember last year, when a little-known company named Uniea announced new iPod nano cases—with correct physical dimensions—before the new iPod nano was ever shown? As we mentioned shortly afterwards, readers were quick to slam Uniea and its mock-ups, but the cases proved perfect fits when the new nano was released. Now, there are all sorts of friend-of-a-friend stories swirling around about the second-generation iPhone, and perhaps not surprisingly, they contradict one another.

[From The Other New iPhone? | iLounge Backstage]

We are now in the minor Apple rumors season, which is the month before WWDC (Major Apple rumor season is the 5-6 weeks before MWSF). The current focus of the rumors is the second generation of the iPhone. We already have plenty of noise making the rounds about the subsidized phones, so now the focus is in specific leaks about changes to the design of the device. It is still a little too early for leaked photos, that's not going to happen until about a day or so before WWDC starts.

WIth the leaked templates we'll have 3D mockups in about a week (the 3D mockups are another tradition since there are always plenty of talented Mac-using artists with the skill and imagination to put together some fantastic what-ifs).

Five minutes after the iPhone presentation in WWDC, the Mac Crying Game starts yet once again.

AT&T to cut the price of Apple’s new iPhone

AT&T (T) is planning to put some extra shine on the even sleeker new Apple (AAPL) iPhone. When the 3G iPhone is introduced this summer, AT&T, the exclusive U.S. iPhone sales partner with Apple, will cut the price by as much as $200, according to a person familiar with the strategy. AT&T is preparing to subsidize $200 of the cost of a new iPhone, bringing the price down to $199 for customers who sign two-year contracts, the source says. Apple is expected to have two versions of the new iPhone, an 8-gigabyte-memory and a 16-gigabyte-memory model with price tags widely expected to be $399 and $499. AT&T and Apple declined to comment.

[From FORTUNE: Techland AT&T to cut the price of Apple’s new iPhone «]

I want to say that I'll believe this one when I see it, but it is just too god damn attractive. I have with AT&T for years (well, with the company that keeps getting renamed and remerged and it is currently called AT&T) and we have two iPhones, so the contract shove is not that big of a deal. Plus we can still sell our current 8GB iPhones to somebody that wants to run them unlocked for at least $200 each.

This is of course relying on the reports that the phone will include true GPS. 3G by itself is just not enough motivation to ditch our first generation iPhones so early, and the slimmer casing is a non-issue, since we don't mind the size of the current casing.

MetaX

It is obvious that my most common complaint about the iTunes and AppleTV platform is encoding issues. Still, there is a second aspect that most of us find annoying: proper tagging of media files.

iTunes simply can't deal with all of the tags that can be used in the movies that it can play:

1. You can't toggle video type.

2. You can't add a rating. You can add your own rating, but you can't mark a movie as PG-13, etc.

3. There is no way to mark a movie as multiple volumes. TV shows have seasons and episodes, movies don't have parts.

4. You can't change the artwork of movies with AC3.

I bet there is more, but those four are the most obvious. I was able to deal with #1 through an AppleScript, but until today I had no way to deal with the rest in a mechanical fashion. Today I learned of a donationware application, MetaX, that does most of that work. I just tested it with a half dozen movies and so far the results are beyond of what I expected.

Not only will it allow me to deal with these issues, but it automates them by both allowing a queue, and implementing automated lookups to both Amazon and the Internet Movie Database.

Kickass.

It even fills the description fields, ratings, etc. The only problem is that in the interest of paranoia, it rewrites your video file, then after completion it deletes the old one and adds the new one to iTunes. It makes for a slow queue, but at least if it fails you won't lose the original file.

Two weeks with the ElGato Turbo.264

It's been close to two weeks since I purchased my Turbo.264 and have managed to push about over 100 hours of video through it, equally split between TS_Video and transcodes from DivX. Almost every night for two weeks it has run nonstop doing TS_Video folders, and at least 2 hours every morning doing transcoding.

The good: it really works. Even at its busiest, it will run on real time (24fps or so for most video) while CPU utilization is very reasonable. The fastest I have seen it encode was 50fps for a WMV transcode for the iPhone (all my other encoding is for the AppleTV). Funny thing is that during the WMV transcode it could not recognize that I have a registered version of Flip4mac.

The bad: it is at the mercy of the software that you use. The application that ships with it slaughters DVDs. I have seen many instances of audio tracks our of sync. It botches the aspect ratio. It can't deal with most TV season DVDs. And no AC-3 passthrough.

Roxio Popcorn 3 is a little better. I haven't seen it screw up the aspect ratio, and again: no AC-3 passthrough. I don't understand why this is a problem since all it has to do is take the sound as is, it won't need to transcode it. It can handle DVD chapters and TV season DVDs a lot better. The in-progress status is not as good as the one with the application supplied with the Turbo.264.

After the first week or so I realized that I could still use the dongle for transcoding and leave the TS_Video jobs to run overnight with Handbrake. Handbrake on this laptop when it is idle can easily run over 30fps, which is not exactly terrible.

I still think it is a great buy, and if you don't care about the AC-3 passthrough then it is even better (for example, if you are watching AppleTV and you are using only the component cables). Just make sure you try Popcorn 3 before settling on the default application.

Adobe to Mac-Bound Artists: No 64-bit Photoshop CS4 for you

(the Soup Nazi, picture related)

Apple, Adobe, and 64-bit Photoshop

Posted Apr 3rd 2008 1:00PM by Mat Lu
Filed under: OS, Software, Developer

Adobe's announcement that Photoshop CS4 will be 32-bit only on OS X has the Mac web buzzing today. Accusations of blame are being shot at both Adobe and Apple by various pundits (though notably not by the companies themselves). Fortunately, some of the better Mac pundits are also weighing in with interesting opinions on this development.

Over at Ars, John Siracusa has penned an interesting historical account of the relationship of Adobe and Apple, and the Carbon API which is at the center of the controversy. He somewhat grimly sees this Photoshop development as the furthering of bad blood between the two companies and suggests that "the real storm may be yet to come" as Adobe and Apple clash over Flash and Air, etc. (witness the Flash on iPhone kerfuffle).

[From Apple, Adobe, and 64-bit Photoshop - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)]

I think somebody at Adobe forgot who butters their bread. They still have the balance sheet mentality of picking which side of the house will bring the best short term return, screw the other side. The problem with this is that they are missing out on the opportunity to exploit on the newest bang-for-the-buck shifts between PCs and Macs. Had they decided once and for all to drop Carbon, they could have used that risk to show off to their users what the can really do. It would not surprise me if the Mac 64-bit version would slaughter Vista, but it would surprise people spending $4000 on high end PCs only to find out the same money could buy them a monster Mac rig.

ElGato Turbo 264: First Impressions

There is a downside to having an AppleTV, iPhone or video capable iPod: converting videos to a compatible format is always a hassle. There are plenty of applications to handle this problem, no two of them are alike.

I have tons of DVDs, ripping them turned out to be quite the adventure. I did the first few dozen or so one by one, with Handbrake. I wouldn't know until I got an AC3 receiver that I ripped all of these DVDs wrong and will have to eventually re-rip them because the default Handbrake conversion for AppleTV converts the AC3 tracks to AAC. Ouch.

VisualHub is great, but it is slow. It doesn't have a pause button, which is really stupid: if you have a big batch of files to convert and you are using too much power, you can't pause the job, you have to kil l it, then remove from the queue whatever is good to go and then start again.

I didn't know I could use Handbrake to process files from a DVD already ripped. The time needed to rip a DVD with Mac The Ripper, then convert it for the AppleTV with Handbrake is usually less than if you let Handbrake do the whole job. More ouch.

Roxio Popcorn, for some really fucking stupid reason, won't allow you to pass-through the AC3 from a DVD, instead you are forced to convert to AAC. The interface *is* better, and it queues nicely, plus it has a proper pause feature. And it allows for hardware acceleration.

That's when I learned that ElGato has a hardware accelerator for h.264. I spent a week or so scouring the web for reviews and hate posts about it, and overall it seems to have a good reception. It is universally accepted that if your mac is not very new, the performance improvements are dramatic. But, what about recent fast macs?

After grinding through about 15 hours of video, I can tell that even in a Mac Book Pro Core 2 Duo 2.33GHz, 3GB RAM, Leopard, and while Time Machine is running, iTunes is streaming to my AppleTV over 100BaseT, and Parallels Desktop is running XP Pro over a Cisco VPN, it is running a hell of a lot faster than VisualHub.

The best part is that the resource utilization of the Turbo.264 application is very low, most of the time I can't tell it is running. The USB dongle with the hardware encoder doesn't even get warm. Right now I am seeing consistent 40fps or better encoding (the source material is 29fps, if you can't crank out at least that much, it means it will take you longer than one hour to encode one hour of video). In real life this means that I am cranking out avi/divx to h.264 conversions at about one hour of encoding for every two hours of video input. I imagine this is going to depend wildly on the source material.

So yes, even if the machine is fast, you can at your very worst expect it to use very little resources to crank out the same workload that would usually max out a multiple core mac.

The 22-hour long Parallels Desktop Adventure

Sometime on Sunday night or early Monday morning, my Windows XP (Parallels Desktop, 10.5.2) started to run like ass. I usually brag that in my Mac Book Pro (Core 2 Duo 2.33 GHz) I can have Parallels running with a bunch of crap open, through a VPN, while having another bunch of crap open on the OS X side, with no real hit on performance.

Not this time. XP was choking just trying to debug a project in VS 2005. Just horrible.

I blew a couple of hours installing every optional patch that I had missed in Windows, like the ASP.net 2.0 framework service pack and some other crap. Then I noticed that I had about 1GB of space left in XP, from the 32GB assigned.

First step was to use the Parallels image tool to expand to 64GB. No cigar, it still said 1GB left. Why? Because I was using an expanding virtual HDD.

Switching it to a non-expanding drive didn't work. After this I hit a vicious circle with the compress tool, which would waste 2-3 hours of my time at a time, only to find myself still at the same spot.

I spent my night waking up every hour or so, checking the progress of the damn compress tool.

At around hour 18, I found this post. It took me one hour to duplicate my 32GB virtual HDD, then a few minutes to get the drive extended properly and reassigned. The rest of the time was burned trying to figure out why I couldn't use the mouse (it had ditched the parallels tools), so I had to remember how to navigate in windows without a mouse.

Good times.

End result: XP now flies, I have two VS 2005 projects open, with VSS sources through a VPN, and everything runs beautiful. I also made a second virtual disk to use it exclusively for the swap file, so that probably has something to do with the performance boost.

The Little Things

After a few more days using OS X 10.5 Leopard, things are starting to take shape:

1. Time Machine is the only backup application that I have seen in the past 15+ years that actually makes sense just by looking at it. Setup is basically automatic, restorals are simple: open Time Machine, navigate to the last backup with the file that you are missing, and click restore. Done. I have been working all weekend and I never get to catch the hourly backup while it is running, resource usage is very low.

2. I turned off Spaces, they were more annoying than useful. I know these have a use, but not for me.

3. Some of the networking changes are very clever. I really like the new shared folders menu and the ability to set permissions by user. I also like the built-in VNC client (not that Chicken of the VNC ever bothered me).

4. The parental controls are nice, but only if the application is compatible with it. This means that PJ is stuck using Safari instead of Firefox. The new options allowed us to set daily time brackets for his Mac usage, with a separate start and end time for weekends. If you would rather use a fixed amount of usage per day, it is available too.

Mozilla CEO Says Apple’s Safari ‘Update’ Undermines Users’ Trust

Whether you want it or not, you may accidentally install Apple’s Safari web browser on your computer by doing a routine update to your iTunes. That sounds strange? It is, as it seems to be a rather pushy strategy from Apple to promote their new software.

After Joe Wilcox noted in his Microsoft Watch blog yesterday that an Apple Software Update window popped on his daughter’s computer offering a Safari download as “bonus” to the regular update, talks about Apples strategy began to emerge.

Mozilla CEO John Lily noted on his blog: “What Apple is doing now with their Apple Software Update on Windows is wrong. It undermines the trust relationship great companies have with their customers, and that’s bad – not just for Apple, but for the security of the whole Web.”

[From Mozilla CEO Says Apple’s Safari ‘Update’ Undermines Users’ Trust]

Jesus Christ, would you grow a pair of balls?

Is the Apple envy in the FOSS community so bad that everyone is going to get their panties in a bunch over a god damn installer? I saw the stupid installer, it had THREE things in it:

1. iTunes
2. Quicktime
3. Safari

There is NOTHING covert or unfair about it. It has a list of three things, clearly named, and each item has a check box. No surprises there.

And how the fuck is this a security issue? Vista was a complete flop, Firefox 3 is still not out of beta, yet big hats from both camps have the time to stop their hard work (whatever the hell is it they do) to bitch and moan about a pop up with an optional download/update?

Mac OS 10.5: First Impressions

It's done, I finally ran out of excuses for upgrading to Leopard. My basic issue was Parallels Desktop, if I kill it I basically lose my job, so I had to wait for the first Leopard-specific build. Once that build came, it was a matter of finding a hole in my schedule so I could spend a few hours just messing with the laptop.

It took a month.

I was finally able to upgrade the Mac Book Pro yesterday afternoon. It took less than three hours from the moment I started to the point I ran out of things to upgrade. I also upgraded the iMac G5, which I am absolutely convinced that it took less than two hours to do it all. I did not check the times, but it does feel like it was less time.

While talking to Alec Esotérica about it, I came out with a very quick review, which to my surprise covered almost everything:

1. Think evolutionary instead of revolutionary.
2. Spaces is only good to show off.
3. Stacks are handy as fuck.
4. The cover flow finder is nice when you are trying to find the right porn.
5. Remote desktop client is now built into the finder, that's nice.
6. iChat is still useless.
7. The dock is now worse: instead of an easy to notice black triangle, active apps have a tiny blue LED underneath the 3D dock surface.
8. I like stacks a lot.
9. Can't test time machine until the new drive arrives.
10. It did not break parallels, for that I am grateful and thrilled.
11. Safari is fast as fuck, but it isn't Firefox

That was within an hour of installing it. The changes to the finder take time to get used to, the one that was the easiest was the downloads folder, something I had done by myself less than 3 days ago, so I was already used to the idea that my downloads were no longer landing on the desktop.

I already got Time Machine running, but I won't see it in action until the first backup is done, which at this pace is going to take the rest of the evening.

The Faraday Cage

A real Faraday Cage is an enclosure that blocks electromagnetic radiation. Over the past few years I have been struggling with my condo because sometimes it feels like I am living inside of a Faraday Cage: my cell reception always sucks and I never get enough signal strength from my wireless access point.

Once we got the two AppleTVs, it got worse. Two AppleTVs streaming off two separate Macs, both on 802.11g is too much of a pain in the ass, and this is assuming the network is running normally. Mine wasn't, so performance for PJs AppleTV was always subpar when used in streaming mode. Because of that, his is setup to pull the actual content instead of streaming it.

Here's more or less what the network was like:

Red: 100MB ethernet.
Blue: 54MB wireless.
Green: Mac / AppleTV pair
I decided to hell with it, why bother with wireless when the condo is just 1000 square feet? I asked my friends around, and they all recommended the same: wire it yourself.
One of my coworkers lent me his crimping tool and his line testing gizmo, plus a bag of RJ45 connectors. I spent about $40 in cable, plus some really neat cable staples and a $10 5-port 100MB ethernet switch.
Last night was patch cord training, since I had not put together an ethernet cord since sometime in 1998. After two hours I had three completed patch cords that could actually pass the gizmo tests.
Today I wired my office, ran a line to PJ's room and made more patch cords. This is what the network looks like right now:


Red: VoIP line (off the Comcast Arris MTA)
Green: 100MB ethernet in my office
Blue: 100MB line to PJs room
Orange: 100MB ethernet in PJs room
There was virtually no benefit to the Mac Book Pro (which was never more than 10 feet away from the wireless access point), but my AppleTV is a little bit more responsive. The real benefit is that now there are no more networking issues with the stuff in PJs bedroom.

Mah Hero

There is this curious thing that happens when you are dealing with movies, music videos and TV shows from iTunes: the bulk update can't edit all of the video dependent fields, like video type, show name, season number, etc.

This is not that big a deal unless you love your AppleTV so much that you decide to rip all of your legally owned DVDs into a huge hard disk so you can watch them from your AppleTV. Try editing a network season of 24 shows, one episode at a time. Apple will probably catch up on this before iTunes 8 is out, after all they are fanatic about UI consistency, but for now we are screwed by having to do it by hand.

Hence, mah hero: Doug Adams.

Not only did Doug fix this with a simple Applescript, he put it on his website for free (he does take donations). The damn thing even has an installer! I find this amazing because adding an Applescript to iTunes involves grabbing a file and copying it to a folder in the library. Yet he went through the extra step of providing an installer script.

Photo Credit: Photo by cosmonautirussi, used under the terms of a Creative Commons license.

Apple Wireless Keyboard

After a hair under one year of furious service, my Mac Book Pro's keyboard now has at least one dead key, plus at least two that are so worn out that they look as if some kind of corrosive liquid fell on it. It is covered under warranty, but I just did not have the time to waste at the Genius bar, so I tried stealing PJs Logitech wireless (non Bluetooth) keyboard.

Not so good. After spending endless hours typing into a Mac Book Pro, a full profile keyboard is simply unbearable. Before the workday was over I had Ivette pick me up an Apple Wireless Keyboard from the closest Best Buy.

I am pretty impressed so far. It was annoying to get used to the new key spacing and typing position, but after just a few hours it feels very damn nice. It is also a really sexy looking piece of gear. It seems to be a solid piece of extruded aluminum, with a white plastic tray underneath. The thickness of the slab is uniform, looks like a hair under 1/4 inch thick. The three batteries are kept in a tunnel along the top edge, which gives it a natural tilt. One side has a power button, the other side has the battery access door. If placed on top of the Mac Book Pro its footprint almost matches the built-in keyboard.

As for the bluetooth itself, I haven't tested range, and it took me two tries to get it recognized because I am too god damn stupid to read the very elemental instructions displayed on the screen. All this meant was that it took me 5 minutes to get it setup instead of less than two.

What I am really curious about is about the new key profile, and how long will it stay clean compared to the standard Mac Book Pro keyboard. This the same keyboard that now ships built into the regular Mac Book line, so hopefully it is better than the piece of shit keyboard on the Mac Book Pro.

Caution when updating your iTunes to 7.6.1

Be careful when updating iTunes to 7.6.1. If your library is not in the default location, it may reset it. For example, my library is in an external drive, and it reset it to Music:iTunes:iTunes Music. As I spent the day adding movies and TV shows to my library, they were stored in my laptop drive instead of my external drive. Fixing the problem only takes a few minutes, but then you have to remember that all of your videos will be clumped into the Movies group, so you must edit them one by one if you need to classify them as TV shows.

Photo by ElitePete, used under a Creative Commons License.

iTunes 7.6.1 out: bug fixes, plus a weekly 99 cent rental special

iTunes 7.6.1 is out, I haven't been able to find the actual release notes, but so far it is reported as limited to fixes for AppleTV Take Two. On a side note, Apple is now offering a 99 cent movie rental every Thursday. You still have a month to start watching the movie and once started you have 24 hours to finish watching it.

Photo by heyjoewhereyougoingwiththatguninyourhand, used under a Creative Commons License.

MacBook and MacBookPro get keyboard update - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

Sonofabitch!

Today Apple released a keyboard update for both the MacBook and the MacBook Pro notebooks. In regular Apple style, their release notes are not extremely profuse, "This MacBook and MacBook Pro firmware update addresses an issue where the first key press may be ignored if the computer has been sitting idle. It also addresses some other issues."

[From MacBook and MacBookPro get keyboard update - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)]

I had been putting up with this crap for a month, assuming that my keyboard was dirty! I even got as far as dissecting the "T" key because it consistently missed presses. This is no trivial matter, the scissor mechanism under the keys is extremely delicate. And I can't even install the damn thing because it requires 10.5 and I haven't updated yet.

More on AppleTV Take Two

After a weekend of basically beating the living crap out of our two AppleTVs (40GB), it is obvious to us that this thing is definitely the wave of the future. It is literally a cable box on crack.

It took me less than a day to get PJ convinced to stop watching videos in his Xbox 360 (streamed from a Mac running Connect360) and instead use the AppleTV. His AppleTV was running, almost nonstop, every minute he was awake over the weekend. And today, school holiday, the same deal. He woke up and immediately turned it on.

His only problem is that sometimes he gets lost in the menus, not because he can't read them, but because hitting the menu button multiple times doesn't keep moving you up the menu hierarchy, which is not very intuitive. Instead it alternates between two actions.

I am having a ball with my own, so far my only real frustration is that I can't use my second HDMI port in my 37" Olevia. It's not the end of the world, at 1080i and with nice component cables it looks almost identical to HDMI.

What probably became more of a challenge was to learn certain workarounds in iTunes. For example, you can't do a multiple edit for video files if you want to edit the video dependent tags, instead you must edit them one by one. I found some utilities to work around this, but I hated them all.

I think so far the most puzzling issue was that I was not seeing new artwork as I was assigning it to movie files. I found a post in the Apple support forums where it explained how to force it to see the new art. All you have to do is delete the file from the library, but leaving the file itself in the same place. When you add it again, it only takes a few seconds, and it will force the AppleTV to load the new art.

Another issue that had bugged me forever: space. This Mac Book Pro has a 200GB drive. After taking into account Parallels Desktop, iTunes and iPhoto, I was left with maybe 20GB or so to play with. I had forgotten that nothing forces you to run your iTunes library in the default location in your home folder. In fact, it can run from anywhere. Ivette bought me a 500GB external drive so we could back up whatever shows we bought for PJ, since we did not want to risk the iMac dying for good and having to pay for these shows twice. I decided to tell iTunes to switch my library home to a folder in the 500GB drive, and the damn thing just worked. First it spent a few minutes rewriting the library file, then it copied everything to its new location. The process did not take long, and now I have basically unlimited storage for my iTunes.

AppleTV, Take Two

Today Ivette picked up two 40GB AppleTVs, one for my home office, the second one for PJs room. Setup was not like a typical Apple product, in fact, it was a pain in the ass.

1. I was completely aware that the AppleTV would arrive with the old version of the software, and I still forgot to upgrade it, then wasted too much time trying to get it connected to iTunes.

2. I did not notice that the two MAC addresses (ethernet and airport) were in the box, so I had to waste yet more time getting the MAC addresses into my router's allowed list.

3. My 37" Olevia is officially a piece of shit. It gave me a lot of grief while trying to use HDMI, while PJ's 32" Olevia (which can't use HDMI to connect to an Xbox 360) has had zero issues.

4. There are two ways to connect to iTunes, the interface does not do such a good job explaining the differences.

5. The upgrade to Take Two took forever, it was just ridiculous.

Notice that many of these problems are my fault, or not directly related to the device itself. Once setup it has been pure joy.

Even without using h.264, the videos that I have transcoded look fantastic. The interface is also much nicer than what I am used to with the Xbox 360 (connected through Connect360).

I haven't rented movies yet, but I did buy two season passes for PJ (Calliou and Teletubbies). I have no idea how to backup media purchased from an AppleTV, so I bought these from Ivette's iMac. That way I know I can copy these downloads offline just in case.