Almost a completely apple household

I've been having a few networking issues at home, partly due to my existing router getting on a bit and some new rules it randomly decided to implement to block most of my iTunes streaming and syncing traffic only over the Wireless Network. As a result I had some elaborate system to get ethernet to all of the devices that really needed to talk, ie the iMac iTunes Server and the AppleTV. This still meant that all of the iDevices were blocked out from being used as remotes etc.

This week I finally bit the bullet and got an Airport Extreme and a Time Capsule and put them into play. I have to say it was probably one of the easiest setups I've every had to implement (even for apple products). I picked up both the items from ebay and if the Time Capsule had come up first I probably wouldn't have bothered with the Airport Extreme but the solution is markedly better with both devices. Adding the Time Capsule wirelessly to the Airport Extreme extends the wireless network (genius) and acts as an ethernet bridge.

The only real problem is it now has me thinking about getting an Airport Express so I can Stream to the nicely wired Tivoli Setup.

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.
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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")

A blog from the plane. One hour to go

I must have managed more sleep than I thought turns out it's only an hour to go and I'm feeling pretty good.

It is only 1045 at home though so I wouldn't normally be too exhausted by then.

I did manage to get through the what hifi reviews of tvs before I fell asleep. Looks like it's much of a muchness between panasonic and samsung. The former has a slightly better picture for the trade against the latter on Internet and streaming features.

As for any of the other entertainment I had planned looks like I slept too much to use it.

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A blog from the plane. Hour 1

So I thought I'd keep myself amused on the flight by blogging. So here we are only just an hour into the flight and there is no sight of in flight entertainment. The system has crashed so we are going to go without mostly. I'm not too bothered as I've got about a thousand media capable devices and a DS a couple of magazines and a Terry Prachet to keep me going. There are going to be some very bored people though.

I'm pretty used to work travel but this trip was especially hard and I must admit I had a few tears saying goodbye and it was only for a week. It probably wasn't helped by the fact the littleone was saying I should stay home or asking if he could come too.

Also it was a little odd but the guy who caught the same lift to the terminal ended up sitting next to me. A pretty nice guy who is taking a his first OS trip and making it a big one doing pretty much ever continent for a year. Its lucky (he's a nice guy) because the flight is packed without a spare seat in sight.

Also if you are flying long haul flight and in economy always order a special meal even if you don't need one. You get special service first. You have to be prepared for angry stares from your fellow passengers though when you're eating.

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