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With the arrival of my Apple TV yesterday I needed a solution to get my Xvix/WMV/Divx files converted and imported into iTunes so that I can watch them. I already have Quicktime Pro, which with the recent release added the ability to “Export to Apple TV”. Since I have a lot of files, and no desire to sit around and convert these one at a time, it seemed like a perfect job for automator. I figured someone out there at some point had to have done something similar so I did a bit of google searching and found the required automator actions. Using the actions I found combined with the sample workflow they have already created for you, it is trivial to set-up a workflow that will convert to the Apple TV format and then import the file into your iTunes library. With a slight modification you can set it up a plug-in and attach it to a folder action. Now I have a simple drop folder on my desktop that launches quicktime pro and converts the file to an Apple TV viewable format, imports the file into iTunes, and cleans up after itself.

Here is a simple step-by-step guide to walk you through what I did:

1) Install xvid, divx, and wmv codecs.

These can be found here:

Divx
Xvid
WMV

2) Install the automator actions for compressing and importing into iTunes.

Download Quick Time Compression Actions and Workflow

3) Once installed you will have a directory on your desktop called “QuickTime Compression Workflow resources”. In this folder you will find a sample automator workflow called “Convert videos and add to iTunes”. Open this workflow in automator.

4) Delete the first step of the workflow which is “Ask for Finder Items”. Instead of being prompted for which items to convert, we want to setup a folder action that will automatically convert the files dropped in our folder.

5) Add a new first step to the workflow called “Get Selected Finder Items”. This action can be found under the “Finder” application.

6) Under the “Compress QuickTime Using Most Recent Settings” step change “Choose directory for converted files” to the desktop (or any other temporary folder you want to use).

7) Create a new folder on your desktop. This will be your drop folder, so call it something relevant. I called mine “Convert to AppleTV”.

8 ) Back in automator, click on file and choose “Save as plug-in”, choose “Folder Actions” from the “plug-in for” drop down. Give the plug-in the same name as your folder. Select your newly created folder for the “Attached to folder” option. Click save.

9) Since the script will convert whatever file you drop in your conversion folder using the last settings you used in QuickTime you’ll need to launch QuickTime with a test file and then choose “Export” from the file menu. Assuming you have the most recent version of QuickTime Pro you should have an option “Export Movie to Apple TV”.

10) That’s it!!! Now just close out of everything and drop your files into your new folder and watch as they are converted and imported to iTunes. It works great to leave your Mac on and then drop a bunch of files in the folder before you go to bed. When you get to your PC in the morning everything should be all ready to go.

To find out more about folder actions, check this page out:

Folder Actions

With the new version of OS X (Leopard) Apple has included some great functionality in Time Machine. Your Mac will automatically backup to an external drive every hour. It includes the ability to recover deleted files in a timeline. The one downside to the Time Machine approach is that the data isn’t remotely stored. A couple years ago my wife and I had a house fire where most of our things were destroyed. Fortunately the fire was extinguished before it spread to where our computers were so we didn’t lose any data. If it had been elsewhere in the house it could have been a serious situation for us if we lost all of our digital files.

After the fire I have followed a manual process of backing up our files on an external drive that I store in our fire safe. The problem with this is it requires me to actually do the work, which I often put-off. When Amazon S3 was introduced I immediately saw the potential to use it as an automatic remote backup source. I hadn’t invested much time in it up until now, but I just got a new computer (MacBook Air!!) and while setting it up I thought it would be a good opportunity to get my backup situation in order.

There are some great tools already in existence that can do most of the heavy lifting for you. The primary tool for doing remote directory syncs is called s3sync which is a script written in Ruby. Lucky for us OS X comes with Ruby pre-installed so there isn’t much work to get it working.

Here is my step-by-step guide to getting your machine setup to do automatic daily backups to Amazon. I developed these steps on my MacBook Air running Leopard however they should work for previous versions of OS X as well.

Step 1) First off, your going to need and Amazon Web Services account. Head over to http://aws.amazon.com/ and sign-up for an account to use S3. The prices are very cheap ($0.15/GB/Month). Once you have your account setup you will need two things to use Amazon S3. Your Amazon access key and your secret key. These are what s3sync will use to authenticate you to Amazon.

Step 2) I’ve packaged together a zip file with all the files you are going to need to get this setup along with SSL. Download the file at http://vallery.net/s3backup.zip. You can go to http://s3sync.net/ to see if a newer version if you like but you’ll need to figure some of this out on your own.

Step 3) You need to create a “bucket” in amazon to store your files. A bucket is similar to a folder, however it is globally uniquely named across all Amazon S3 users. In order to create the bucket you are going to need one of the S3 GUI applications that exist. I have included in the zip file the one I have used called “S3 Browser”. You can find the latest version at http://people.no-distance.net/ol/software/s3/. Once you launch S3 browser click on “connection” then “new connection”. You’ll need to provide the access details you got from Amazon in step 1. Once you have connected click the “Add” button which will allow you to create a new bucket. Because the name has to be globally unique I used “vallery-macbookair-backup” where vallery is my last name. Keep track of this bucket name because you need it in the next step.

Step 4) Once you have the zip file I created downloaded it should automatically extract itself into your downloads folder creating a new folder called “s3backup”. Within the s3backup folder are all the files and scripts you will need in order to get this working. There is one key file that needs to be edited in order to make this all work which is called “backup.sh”. Open the file “backup.sh” and replace the place holder access key, secret key, bucket name with the ones you obtained form Amazon and step 3.

Step 5) Now that you have all the files ready to go you need to select a place to store them. The application will run as root at the system level in order to prevent file access issues, therefore I recommend storing the entire s3backup folder in your /Library folder. You should copy the entire folder using finder to /Library. There are a few other paths in “backup.sh” that will need to be updated if you choose to store the file elsewhere.

Step 6) You need to setup your Mac to automatically run the backup shell script on a regular interval. There are a couple ways to do this. Since I am Unix guy I immediately started looking at cron. I discovered however that Apple recommends you use launchd for scheduled tasks. It is fairly complex to setup a scheduled task using launchd but thankfully someone has already created a simple GUI that will let you do it. The application Lingon can be used for this. I’ve included the latest version at the time of writing this in the s3backup directory but you can always obtain the latest version from http://lingon.sourceforge.net/. Once you have launched Lingon you need provide some information. Click the “New” button to start a new agent. Choose “Users Daemons” so that the script will run as root and have access to all of the users on your Mac. Once you have created your new daemon you need to give it a name. I recommend something like com.vallery.s3backup where vallery is your name. You need to give the command line action for what to execute. Again, this assumes that you have stored the s3backup folder in /Library. Enter: “/bin/bash /Library/s3backup/backup.sh > /dev/null”. Lastly you need to give it a schedule as to when to run. I have mine setup to “At a specific date” with “Every day” selected and the time set to 4:00am. This is great if your leave your Mac on all the time. You might select a different option so that you can make sure your Mac isn’t in use when it is doing the backup. Click the “Save” button. It will require you to type in your admin password and then restart your computer.

That is it, your system should run the first backup as schedule. It will take a long time initially as the upload speed is limited to your internet connection. Once the initial upload has taken place it will only upload files that are new or have changed going forward. The script is setup to backup everything in the /Users folder. If you would like to limit what is being backed up you can change this to something else.

In the unfortunate event you actually need to get data out of the s3 store there are a number of applications that you can use to do this. Initially I have been using Panic’s Transmit however it seems to have problems with the way s3sync is storing the data. I found another great free app called “S3 Browser” which has worked well for me. You can also use the Firefox plugin S3 Fox.

With all the news today from Apple, I think one of the most overlooked announcements was that TV shows are available now in HD. HD is sort of a vague term though and just really means higher resolution (more pixels) than a standard NTSC broadcast. They failed to tell us what resolution the new TV shows are actually provided in. Because the target delivery device for the HD content is the Apple TV and it has been documented to have a hard limit of 1280 x 720, we can assume that the resolution is at least less than or equal to this for the new content. The standard resolutions which are used by broadcasters are:

1080p or 1920 x 1080 (progressive)
1080i or 1920 x 1080 (interlaced, which means only have the picture is displayed at a time)
720p or 1280 x 720
480i/p or 640 x 480 in 4:3 mode or 854 x 480 in 16:9

Anything less than 720p and you really can’t call it HD, it is just “enhanced definition” TV.

Here is a handy chart showing the various resolutions in comparison (taken from Wikipedia).

I pulled some screenshots from my iMac playing back an episode of the office. Here is a comparison between the standard definition and the high definition versions of the same scene. The first shot is the standard definition, and the second is the high definition. Click the thumbnail to view the full-size image.

If you look in iTunes at the info for “The Office” video files, it is reporting that the resolution of the “Standard Definition” version is 853 x 480 (or 480p) and that the resolution of the “High Definition” version is 1280 x 720 (or 720p). You can see some improvement, specifically around the text on the milk carton, but I don’t really see enough to justify the extra $1.00 per episode.

I’d really have liked to see Apple step up and offer content in 1080p. If they are going to lure me away from my DirecTV service and my DVR, they need to offer me something more compelling. I already get my shows in 1080i and will be getting them soon in 1080p form DirecTV. If they had come out and started offering 1080p content I would be buying all my TV shows from iTunes. As it is I can get higher resolution content for an arguably cheaper price from DirecTV service. Until they can get the massive amount of content, all available in 1080i or greater, I think I’ll stick to my current solution.

I’ve been a long time Google Reader user. It’s great having one place that remembers exactly what you have read and what you haven’t. I had never really spent any time using a desktop feed reader as the online ones have always met my needs. Recently however I started a new job at NewsGator Technologies. We make a number of products focused around RSS including several desktop readers. In order to “eat the dog food” I began the process of moving over all of my RSS consumption to utilize the various NewsGator products.

I’ve tried using the NewsGator online service in the past however it didn’t provide me a compelling reason to switch from Google Reader. This time I was determined to figure out the best possible way to utilize the various products in a way that would make it easier and quicker for me to follow the large number of feeds I’m subscribed to (currently 62, some of which are fairly high volume). I try to limit my news reading to no more than an hour or so a day, but in that hour I have a lot of content to skim through and read. Finding a really efficient process is critical to maximizing the use of the limited time.

After tweaking with things a bit, here is my new setup:

• I’ve setup my account on the NewsGator online server (I’m using an internal to NewsGator version of the public server, but it’s the same thing).
• I’ve configured my feeds into the NewsGator server to be fetched and have the posts stored for my retrieval via one of the various clients. My feeds are organized into 4 categories (Technology, Blogs, Local News, National and International News).
• I’m using NetNewsWire on my home iMac and my MacBook Air, The iPhone version of NetNewsWire, and FeedDemon on my work laptop.

The advantages of using NetNewsWire and FeedDemon versus Google Reader are numerous. Here are some of my observations after just a few days usage:

• The biggest single advantage is offline viewing. NetNewsWire can fetch all of the content and then store it locally on my Mac to view when I’m away from an internet connection. This is also true of FeedDemon although I haven’t used that yet.
• With NetNewsWire there is no waiting for page loads of the content or images. Because everything is fetched in advance I’m only communicating with the NewsGator servers, which are very fast. All of the content is downloaded when I first sync so when I’m actually reading the posts I can just click through them with no delay. This is a huge time saver when I’m only looking at titles on 85-90% of the posts that I receive, being able to move on to the next one without waiting the 1-2 seconds it takes in Google reader to catch-up multiplied by the thousands of posts I skim in a day is certainly time saved.
• My process with Google Reader was to skim the posts for the ones that I’m actually interested in reading and then open the permalink in a new tab. This will cause the page to load in the background while I continue skimming Google Reader. This process worked well, but what works even better is the built in browser within NetNewsWire. When the permalink is clicked in NetNewsWire it is opened up in a tab right within the application. That page is opened up in a “tab” of sorts identified by a helpful thumbnail image of the resulting page. NetNewsWire keeps all of these pages open while I’m reader so that I can easily consult them without filling up my browser tabs.
• Something I haven’t taken advantage of before now are feeds that contain media rich (audio and video) downloads. Google Reader has no real way to accommodate this. In NetNewsWire however you can configure feeds to push content straight to a helper application like iTunes. This allows content distribution via RSS without the need of a central service. I look forward to more and more content providers using this approach for rich media in the future.
• I use the “clipping” functionality to save off various posts that I find interesting enough to share with others. With the online service you can configure NewsGator to publish an RSS feed of your “clippings”. I’ve setup this feed to be syndicated to my wordpress blog so anyone can go and see the stories that I found interesting.
• I can access my feeds from anywhere using my iPhone. The iPhone application has the same benefits as the desktop client and the portability of the iPhone. If only it could sync against other NewsGator servers than the public one.
• Brent also created a list of unique features of NetNewsWire that might be helpful.

So overall I’m very happy with this solution. I went into this feeling fairly pessimistic that it would actually be an improvement over Google Reader. The end result however is that I’ve been able to shave a significant amount of time off the feed reading that I do. I guess this means I can just start subscribing to more feeds

I’m a sucker for all things Apple. While I didn’t wait in line for the new iPhone 3GS today like I have in years past, I did manage to head over and pick mine up after work. I already had a MobileMe account so one of the first things I wanted to try out was the new “Find my iPhone” functionality.

It’s cool but I can’t imagine that it will be all that useful for me. If you think about it, the GPS sucks indoors. I live in a concrete building and so I can never get a GPS fix inside. Further, the accuracy of it plus google maps means that at best it will tell you within roughly a few thousand feet where your phone is. How is that useful?

The only circumstance I can think of where I’d want this is if I truly lost it or it was stolen. If it was stolen it only tells me approximately where the thief is, not enough accuracy to go and find the guy and beat him up.

That leaves forgetting it at a store, friends house, etc. I guess that is cool but I’ve never done that. Anyways, here is a screen shot.