Mac Installation TV 101
This is the final part of a short series of posts about installing Mac OS X. Today’s article shows how I manage without a TV. If you missed earlier parts, links are at the end of this post.
Having been on the road for almost a year now, I haven’t been able to keep up with my favourite shows which run on different schedules in different timezones, and neither have I been able to get at my DVD collection which is in storage somewhere in Herefordshire. Worse, I let myself start watching some new shows in America that won’t make it to air in the UK for a few months at least.
Thankfully, there is some excellent software for the Mac to help me get my fix of the movies and television shows I’d like to see — and better yet, I don’t have to sit through 3 minutes of commercials for every 7 minutes of actual programming. For a few months now, I’ve gone without a television altogether or rather, when I have had access to a television I’ve only used it as a giant monitor:
1. Handbrake
Before galavanting off around the world, I ripped thirty of my DVDs to disk in iPod video friendly resolutions. Some were old favourites that I hadn’t watched for a long time, and the rest were from DVDs I had bought but not watched yet. At this resolution, a 90 minute movie takes up about 500Mb on disk. Because I keep my iMac in England set for region 2 disks, and take my macbook on the road set to region 1, the ripping process makes it easier to manage my movie collection and play the movies back on either machine regardless of whether the region of the DVD matches the region setting of the machine I’m watching on.
I was thinking of adding the new 160Gb AppleTV to my travel gear as a mobile repository for movies and tv shows I wanted to take with me, and to add to as I moved around. But, it needs an HDTV to play back on… a luxury not yet present in many furnished apartments or hotel rooms. I got by perfectly well using my video iPod with a TV lead for the last year though, so I’m happy to wait another few years until HDTVs are more widely available.
Price: $0
2. iTunes Store
The selection of movies and TV shows in the UK iTunes Store still pretty much sucks, but the American store is packed with great shows that, in some cases, will never even make it over here. Season premiers are often free, to entice you in to buy the rest of the season, and of course there’s a whole slew of video podcasts to download. The iTunes store makes it easy to watch what I want to watch, and when I want to watch it, without the annoying commercial breaks, and all at a pretty reasonable cost in the US (or a more expensive but affordable cost in the UK store).
I’m currently watching LA Ink and Human Weapon from the US store.
Price: $0 to $9.99 for a full movie
3. XTorrent
By now, there are plenty of BitTorrent clients for the mac, but this was the first good one that came along, and has lots of cool functionality like bandwidth throttling, torrentcast subscription and downloading only some of the files from a torrent. This is the best way to get a hold of TV shows from studios that refuse to provide digital content to their customers.
Price: $24
4. TVShows
This little application allows you to subscribe to your favourite shows, and then runs quietly in the background waiting for episodes to show up on BitTorrent. When they do arrive, it tells XTorrent in my case (or whatever client you are using) to queue it up for download. Having left my DVDs of Alias in storage without the foresight to rip the unwatched episodes of the final season before leaving the country, this application was a lifesaver in locating and downloading them in the background for me so that I could still watch them. It might also be useful to you if your rips are not in the resolution you wanted, or you simply don’t want to leave your computer running at full pelt for days on end to do the rips in the first place.
Price: $0
5. Visual Hub
It’s a sad fact that many of the torrents I want to watch will arrive on my computer in a non-iTunes compatible format, which makes transferring it to my iPod for watching with the TV Out cable a no-no 
That’s where Visual Hub comes in as a one-stop transcoder, that will convert from pretty much any format to just about any other format. The latest version even has an output mode optimised for the iPhone. I’ve also used it to convert my old mpeg rips to the smaller and better looking H264 format.
Price: $23.32
6. Flip4Mac
Pretty much everyone should know about this codec by now. Again, it’s a sad fact that many of the videos I find on the internet are in the awful windows media format, wmv. Rather than contaminating my gorgeous Mac with Microsofts third-rate media player, which can’t handle skimming through a video at speed without stuttering or crashing, Flip4Mac installs a wmv codec into the Quicktime player. So all those wmv’s on the ‘net will play through the Quicktime browser plugin too!
Price: $0
7. DivX CODEC
There are hordes of different codecs to download and install if you have the time to track them down. In practice, with the Flip4Mac wmv codec and this DivX codec, I rarely bump into a file that won’t play in Quicktime, and when I do I can almost always convert it into something that will play using Visual Hub.
Price: $0
8. VLC
VLC, however, is my plan B. When all else fails, the surprisingly mac-like VLC will play almost any video format you’re ever likely to meet. For a long time VLC was the only way to play QuickTime movies in full screen without ponying up $40 for a QT-Pro license, though Apple haven’t done that for a long time now.
VLC also plays DVDs from either a disk image or the optical drive itself, and best of all it’s entirely Open Source!
Price: $0
9. Realplayer
I admit it. I’m an American Football nut. I’ll even admit that I’ve been supporting the ailing Oakland Raiders for the last 15 years. For some reason (probably an expensive licensing deal), all the free game highlights at NFL.com as well as the downloadable games for subscribers come in RealPlayer format, which is so proprietary that not even VLC can play it. This is the last line of defence for when there is absolutely no other way to watch a video on my mac.
Price: $0
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2 Responses so far
2007.09.26@11:10 am
A great selection of apps. Sadly though i’ve not quite got into the mindset of ripping DVD’s i watch instead of just plonking in the DVD player. But really, i should as it saves the darn DVD drive from spinning up and eating away at the battery.
(Thinking more of the DVD drive, i really wish there was a way of turning it off so it didn’t always make a darn noise every time the machine boots up or resumes from suspend)
Another TV-related app which runs on OS X is Miro. Think of it as a Video Podcast downloader which includes a nice Channel (i.e. Video Podcast) Guide. It even uses Bit Torrent, so the downloads are usually quite fast. There are a lot of interesting channels to watch on it – Channel Frederator being one of my favorites!
2007.09.26@12:29 pm
Hi James,
Miro looks pretty neat, I’ll be trying it out over the next couple of weeks. Thanks for the tip!
With respect to ripping DVDs, aside from saving wear and tear on the battery and optical drive, it’s quite liberating being able to carry what used to be a 6 foot tall bookcase full of DVDs (100 or so) and CDs (600 or so) in a single 2.5″ 160Gb external drive. I haven’t bought a physical CD for more than a year now, and I’m looking forward to the day when digital distribution of movies is convenient enough that I won’t need to by physical DVDs anymore
I forgot to mention Apple’s Front Row, which I would be more likely to use but for the fact that I tend to watch stuff either on my macbook where I’m close enough to just reach for the keyboard, my G5 iMac which doesn’t support a remote control, or my (late) video iPod which of course doesn’t run Front Row… And then there’s the promising looking CenterStage, which might make hooking my macbook directly into the TV a better option than syncing shows to my iPod first…
Cheers, Gary