Apple Tv – How It Fits In…..

So i got me an Apple Tv last week, more on impulse than as part of any rational thought, as such things go.  i was planning on getting one, but only later this summer.

But such is life….

So its sitting there on my Tv cupboard, replacing the DVD player that does not work any way…. surrounded by my impressive collection of DVDs. Which do me no good sitting on the shelf instead of on my Apple Tv hard drive….

The solution to this is, of course to back up your DVDs to disk. I use DVDShrink 3.2 (the last version ever released), or DVD Decryptor. both of which leave you with a folder full of .vob files ( usually  a VIDEO_TS folder).  This will strip copy protection from the files.

These files do us no good. Apple Tv will not take .vob files. But, and I must admit my irritation here, Windows Media Center does ( serves me right for being a turncoat ).

So the next step is to use Handbrake ( for Mac and Windows) to take your backed up files and turn them into Apple Tv readable m4v or mp4 files. These files can be read across iTunes, Apple Tv, and your video capable iPods and iPhones.

Now this conversion process is eyewateringly long. I’ve resurrected an old laptop ( Intel Celeron M 1.4 ghz, 256Mb RAM). The average time is about 10 hours – at 4.3 frames per second. My 3ghz Pentium 4 with 2Gb RAM is actually only slightly faster, confusingly enough. in any case, i need the desktop and no the laptop, so the old and busted laptop is doing the conversions.

The 10 hours conversion does not bother me much. I set it up to go in the morning, and its usually almost done my the time I’m back home in the evening.

All this media is being stored on my Windows Home Server, with a normal install of iTunes being the server. I’m not sure if Firefly Media Server will work with Apple TV, but if it is, I’ll install that instead.

Finally, I use MetaX 1.0 for Windows (theres a Mac version, too) to add in metadata – pic, sypnosis, direcots, actor, etc…. This is amazingly useful and saved me loads of time….

Now my music library is full of duplicates (my fault for leaving the “Copy to iTunes library” option on when i import stuff), So I’m slowly going through it and deleting the duplicates (and saving space at the same time).

My Photos are spread across a hundred folders, so i have to get some sort of organisation going so i can sync them to Apple Tv and show them off on my Tv .

I have SageTv running on the same server. Their conversion process for Apple Tv takes just as long and won’t work – sigh. If I could just get Sage to save the files in m4v format, i could sync my recorded tv directly to my apple Tv without any (hours long) conversion in between.

Update 14-10-09: The latest version of SageTv does indeed convert to m4v perfectly. Works wonders, but the time is still rather long. I reccomend turning off everything, defrags, AV runs (and temporarily, backups) if you have a long queue of files to convert. Right now I have 16 files to convert all of which are about 2- 3 hours long. Usually two a day. So for this week, I have turned off the defrag passes. SageTv actuall scales its CPU usage remarkabely well in these situations.

If i could, i’d have uploaded everything to EC2 for encoding

Thanks to the guys over on Friendfeed for help with this.

Dvd backup software thread: here.

Metadata thread: here.

Favorite Tweets/ FriendFeed Comments of the Day

Ok, quickie post here. I’m still alive but busy on university projects and studying for exams .

In no particular order

1. FF : Ian May posted “My wife said, "Whatcha doin today?" I said, "Nothing." She said, "You did that yesterday." I said, "I wasn’t finished."”
2. FF: Stupid Sleepy (aka Tina) asked: “Caption, please!”

   

   See the suggested captions at FriendFeed here.

3. FF: BreakingNewsOn – Tweeted:

   “Statement from Israel on boat collision involving former US Congresswoman McKinney: http://www.bnonews.com

   To which Evan Brown commented: “Thankfully, McKinney is no longer in Washington screwing things up. Unfortunately, she is now oversees screwing things up”

4. FF: Stupid Sleepy (aka Tina) posted this story:

   Mr Fixit’s Emily Newton, left, and Sara Cooper are ready to make the Taste toilet experience more enjoyable.

   I beg you to read the hilarious comments on FriendFeed here.

5. And finally, while there its not funny, theres a twitter/Friendfeed effort to get Robert Scoble an interview with Steve Jobs of Apple. See here (FriendFeed) and here (Scoble’s original tweet) and here (@joshaidan’s response).

To be honest, emailing Steve Jobs is a bit daunting. But I will get round to it.

So come on,  help Scoble get an interview with Steve Jobs: email Steve: sjobs@apple.com. @joshaidan says to make it personal.

Twitter Vs FriendFeed

Ok, so I got the FF bug before going to Twitter (you can follow me here).

So I installed Twitterific on my iPhone and turned on FF-to-Twitter integration. And I imported Twitter into FF, too.

This whole set up works very well. Twitters that go out of FF (as items that are posted to FF) aren’t re-imported to my FriendFeed stream (clever!). And comments in reply to twitters also go to Twitter.

The above accounts for 90% of the updates on Twitter.

So, what value do I see on Twitter?

Well, I have had several conversations, both public and private on Twitter with people all over the world. So yes, there is value there.

But I increasingly find that its easier to talk to those people that I’ve been following on FF for a few months already. And you’ll find that most of those people I follow on Twitter I also subscribe to in FF.

This raises an interesting comparison: what service do I get the most value from when i follow the exact same people in both?

FriendFeed is the clear winner here.

• One, FF makes it a lot easier to follow conversations, even across several different items. This makes for focused interaction on specifics. Threads rarely ramble, and usually spark a new one if that happens. I’ve see and been part of more debates that I can count, but always come out of it feeling good – win lose or draw.
• Two, we get far more from the stream. FF allows anything with a link or even just a message to be posted. Videos play right in the stream. YouTube video appear automatically when you post them. Google maps appear for location based services. Pictures can accompany the links, giving nice visual feedback on the item even before you click on it. all these little things and more engage the user far more than simple text can.
• Three, Likes and Comments. Both are nice to get on a item you’ve posted. And both help item to rise to the top of your stream. Its not unusual to see items a few hours or even days old suddenly appear. These are usually some of the good stuff that been posted. these allow you to see the real hotbeds of activity on FF. Twitter has no such system.
• Four. Twitter integration. This is a circular argument, but its nice to pull stuff back into Twitter. Especially since I’m not that fussy about using twitter directly.
• Fifth. The team. The FF team use FF itself to engage and interact with the users, giving them a voice into changes to layout and such. This is important. user know that they are being looked after. this will prevent people leaving easily. it certainly makes me feel better that they’ve got my back.
• Sixth, and finally – the API. The FF API has no restrictions on it and they provide libraries for all platforms and languages. Getting data in and out is easy.
• Seventh, Ok, this really is the final point. Rooms. The notion of subject oriented streams has really taken off. You name the subject and there’s a room for it on FF. The US Politics room was particularly useful during the election. The nearest Twitter has are hashtags.

So, I will continue to use Twitter. And I’ll continue to use FriendFeed. Both are very much essentials for the modern internet hog. Even if you don’t like (or have) an account with the facebooks and myspace’s of the internet, even if blogs don’t figure in your online presence, both Twitter and FriendFeed are as good a start as any.

The shared opinions of millions live on the internet, but I have my little corner of that universe. And that good enough for me.

FriendFeed Gets My Images, Too – FriendFeed Notify 0.2

Like this picture?

(Yerba Buena Island – Thomas Hawk)

Me too. How about this one:

(Passage- johopo)

Nice huh?

One more:

(Untitled – Me)

Couldn’t resist.

My point is that the above three images will be posted to FriendFeed along with the link to this post by the new release of FriendFeed Notify 0.2.

Now this isn’t for just for photography buffs like me and Thomas Hawk. It works for any images embedded in an img tag and greater than 50×100px.

Now the release isn’t actually feature complete. There are a few things I’d like to add to it. These will be in the 0.2.1 release. Including picking and choosing which images to post and  the posting of a comment by way of summary. These are simple to implement and I don’t thing it will be too long before they are out.

So go and get it from here.

Anyone looking at the code will see that i am using the .Net frameworks webbrowser control to retrieve images. This runs in the same dialog you are shown the images.The regexes I tried are all in the code, but commented out. If anyone can help with these, that would be great. It would cut down on the overhead. Thanks.

For those of you reading this and wondering hat happened to my Smugmug add-in for WHS.its been on the back burner for a while. I didn’t expect the hiatus to take this long. In the meanwhile, Omar Shahine has updated his Send To SmugMug utility. Some of the features for the next release that people are voting on are similar in concept to my add-in. So, go vote. I still intend to do this Add-In and get it integrated with WHS.

Enjoy.

A Word of Caution

Since the quake in California,  old Vimeo and Youtube videos that people have favourite have been showing up in FriendFeed. Current thinking has it that the data must have been destroyed and recreated from backups.

Some of them are, NSFW, shall we say (I’m putting it very, very delicately). There is even one particular user that has a lot of these videos showing up in his stream (and I’m not linking to them – I’m keeping this blog respectable).

So given the current employers habit of Googling prospective hires, it might be safer to be careful what we add to our online personas.

Just saying.

Social Networks at Work

IF you’re surprised that I’ve gone so long without posting here properly, its because I’ve been spending so much time on Friendfeed.

Friendfeed suits my style so much better than blogging. With its link/article centred comments threads, it allows short comments about a particular subject that aren’t a blog in length. Its suits my free ranging style, commenting of just about anything that I’m interested in.

Two incidents this week, both well publicised on Friendfeed illustrate the power of the social network.

The first, and arguably most public, is the PR battle now erupting between Thomas Hawk (the photographer) and his supporters on the one side, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on the other. In the middle there are a few moderates keeping a steady and cool head.

Thomas Hawk:

After purchasing my family membership and visiting the museum today I was forcibly thrown out of the museum by two museum security guards at the direction of the Director of Visitor Relations Simon Blint.
My crime? Taking a photograph from the second floor stairs in the SFMOMA’s atrium (an area where the SF MOMA’s own website explicitly says photography is allowed).

And again ( the following day):

One allegation that has been raised is that Blint threw me out because he felt that I was shooting down a low cut blouse of one of his employees sitting in the atrium below where I was shooting. The photo above is a photo that I snapped of Blint as he was publicly admonishing me from the floor, that’s him with his arms crossed there — he’s about the size of an ant in the photo.

I can vouch for the absurdity of shooting down a low cut blouse with  14mm lens from the top of those stairs

The comments are prolific on both these posts with a number of differing viewpoints about Thomas’ account. While most are not explicitly for or against, there is a searach for a middle ground between emphasising Photographers Rights and the way in which the situation was handled. Just do a search for “Simon Blint” on Friendfeed. Here.

SFMOMA responded with this Press Release:

Last Friday an incident occurred in our museum in which a visitor was asked to leave the building. We stand firmly behind the actions of our director of visitor services, who acted appropriately to ensure the safety of the museum’s admissions staff. He took measures to protect another staff member who according to witnesses on our staff and among the general public was being photographed in an inappropriate and harassing manner. SFMOMA welcomes over 600,000 visitors annually; disputes and disagreements between our guests and our staff very rarely occur.
This was not an issue relating to the museum’s official photography policy. In fact, SFMOMA recently made a policy change to allow photographers to take pictures of the permanent collection, the architecture of the building, and the museum’s public spaces.

The comments on this link on Friendfeed are quite interesting, you can find them here. Most are wondering why the other side of the story is not being told here (Since all the information we have is from Thomas). I can understadn them drawing a line under the incident. I’d want to as well:  the issue of Photographers rights has well and truly been highlighted.

This whole discussion has gotten way out of hand. Someone even posted a link to Simon Blints Facebook page ( Which I will not link to, on principle). On the one hand, this will dominate any Google searches for Simon and potentially portray him in the wrong light. On the other it portrays him as on his toes, looking out for the needs of his employees and visitors alike (tenuous, I know, but still).

Do I think Thomas should have blogged this? Yes indeed. Do I think both sides could have handled it better. Yes again.

In closing, Jeremiah Owyang said the following:

Thomas Hawk’s skewering of Simon Blint: Thomas is a community leader (and photo site CEO) he needs to wield his power with responsbility

And you can see the level of discussion that generated below:

 

The other one, which I am less informed about is a solely a twitter affair. Usually Twitters popup in my feed entirely out of context. This time, however almost my entire page way covered in Twiters between Jason Calcanis of Mahalo and Andrew Baron.

And boy were the insults flying back and forth.

It takes up the first page and a half of this FF search.

That last entry in the picture above refers to this chart regarding Mahalo traffic numbers:

And that’s how this whole thing kicked off. Exactly what was the bone of contention, I’ve no idea.

Again, the power of social networks was leveraged since the combined communities of Twitter and Friendfeed were spectators to the whole debacle.  What ordinarily would be solved via email just a few years ago, now is thrust on to the Internet for all to see.

What is particularly troublesome of this kind of behaviour across multiple social networks is the effect that they have. No matter who was in the right or wrong, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

These two incidents also shows the difference in format between two highly successful social networks (can you even describe FF as a social network?). It emphasises that we can either interact with the content or which each other. Interacting with the content gives us a starting pint for conversation, interacting with each other, apparently, can be much shakier.

Of the two choices, I would rather join a discussion centring on something solid, a blog post, link, photo or even an informative twitter.

Friendfeed Feature Request

Will someone please give me a way of associating two items together?? Would really help. Thanks.

PS. Don’t take me wrong, I love FF .

FriendFeed gets my posts, Twice

I’ve noticed that there is a lag between my post being published and it showing up in FF (From Michel Arrington’s stream):

 

I’ve actually noticed that this is becoming the exception rather than the norm slowly but surely:

Nevertheless I wrote a plugin for Windows Live Writer that automatically posts a link to FriendFeed every time I publish a post. In fact the link in the above picture ws posted using this plugin

Since I’ve never written a WLW plugin I used the Twitter Notify plugin that is included as part of the SDK as a springboard. You might notice that there is very little code left of the original.

Since it uses the new SDK feature unavailable in WLW 2.0, you’ll need the WLW 3.0 CTP for this plugin to work.

You can get it from Codeplex here.

It will ask you for your FriendFeed username and Remote Key as well as a preamble to accompany the posted link. This is set, by default, to “Blog Post”. As you can see mine is set to “New Blog Post”. All these settings can be changed from the Plugins page of WLW options.

Suggestions are welcome as are bug fixes, etc.

The plugin is working well for me and I’ve encountered no issues, other than WLW taking slightly longer to start up ( this could be a CTP issue).

I currently thinking of:

• Putting a link to the discussion on FF in the post( as far as I can tell this would require a re-write)
• Linking to FF when you Update the post

Anyone else got any ideas?

FriendFeed as a Service

I’m on holiday and just logged on to FriendFeed after a week away.

What I found was a load of Twitter comments that make no sense outside of their conversation context and two items of interest (Why Twitter is better than FriendFeed – which makes little sense and Internet-savvy voters shake up US presidential election which does).

The point being that on any particular day one’s  noise filter varies – in this case I wish to be rid of Twitters because I’m out of time (I’m being charged for WiFi – Net Neutrality for you!!).

Second, the interestingness ( yes, Yahoo I’m infringing on your patent) of the items is arbitrary. Thus what appeals to me one day may be the next based on my current circumstances ( this time I’m in a hurry and a summary would be best). In this second point, FF has done very well, giving Best Of filters for the Day, Week and Month ( through one could argue for the value of a Year filter). The Weekly best of gives me this item that springs to my attention:

Steve Rubel: “I am working on a post about the implication of Friendfeed, Mahalo and other human discovery engines on PR and journalism. Interested in your thoughts please share. ”

There’s  fascinating discussion in the comments. Its rather noticeable that items with lots of Likes and Comments appear in this filter.

Buts its my first point that needs to be addressed: I want to temporarily blog twitters, for example when I’m busy. Its noise control for when its needed.

But don’t get me wrong – I like the noise.

Online Aggregation – a la FriendFeed

If you read regularly, you’ve probably begun to wonder where i’ve been these past few weeks. I’m not blaming you.

Between FriendFeed and exams there aren’t enough hours in the day.

FreindFeed itself is great. Being able to aggregate so much data in one place is very useful. FF ( as FriendFeed is shortened to) supports 35 ( or more) services directly and more through the use of the RSS feed(s) that you can add.

Robert Scoble is the prime example of this. The sheer amount of online output the man generates makes you wonder if he ever sleeps.  Go on, click the link and admire this river of news, posts, tweets, videos and photos. Then take a look at how many friends the guys has- well over 10,000 people as friends ( people that either are subscribed to him or he subscribes to). FF has a Friend of a Friend feature that add some of his friends posts to your home page on FF. This gives you a tremendous amount of noise to wade through.

And combine this with all your other friends. This gives you a long, long river of news to read through.

However, FF is not a true social networking site. It aggregates data from a huge amount of sites. But your Friends are nothing more than people you’ve subscribed to for their feed. Its rather like saying that because you have a subscription to the NYT you are their friend and they’re yours.

To reinforce the point there is zero information about you save a picture – which suits me as you’ll notice I don’t have an About Me page ( I’m thinking about putting one up, though). And I’m dithering on what picture I should put up.

Jennifer Woodward Maderazo made the point that its very personal having all this information in one place. Possibly. It depends on what information you share. Robert Scoble and Thomas Hawk have no problem with this – they’re subscribed to practically every service available. I mean, its darn interesting to see what photos Thomas favourites on Flickr. I’m sure its possible to figure out his taste in photos and his political leanings from his content. Even how he likes Mac and  Microsoft solely for its Windows Media Centre.  But there is no real, personal  information being shared here.

On Jennifer’s second point about no real interaction – come on!! I comment more in FF than outside, often commenting as a post comes in, and as part of a conversation. I like a lot as well ( comments and likes are another way if discerning peoples taste – but no real information is there. See above). If there is anything to suggest its no otherwise the case, its that comments don’t follow items as they are ReShared or posted within FF. This inevitably leads to fragmented conversations and a reduction in interaction. Also blog and FF comments should be synced in some form that will lead to even more interaction.

And Jennifer’s last point about information overload is just plain wrong. We have fine grained control of what turns up in our feed. from hiding friends of friends completely to hiding on a per-friend-per-service basis ( you can also blanket hide a service entirely – so no Twitter tweets show up from any friend, ever).

The Flickr favourites feature I mentioned above is a compelling reason to join Flickr ( I’m with SmugMug and intend to stay – you’ll see my photos show up).

One thing that is surprising is that FF is slowing taking attention share away from Google Reader. Not just when it comes to commenting, but I post links that I find interesting. Steve Rubel, for example, tweets and posts links fairly often that point to interesting material – I share some. But those don’t show up in my Shared items to your right ( from Google Reader Shared items). I’m thinking of some way to integrate them together using the FF API.

Another reason is the Imaginary Friend feature. I currently only have one at the moment – MarsPhoenix. If that sounds familiar to you its that lander NASA just put on Mars’ north pole. Its got two blogs and a twitter feed. This Friend combines them into a one feed with posts from both blogs mixed in with the numerous tweet updates and makes it dead easy to follow via FF or RSS. These appear as fart of my feed on the FF homepage along with everything else, making it doubly useful.

FF is literally Google Reader gone wild (rather than Twitter). Its subscriptions based. And, one up on Google Reader, shares all of your online activity back to the community. Its not even Digg (I can’t remember the last time I logged in to Digg).

Many belive that Robert will be going on about another service in a few months time. But FF has the traction ( its many services and thus audiences that it serves) and the leverage (the huge number of adopters it has at the moment) to survive. It straddles the difference between a true, thoroughbred networking site like Twitter ( or Facebook, if you prefer) and the disconnected consumption of content of a RSS reader. Its perfectly situated to bridge the gap between all these disparate services.