Just a few brief updates this afternoon before I start getting ready for the weekend–and for (da da dummmm) Superbowl Sunday.
First, my decision to load Tiger into a new partition has worked amazingly well. I’m running EyeTV 2.3.3 and it seems bypass all the bugs I had under my nonstandard OS. Both remote controls–Apple and EyeTV–work exactly as advertised with the EyeTV software, which means I can hide the mini’s keyboard and mouse in a drawer. I was delighted to find that a button on the EyeTV remote allows me to turn closed captions on and off without having to use a menu. Very convenient! I can now understand what Milo Ventimiglia is saying in his scenes. (For whatever reason, I had no problem understanding Christopher Eccleston.)
More after the jump…
Another advantage of working under Tiger is that “iPod export” now works. (It does not work under the nonstandard OS installation.) Agreed, the export is still sub-HDTV-optimal and the bitrate is kind of sucky, but that’s something that I can probably work with or hack over time.
Finally, I have been testing out Front Row a bit. It works fine with nearly any video format I throw at it, so long as the video can be played in iTunes. For what it’s worth, I’m using that very old trick of opening files in QuickTime Pro and then saving reference movies in order to load DivX, XviD and other oddball formats into iTunes. I haven’t tested with WMV/ASF mostly because I didn’t have a spare movie around to test with.
These videos do not sync to my iPod and I’m not sure whether they’ll be able to sync to AppleTV when it arrives, but I’m guessing that so long as I can put an item into the iTunes library that I can stream files directly to AppleTV for viewing. Apple says you sync to one home computer and can authorize up to 5 more for streaming privileges.
One final note. The reason that my fragmented disk, which I mention in an earlier post, was a problem, was that it had several large blocks of data that kept me from using non-destructive partitioning. I’d really just wanted to split the partition in half using diskutil but you can’t do that unless physically the second half of your partition is unused. Since I’d recorded bunches of large programs, most of the disk had been in use. When I deleted many (but not all) of those videos, there were still files left in the second half of the disk preventing diskutil from proceeding.
Love the Perian! That's the codec that makes the reference stuff work.
have you checked out perian? It's a pretty good codec for quicktime that allows all kinds of formats to be played... and i think it works with front row, so you dont have to save reference files anymore.