BBC iPlayer Hell
Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007
Whilst I was considering it a protest until the BBC launches a Mac version of their iPlayer, I’d held on long enough and really wanted to see what the experience was like.
Archive for the 'Video' Category
My ultimate Handbrake settings
Sunday, June 24th, 2007
After many months (on and off) of testing, reading, deliberating, scratching my head and waiting I’m finally happy that I’ve found the perfect settings for encoding video with Handbrake for playback on my Mac and AppleTV.
Old Bob and Piracy
Thursday, September 15th, 2005
This week I have mostly been drinking Old Bob. Don’t mistake this for some sort of dodgy pass-time, it’s simply a bloody fantastic real ale. Brewed by Ridley’s of Essex, I’ve yet to find a better pint in a London pub. Sadly Ridley’s has just been sold to Greene King, so the beer is bound to take a drop in quality if they decide to brew it in the sugar-beet hell that is Bury St. Edmunds. I’m thinking of joining CAMRA and growing a beard so I can blend with real ale aficionados – I already have a battered corduroy suit jacket, so the look will almost be complete.
I saw ‘40 year old virgin‘ at the cinema which I’m going to have to recommend. It could have been really fucking awful, but it’s not. I cared about the characters and it even had me laughing, which is rare lately.
I finally got around to working out how to copy DVDs onto my mac – not as simple as it sounds as you’ll know if you’ve ever tried. I won’t go into great detail as I’m sure it’s not legit, but I want to keep the movie’s I’ve bought on my computer. I’m not really sure why copying ripping CDs onto my iPod is okay, but copying a movie from a DVD isn’t? Anyway, Mac The Ripper works a treat for extracting the DVD content, removing the region code and macrovision protection. FFmpegX (after a fidly installation) will encode your VOB files into just about anything you want, and for any device. I’ve been going for the H.264 format as at 1/10th compression with very little loss in quality it’s a minor miracle. Sadly, I need a bit more oomph in processing power than my powerBook can muster as currently the average DVD encoding process is taking about 8 hours.