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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