AppleTV Take 2: Maybe the Second Time Apple Gets it Right
We reported about the
AppleTV last year and we had mixed feelings about it. We loved the ease of use and the fact that unlike so many other devices on the market it just worked. One of our biggest pet peeves is that for this sector to take off devices need to just work. Not everyone likes to hack up little scripts to get their device to auto NFS mount their media server. Most people just want to plug the device in and start using it. This is were the
AppleTV has crushed everyone else. We have not see a simpler setup and an easier way to get a device to find all your media then the way Apple has done it. It is in this ease that our main complaint lies.
We are not fans of being forced to use iTunes for all of our media. Call us commitment phobic, but we don't like being tied down to one technology. We have a large collection of DVDs ripped to .ISO as well as a bunch of other random formats. Having to use iTunes means that we need to covert all of our media to fit the model that Apple wants us to follow. This is probably fine for like 90 percent of the users, it just bothers us.
Well Apple has added a new wrinkle to the mix that has made our ears perk up. They are rolling out DVD rentals via iTunes to be watched on the
AppleTV. All this can be done from your couch with the
AppleTV remote. This is what a lot of people have been dieing for, a simple way to rent movies without leaving the house or waiting for something in the mail.( Yes we know how lazy that just sounded, but it is the reality, we want things now and we want it with minimal effort ).
Apple says that you will be able to rent movies in either standard definition or high definition. The Hi-Def stuff will be 720p so don't be expecting full blown 1080p, but with the download model it makes sense, a lot less data to transmit for minimal quality gain( in most peoples eyes ).
We just recently picked up an
AppleTV so that we could test out the new rental option when it goes live. We are excited to see how fast they are able to stream it and how seamless it really feels. So stay tuned for an in-depth hands on review with the AppleTV.
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Posted by David Ficocello at January 16, 2008 11:36 PM
We use Handbrake to rip our ISO's to MP4.
We run a cronjob on our Mac that scans the DVD folder and searches for new movies to convert. When it finds a new entry it uses handbrake to make the mp4 and store it in the new directory.
Here is an example.
#!/bin/sh
ISO_PATHNAME="$1"
BASE_ISO_FILENAME=`basename "${ISO_PATHNAME}"`
MP4_BASE_FILENAME=`echo "${BASE_ISO_FILENAME}" | awk -F '.' '{ print $1 }'`
MP4_PATHNAME="//${MP4_BASE_FILENAME}.mp4"
if test -f "${MP4_PATHNAME}"; then
echo "Skipping ${BASE_ISO_FILENAME} already transcoded"
else
echo "Transcoding ${BASE_ISO_FILENAME}"
/Users/david/bin/HandbrakeCLI -N eng -L -i "${ISO_PATHNAME}" -o "${MP4_PATHNAME}"
fi
so we call that script with this script:
find //DVD -name "*.iso" -exec /Users/david/bin/transcode.sh '{}' \;
You can either do this via cron or do it manually whenever you add new files.
So if you already have your collection in ISO format you can just run it once and let it go overnight. it will take awhile depending on the power of the machine you have. If you don't own a Mac I'll have to look into other options for you.
Let me know if you have any other questions.
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