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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Operation: digitize physical media

I've doing it for a long time with CDs, I suspect many people have, converting all my physical media to iTunes (or whatever format you happen to support). There are lots of reasons for it but generally the biggest driver is to have out music on the go and easily organized into those fantastic things known as playlists and genres.

Now the iPad and the AppleTV are my main sources of video content I've made the decision to digitize all my video media as well. The hardest decision was really which format to convert to. I'd originally embarked down the VOB or ISO path due to the speed of transfer and using the ATVFlash Nito plug-in to play them. The biggest problem with this is that you need to have a different interface and half my content is only available in each interface. There iso format doesn't allow for any meta data so a lot of the searching advantages are lost (this is important on 500+ movies) and I can't use them on any of the mobile devices I have.

So I've settled on the iTunes compatible MP4 format. It's a slow process though. Even with 3 machines running compressions it's going to take a while. I'm obviously prioritizing any that I'm yet to watch and all the kids movies (for obvious reasons). The interface on the AppleTV is brilliant for navigation on the TV so it makes sense that all the movies are accessible there especially all my new movie purchases are from iTunes.

I'm using the ATVflash to give my AppleTV access to 2TB storage so I can keep most of the library available even when my Media server is offline. The only thing left on the list is to get a DROBO to give the Media server some redundancy and easily upgradable storage.

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