The Tivoli Model Two gets rewired...

Now ordinarily this wouldn't rate as post worthy (or even tweet worthy) but it's on here because a. I didn't rewire it... and b. it looks pretty amazing... much better than my last effort.

Time for a new blog

I've been posting about gluten free stuff here for a little while but I thought it was about time I put it all in one central spot.

So here it is... a new blog Gluten Free in BNE (Brisbane)

I'm going to try and list all the places I know in Brisbane/Queensland that stocks and serves Gluten Free stuff.

Airplay disappointments.

I'm not normally a forum/comment complainer but I'd consider it after today's disappointing iOS update. I was pretty excited about the possibilities of airplay and how it would aid some nice touches to my home theatre setup, especially when another iPad/iPhone user dropped round and wanted to show off something on my lounge room tv.

I've been running with an appletv as the centre of my media setup for some time and it's been such a success we dropped our cable tv subscription and almost never tune into a regular commercial station. When they announced that the old appletv wasn't going to receive any updates after the release of the gen 2 I was hoping that we would still be able to do airplay from the iDevices (especially the airplay icon works from my iMac). However after the release today it's obvious this support is only for the new appletv which I'm not really interested in cross grading too.

The new appletv doesn't suit the australian market very well with it's rent only interface for a store with few rentable movies and no rentable tv shows. This fact combined with the stream only option which means my iMac has to be powered on to watch any content rules me out.

I'd like to be able to run airplay but it's not a deal breaker. In reality it's a requirement I only had after it existed. It's disappointing that those who were loyal to the old apple home entertainment tech have missed out on some of their nicest new features but have to sacrifice features to upgrade.

End rant here.
Sent from my iPhone

The AppleTV encode continues.

So the encoding of my DVD library has been going on for a while now and I've now stored over 200 of them but there seems to be and endless list to go. I'll warn you now. I've been accused of having a "geek out" about this so read on if you dare.

I did some experimenting with the bit rates and conversion settings in handbrake this week. On the whole the conversions using the standard handbrake appletv settings have been excellent. I watched Galaxy Quest the other night and even with it upscaled on my 54" Panasonic plasma the picture was fantastic. Of course it wasn't hd and lacked the crispness of a HD transfer, but in comparison to a full DVD there was very little noticeable difference. There certainly wasn't anything that you would pick up without a direct side by side comparison.

The quest for better transfer came from the (numerous) animated movies I have as they seem to look the worst on the standard preset. The first option I tried was to simply increase the constant quality factor for the movie but quickly discovered that putting this marker too high hit the limitations of the Apple TV and it just turned into a blocky mess. The key seems to be a balance between keeping the quality high enough whilst still ensuring but rate spikes stay below
1200kbps.

In the end I captured the same sequence of a movie with various quality settings and bit rate limits ( about 9 different combos to be honest) until I came to something that appeared a good compromise. Monsters Inc. Was my first animated movie that I did a full transfer on and the size ended about 1.85GB for the whole movie compared with the standard preset transfer coming it at 1.38 and the iTunes version at 1.31.

I had a chance to watch the whole thing today and the transfer was great apart from a few spots in the credits (of all places) where it gets blocky so I fear there might be a few more tweaks to be done. Stay tuned

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54 vs 40... a comparison

In short.... a new TV (really busy today but here's a comparison of the upgrade)

The box

The new (54")

The old (40")