Day: March 14, 2009

In my process of tranferring my DVD collection to a digital media server I discovered that the Apple TV software is smarter than I thought.

I have been ripping my DVD collection using Handbrake on my Mac and transferring them to a Windows box which is shared out via my internal only network to the Apple TV using iTunes.  I use the built-in Apple TV profile to do this.  The profile sets the frame rate option on the encoder to be “Same As Source”.  It turns out that if your rip has a final fps (frames per second) that is greater than 30 then the resulting movie will not be available in the list of Shared Movies on the Apple TV.

Over Thanksgiving break I bought an Apple TV.  Like any good geek I wanted to expand the capability of the unit beyond the default setup.

After installing Firefox and getting USB keyboard and mouse support going, I realized that it would be tremendously cool if I could control it from my iPhone instead of using a wired keyboard.

To begin with I installed OSXvnc.  The only problem was that I needed to store a password.  After reading a the VNC post on the aTV Flash forum, I successfully conquered that.  However, I had the same problem that iMattUK had: you had to use an ssh connection to start it.

To conquer this I wrote a launchd plist to launch OSXvnc for me at system startup.  Read on for the process I used to get it all working.

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This next week the Senate is expected to vote on legislation to delay the transition of broadcast television in the United States from analog signals to digital signals.

The initial deadline was to have been February 17, 2009, however some in Congress as well as President Obama claim that more time is needed due to the fact that evidence has shown that consumers are not prepared. The new legislation sets a deadline for the switch to June 12, 2009, however broadcasters can switch over to digital prior to that deadline if they so choose.

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Fringe, a new series on the Fox network that is using a new format Fox dubs Remote-Free TV.

The episodes are longer than your average sitcom.  The Wikipedia entry on the show states that this series will have less commercials and promos.

While this is true, one of the interesting bits is that before each commercial they tell you how many seconds should pass before the next segment starts.

Another interesting aspect of the series is how they identify each location during the episode.  Often shows just print plain text on the screen, however in Fringe they use 3D text on the screen and it is oriented differently depending on the scene.