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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’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.

The iPhone 3GS came out today. And as always, there was just about as much media coverage as ever. Pictures of long lines, and people all excited about shelling out more money to Apple and ATT. While I think the improvements are nice, and the new 3.0 software has some cool-ish things, I’m still not at all interested in buying one. Heres why:

The big features of the 3.0 software that everyone is talking about are:

– Copy/Paste
I have this on Android, and most other smart phones do this. Pure catch up

– Landscape keyboard
Really? Only just now getting this?

– Type new messages while the old is still sending
This is a feature? I can do this on Android, or better yet, type a message, send it, go do something else, and still have my streaming music player open in the background.

– Spotlight search
This is very cool, and a nice addition

– YouTube video upload
Android, Pre, etc can do this already.

– Turn by Turn nav
Nice, but Pre had it out of the box, most all Verizon phones have this as well.

– MMS*
Welcome to the 21st century iPhone! Oh wait ATT still doesnt support this…

– Notifications
Nifty I guess, but my Android phone notifies me all the time, and Androids notification system is far better. More on this later

And the new 3GS hardware itself has some new toys:

– Compass
Ok, I have this on Android and I rarely use it, I wouldnt switch phones for this

– Video recording
Again, this is not new and somethign that should have been there a long time ago.

– Tethering
ATT is killing this, so no point in upgrading for it. T-Mobile wont let Android either. VZ lets you, and its pretty fast too.

– Voice control
Could be interesting, I would have to see how it actaully works in practice. I can do voice google searches already on my Android, but I rarely use it.

– Better battery
This would be by far the best part of the new HW. If the batt is much better a lot of people will be happy.

– Faster processor. This is the new Cortex chip, so should be a nice speed improvement. But the Pre has this chip too… and the Toshiba G01 has a Snapdragon that will toast anything else… so not a wild technology leap, but still a good upgrade.

Notifications were one of the biggest things hyped about the new 3.0 software. This is Apples answer to the cries for multitasking. But this still won’t matter. For example, say I have a notifications enabled IM app, and then I go off and open Pandora and listen to some tunes. I get an IM and I get “notified” however that happens to look on the phone’s UI. If I switch to the IM app, I still have to kill pandora and my music goes away.

Now, lets look at this scenario on Android. I’m playing music on fast.fm. I get an IM on gChat. It pops up in the notifications area and I can simple slide the notifcations bar down, read the message and be done. Or, I can click on it and gChat opens and I can respond. And guess what? My streaming music is still playing!

In the end, I this won’t stop the complaints about no multitaksing, it will just finally make some things actually work ok on the phone – IM clients and the like.

So for me, while I love the physical design of the phone, and the interface is so nice and polished, I just don’t see how I could upgrade and lose out on things I do the most – IM and txting, and being able to do those things while I have whatever else I want running at the same time. Oh ya, and ATT still has a sucky network…

So the Zune HD specs are out and all the rumors can be laid to rest. I have not owned any type of Zune before, but I’ve played around with them. The interface is nice for an MP3 player, and it is better than the standard iPod, but obvious no where near the iPod Touch. But the Zune HD might change that.

First, the specs lifted from zune.net:

• Zune HD comes with a built-in HD Radio receiver so users can listen to higher-quality sound than traditional radio on the go. Users also will have access to the additional song and artist data broadcast by HD Radio stations as well as additional channels from their favorite stations multicasting in HD. If you don’t like the song playing on your station’s HD channel, switch to its HD2 or HD3 channels for additional programming.
• The bright OLED touch screen interface allows users to flip through music, movies and other content with ease, and the 16:9 widescreen format display (480×272 resolution) offers a premium viewing experience on the go.
• The HD-compatible output lets Zune HD customers playback supported HD video files from the device through a premium high-definition multimedia interface (HDMI) audiovisual docking station (sold separately) direct to an HD TV in 720p.*
• Zune HD will include a full-screen Internet browser optimized for multitouch functionality.
• Zune HD is Wi-Fi enabled, allowing for instant streaming to the device from the more than 5 million-track Zune music store.

First, the screen resolution is slightly less than the Touch. How much that matters, not sure. We’ll have to see. But it is OLED, so that should be very nice.

A built-in HD radio is pure awesome. This is something I wish my Touch had – a radio of any kind. Granted with I Heart Radio I can listen to any of the stations here in Denver that I care about, but its not HD and I have to have WiFi for it to work. Score 1 for Zune.

HDMI hi def output! This is killer as well. I download a video from somehwere… I take my Zune to my friends house… hook it up to the flat panel and bam, movie night. Or maybe a slide show of my favorite vacation pics. Score 2 for Zune.

Full screen internet browsing and WiFi. Nice. And then they say “multitouch”… and all the Apple lawyers start salivating. First Palm and now Microsoft. It will be interesting to see how the Apple patents hold up. This is a good feature, but nothing new over the Touch.

Streaming of music from the Zune store is cool too. But since you can get a SUBSCRIPTION to the Zune store, this is even cooler. I could listen and refill my Zune as much as I want, over WiFi.. or stream anything. This model is very much needed with iTunes.

But the biggest question… will there be any sort of “apps” at all. I mean music and such is nice… but if I can’t play Oregon Trail like you can on the Touch, then whats the point?

Billshrink.com is an interesting site that lets you compare cell phones and services. They have a graphics that compares some pertinent features of the 3 big smartphones.

A few interesting points about this. The storage capacity is the base amount (or with the Pre the only amount). The G1 looks bad, but then again, it has a micro SD slot so you can put whatever you want in there.

Battery life for the G1 looks bad as well, but this is very different from other data (see last post) where standby was over 300hrs. However, as a G1 owner, I can say that standby time is not stellar, and I don’t think its really 300hrs.

Voice commands are interesting. The new Android 1.5 software has Google voice search. Which is interesting I guess, but most of the time I’m using my cell, its not ideal conditions for voice commands.

The app store should have listed an approximate number of apps available. Obvious the Apple App Store is the huge winner. Android Market isn’t bad, several thousand apps now. The Palm Catalog is new and has less than 20 apps, but we should give it a few months before passing judgement.

Multitasking is slightly misleading on the iPhone 3GS. The new 3.0 software has “notifications” so things like IM can “run” in the background. Or at least you could stay logged in and be notified when a new message comes in. Of course this isn’t real multitasking. And there is no way (that I have seen) to let 3rd party apps hook various system features. Android is great at this.

Finally, the thing that hurts the iPhone most in this chart is the service plan. ATT is more expensive than plans from T-Mobile or Sprint. I shopped plans myself, and I do a lot of txting and data, but don’t need a lot of minutes. Sprint ended up being cheapest – about $55 a month plus their free night minutes start at 7pm! T-mobile (my current carrier) was next cheapest at about $70. The win with them is the “My Favs”. I get unlimited calling any time to any three numbers. I use the Phonalyzr app to keep track of who most of my minutes go to, and set them as my favs. I have never gone over my minutes. ATT is fairly expensive by comparison. $20 extra just for unlimited messaging! My $25 unlimited data plan from T-Mobile includes unlimited SMS and MMS.

Bottom line from this graphic is the iPhone still has the edge in a apps and storage. But carrier selection hurts and still no true multitasking is a bummer. However, if the notifications service works well, that might be good enough for most people.

I picked up this book a while back. I got a job at NVIDIA with the OS X drivers team, so I was brushing up on things.

This is pretty much THE book for info on system internals, kernel coding, etc. It’s rather large and takes a while to get through, but the info is awesome.

Lifehacker had an article regarding Windows 7 versus Mac OS X Leopard:
http://lifehacker.com/5277207/windows-7-versus-mac-os-x-leopard-the-feature+by+feature-showdown

Personally I think this article was a little gutsy when the WWDC was going to be the very next week and it was guaranteed that it was going to announce the successor to Leopard: Snow Leopard.  To summarize the competition was close but Snow Leopard was decided as the favored operating system.  The author’s comparison points were interesting and I think it was a fair assessment of the two operating systems. 

However, I thought it was bizarre that they would compare Time Machine to Windows backup.  My first thought was about how I never use windows backup.  I just make a habit to store my important files on a secondary drive and keep the operating system on it’s own drive.  The real backup system is Windows Home Server.  And then a colleague of mine at work pointed out their poll at the bottom of article asks for people to rate the favorite feature about each operating system, and with 10% of the votes Time Machine was the readers favorite feature of Leopard.  Wait, I thought Mac’s were secure and didn’t crash, then why is the backup/rollback system the favored feature? I think I deal more with the taskbar, themes, aero and the file explorer way more than I ever think about my backup.  I am happy it’s there but I tend to go more with the set and forget it method.  But, I guess that is just me.  That’s just my two cents.

Ah, spring. Birds, leaves on trees, outdoor events, maybe some good beer. And thousands of rabid apple fanboys converging on San Francisco for the annual love-in with Steve & Co.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Apple a lot. In fact I’m writing this post on my MacBook Pro with some sweet Mac software called MarsEdit. But I’m just not so sold on them that I overlook the somewhat obvious issues that Apple can have.

Lets start with the MacBook announcement. Better price, this is good, especially given all the “I’m a PC and I’m cheap” commercials of late. Also, finally removing the ExpressCard slot was nice. I’ve never used mine, and don’t think I ever will. But an SD slot would be so nice. Maybe not nice enough to pay for a new system, but this is a win. But a non-removable battery?? Seriously Apple, why? Every other notebook on the planet has a user changeable battery. So now I have to make an appointment with a “genius” and wait around while someone does this for me. Lame, not a win.

Snow Leopard. Big win here with the $29 upgrade price. Microsoft should really remember this someday. But then again, the list of new features is fairly tame. Sure there are under the hood improvements, but we’ll have to wait for the upgrade to see if its noticeable. The inclusion of OpenCL is pretty cool. I’ve been a fan of GPGPU for a while now and the usefulness of this could really be big, especially for compute intense apps like video processing or graphics apps. Not that it hasn’t been available before. NVIDIA’s CUDA package has been out for Mac OS, and could have easily been used to do much the same thing. The win with OpenCL is that it is a common standard that NVIDIA and ATI are at least somewhat on board with. So this could be a win if anyone writes apps to take advantage of it.

And now for the iPhone. I love the iPhone for many reasons, even though I don’t have one. It really kicked the wireless industry in the pants and finally got other companies really thinking about a true mobile computing platform. Unfortunately I still think there are some issues, most notably ATT. Verizon really screwed up when they passed on this.

With that said, the new 3.0 software seems like a good move in a few areas, although not as far as I would have liked to see it go. MMS support (finally) is nice, but is this really something to get excited about? I mean I’ve had MMS on cheap phones for years. Add to that that ATT won’t actually support MMS when 3.0 launches means this does nothing for anyone right now (well at least in the US).

Notifications is an interesting take on having “background” apps without fearing battery loss. Some of my friends who are rocking their 3Gs complain about battery life, so I can see where this might be an issue. But my Android phone has true background apps and I don’t have battery issues. I digress. So essentially you can register with some apple server and get push notifications on the phone that can be read with whatever app. This will be great for IM and the like where you can finally stay logged in and actually do anything on the phone. The big issue I have with this is that Apple controls the notification path. So crippling or removing services they dont like or don’t want you to have is easy. Also this is a single point fail for everything. Its better than nothing, but real background apps would have been so much better.

The 3G-S is interesting. No cosmetic updates at all, but then again the design is pretty much the coolest phone out there right now. The only thing that comes close is the new Palm Pre, but still. The 3MP camera upgrade was long long overdue. I wouldn’t even say this is a win, its a catchup. And video recording? My 9 year old little brother has a cheap Verizon phone and he takes pics and vids all the time and MMSs them to me. So no win there.

The compass is nice I guess. My Android has one, but I never really use it. I mean with GPS enabled Google Maps, why would I try to navigate on my own?

The claimed performance increase would be a big win if it is actually true across the majority of apps. But the biggest thing I read about the 3G-S was the improved battery life. This is the single biggest issue with mobiles, and the iPhone was hurting in that area as it was. So this alone would make me more interested in the phone if I was thinking about it. Which I would be, if I didn’t have to go to ATT.

Oh ya, the HSDPA+ addition. Meh. This isn’t cutting edge, many other phones with this support. The bigger question is can ATT’s network handle all these phones all wanting that much bandwidth. Will you see the 7Mb speeds in real life? Most likely not, unless you live in a small town in Kansas and are hugging the base station at midnight when everyone else is in bed.

Apple needs to be careful going forward with the iPhone. They are no longer the far and away winners in the smartphone world. The Palm Pre is a gorgeous device with a nice OS and a lot of good features, and once Android gets a better handset, it will be right up there too. So Apple needs to innovate, not just sprinkle some “updates” and hope to keep gaining market share. While they still hold the edge over Android in handset design, UI quality, and amount of apps, I think the Pre wins over the iPhone in several areas – background apps, better app management in the UI, and real background apps. If the Pre can get a sizable app base, this could be a bg problem for Apple.