Adventures In Digital Marketing

So I’m still battling along with my Apple TV in terms of video, and whilst I have found some great assistance from Thomas Fitzgerald, I thought I’d write a short list of the tools I’ve been playing around with and using to help me in getting my own legally purchased DVDs onto my Apple TV.

Handbrake
Mac and PC software for ripping DVDs to the HDD.  Seems to work a whole lot better on the mac than it does on the PC IMHO.  Mac users seem to swear by this.

VisualHub
A Mac only video compression tool which will convert practically any video format into another one.  Has a built in setting for Apple TV.  Has worked the best for me so far.

CloneDVDMobile
A PC only tool for basically doing what VisualHub does on the Mac.  Converts one video format into another.  Have had limited success in using this, mainly with shorter video clips.

Apple Quicktime Pro
Apple’s own tool which now has a built in Save for Apple TV setting.  Will take any format of video that quicktime can play and convert it to MP4 or M4V format for iTunes and Apple TV.  I’ve not had much luck with this though and it seems a bit flaky.

Apple iTunes
You need this.  Don’t go moaning about how it’s not that good and it’s a bit dodgy on the PC.  Just use it a stop being such a moaner.  As if you even use Ogg Vorbis files anyway! :D  Joking aside, it’s pretty obvious you need this - but it does now have a Convert for iPod feature, which can be used to make video Apple TV friendly - although it really knocks the quality down.

Howard
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Jon

On my recent trip to Toronto I decided to take the plunge and move away from my endless struggles to get Microsoft Media Centre working how I want it, and buy an Apple TV.  I still have my media centre, and I still use it as a PVR, but it’s not attached to the TV any more and has been turned back into a gaming machine.

So, my new Apple TV is plugged into the TV in the lounge, and is looking great I have to say.

I know a lot of people have done considerable reviews recently of this device, so I’m not going to do that, but I just want to blog about a couple of small problems I’ve experienced with it in the past week.

Photo Syncing
I’m running this Apple TV off a PC via iTunes. I could do it off one of my macs, but as my media centre has all of the content on it, it makes sense to use it as the main sync machine.  Music, podcast and so forth all went across without any problems, and I now have my entire CD catalogue synced to the device, and playing through the stereo as I wanted.  But, photos were a different issue. I couldn’t get photos to sync from the PC for love nor money. I tried and tried.  iTuned can see them i the MY PHOTOS folder no problem, but for some reason it won’t sync. I read the apple support site - it says it should be fine.  I rang apple support - the guy read the support site back to me and said it should be fine. So i looked a little deeper and I found that hidden deep in the small print on the support site is mention of Adobe Photoshop Album.  So i went to Adobe and found that luckily they have a freeware version, so I downloaded and installed this.  Annoyingly I had to reconfigure all of my photo sets but low and behold all of the photos magically synced across to the Apple TV.  So, a lesson to be learnt - to sync photos on Apple TV with a PC it appears that you MUST install Adobe Photoshop Album Starter Edition or higher.

Video Syncing
Contrary to what Apple tells us on the web site and in various other place, video syncing on the Apple TV is far from easy. In fact, a lot of the videos I have in iTunes won’t sync or play at all.  This is because Apple TV only supports a small amount of video formats and sizes.  Now, I’m happy enough to only use mp4 or m4v, or even mov, files as I don’t have any divX movies, and what I really want to do convert all of my DVD films for playing o the Apple TV.  In exactly the same way as I have done with my CDs for my iPod.  This has so far proved to be a major tasks.  iTunes doesn’t support this at all, which is bizarre, and i’ve tried several third party tools to do this, such as CloneDVDMobile, and have had limited success on small files (a couple of minutes in length). But, doing a whole film has not worked, even when the same settings are used as with a 2 min clip that has worked.  There seems to be no explanation for why this is the case.   I’ll keep trying and readin blogs etc., but for me the easiest thing would be for Apple to build DVD ripping into iTunes so that I can take my legally bought DVDs and stream or sync them to the Apple TV.

To help with this, and to see if we can make a difference at all, I’ve started an online petition over at iPetitions.com to see if we, the people who’ve bought an Apple TV can get Steve Jobs to add the functionality it needs - DVD ripping - into iTunes, the software that drives it.

You did it for CDs Steve - why can’t you do it for DVDs as well?  You know it makes sense!

The petition is available online now at this URL…
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/appletvdvd

Please sign.

Thanks

Howard
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