Extra Pepperoni

I use Handbrake to rip DVDs for my iPhone and Apple TV (and previously for my Treo 650, at much lower quality). It’s excellent, but takes a long time, and slows down the whole system while compressing. My PowerBook G4 wasn’t powerful enough to do H.264 compression in reasonable time, so I got into the habit of ripping the DVDs on the Mac with Mac The Ripper, copying them to the server, converting on the server, and copying back down to the iPhone through iTunes on the laptop. Transferring a full DVD via gigabit Ethernet takes under 10 minutes, which is why we have 3 1/2 gigabit Ethernet switches (8-port, a pair of 5-ports, and the 3 ports built into the Time Capsule) in a 3 1/2 person (2 grown-ups, a 5-year-old, and the cat) home.

Since then I’ve upgraded the laptop and replaced the server, so they’re now both 2.4GHz Core Duos, but I still prefer to avoid the load on my personal machine — especially now that we have an Apple TV, which likes large high-quality video files. The MacBook Pro runs HandBrake.app (Mac GUI), while the server runs HandBrakeCLI (Linux).

HandBrakeCLI is designed to convert individual files and is awkward for converting whole DVDs. Fortunately I found MediaForkCLI-batch.sh, a wrapper which is good at converting all the real titles from one or more DVDs; it automatically ignores short titles such as previews, and titles that have already been transcoded. Unfortunately MediaForkCLI-batch.sh is languishing, and hasn’t been updated for HandBrake v0.92, but it was straightforward to update it to the new syntax.

In the process I made some changes and added an alternate version with different settings optimized for our Apple TV. On the Linux box (named inspector), the scripts are ~/bin/appletv.sh & ~/bin/iphone.sh. I put newly ripped files into ~/tivo-inspector/input/ on inspector, and these scripts rip whatever they find there, generating files in ~/tivo-inspector/output/.

On the MacBook Pro, I keep video files in ~/tivo, and ~/tivo/tivo-inspector is a symbolic link to tivo-inspector on inspector, the server — mounted via AFP. This makes it easy to move files back and forth.

For convenience, I have a couple aliases on the MacBook Pro which log into the Linux machine, start a screen session, and run the appropriate script. This means that if I disconnect the laptop, I can later ssh back into the server and use screen -DR to reconnect to my running conversion session. When the conversion is done, the aliases open the remote folder in the Finder. I move the files back up out of input & output, drop them onto iTunes, and then either Sync the Apple TV (which gets copies of my whole iTunes Library), or sync them to the iPhone.

The scripts are appletv.sh & iphone.sh.

If you use these scripts, you should carefully review the encoding settings. In particular, I encode Apple TV audio to AAC stereo, because our Apple TV is connected to a pair of stereo speakers with a subwoofer; they cannot handle Dolby Pro Logic, which is better for most TVs.

You will also have to update paths in the scripts — to the input and output directories, and to HandBrakeCLI itself — to make them work on your own system.

Here are the aliases in sh/bash format; change the equal signs to spaces for csh/tcsh:

alias appletv="ssh -t inspectore time screen bin/appletv.sh; open ~/tivo/tivo-inspector"
alias  iphone="ssh -t inspectore time screen bin/iphone.sh;  open ~/tivo/tivo-inspector"

Our (cheap) 23″ LCD TV’s composite input gives lousy color. On the other hand, we’ve gotten loud buzzing noises a few times from its HDMI input, so we had our Time Warner (Scientific Atlanta) HD DVR connected to the composite inputs, and dealt with the lousy color and poor brightness. We also paid an additional $20.10/month for the second cable connection and DVR (Time Warner charges $9.95/month more for either HD or non-HD DVR than for a non-DVR cable box [HD or non-HD]). Now I wonder if the problem was with the DVR’s HDMI output all along. Oh, well — it no longer matters.

We do still pay $66.19/month for digital cable service upstairs. This lets Julia watch a couple kids’ shows a day, and Annette & Amy check the Weather Channel. Our (pre-paid) TiVo also records the shows we like, so we can watch upstairs, but we generally watch downstairs. Neither of us knows if we’ll watch more upstairs, or pay a few dollars a month to watch downstairs. It’s an experiment.

Since we watch most of our “TV” from (ripped) DVDs, and our Time Warner signal is very unreliable, and their service is lousy, I returned the DVR on Saturday. That $20.10/month should pay for a Netflix upgrade and/or several shows from the iTunes Store (no longer the “iTunes Music Store”, I noticed — I wondered how long that would take, but missed the actual switch).

Good candidates for iTunes ducats — (certain to total less the $241.20/year we’d been paying for the downstairs DVR):

• $10: 16 consecutive episodes (4 weeks) of The Daily Show ($2/ea) — we watch it infrequently these days.
• $20: a season of South Park.
• $26: a Torchwood season.
• Doctor Who isn’t available from iTunes, but we can watch it in VLC or upstairs, on cable.
• free: Battlestar Galactica (on cable, upstairs)
• free: The Sarah Jane Adventures (upstairs)
• free: Robot Chicken (downloaded and watched on a laptop)

The TiVo S2 has a built-in web server, and I use tivodecode to extract MPEG video, but it won’t play in QuickTime Player. They do play in the redoubtable VLC, but it’s not quite as polished. This is not presently annoying enough to justify purchase of Toast, which can convert .TiVo files for QuickTime or iPhone, but I am not sure if DRM would be a problem; they don’t provide any detail.

We haven’t yet purchased anything through (or for) the Apple TV yet — perhaps this week we’ll try it.