2007.10.07 - Part 2
Chris: Hey Adam, this is Chris in Long Beach. I had a question I hope you can help me out with. I'm thinking about getting an Apple TV in the near future and the only thing holding me back is something that doesn't seem too available yet for it and that's high disk content and, possibly, more hard drive space. I thought maybe you've heard something in the future that's coming out for it in regard to that. Also, I'm a huge high-def picture nut when it comes to viewing movies and pictures and so forth. With my current plasma screen set up, I'm thinking if I go get an Apple TV now and I get all these movies on there from iTunes, the picture quality is not going to satisfy me and that's what's holding me back; that and the hard drive space. I mean, 160GB can be a lot, but it can get sucked up pretty fast with movies, especially if you have a lot of them. I thought maybe you could help me decide that or how your experience has been with the Apple TV and picture quality. Does it support 10ADI, 10ADP, HDMI cabling, things like that, because those all are factors? Again, you do a great show. Keep up the good work. Thanks man.
Adam: Hey Chris, great questions. I think that I have to say as much as I love my Apple TV I don't think that the Apple TV is for everyone. Let me address some of your questions. As far as content goes, you're right. I mean, currently on iTunes the content is not the highest quality. It's not high-definition quality, despite the fact that the Apple TV does do high-def and I want to be very clear about the high-definition that the Apple TV does. Apple TV supports 720P or 1080I content. It does not do full 1080P, so if you are looking for that kind of quality you're not going to get it. It sounds like you're very much into the high-def content. If you want high-def content currently on the Apple TV it's going to have to be stuff that you get yourself or you get from another source; rip yourself is the common way that most people are getting that kind of content on the Apple TV. But, again, 720P is the best you are going to be able to do. Now there has been a lot of rumors that Apple is going to bring out sort of iTunes high-def and that they are going to eventually offer up 720P content.
Another big point of contention for a lot of people is the audio. Currently the stuff that Apple sells through iTunes audio-wise is not 5.1 it is Dolby surround stuff. I don't want to confuse people because there's a lot of confusion and a lot of people say that Apple TV does not support 5.1 surround sound and that's simply not true. I mean, it doesn't have 5.1 surround sound decoding built into it but, again, most devices, DVD players and things like that, don't have that built in. It does have digital video out with the Toss link and if you connect that to a 5.1 surround sound processor receiver you should be able to get, assuming your content is passing through the audio, 5.1 surround sound. I know that's important for a lot of people, but you're not going to get it through iTunes content. So, again, you're going to have to get your own content with the Apple TV if you want to do that. You are right to have concerns about hard drive space. 160 gigs is pretty good, but if you are doing a lot of high-def content you are likely going to need more. What I can say about that from my personal experience is that streaming content works great, so I stream almost all of my content from my other Macs. I don't actually sync it to the Apple TV. I've never had a problem with that. Again, of course, I'm using the current iTunes content and some of my own ripped content and I'm not ripping it into high-definition. I'm not doing 720P, I'm doing typical iPod and iPhone Apple TV resolutions, so that could be a factor in there. I am doing it wirelessly over 80211G, so if you were using 80211N there's no reason why the steaming shouldn't work. All the reports that I've seen say that it works great and it works flawlessly even with 720P content. You shouldn't run into any issues as far as storage if you just want to stream from your other Macs and, of course, there you can hook up other external drives, things like that. I do have to say, picture quality for me has been great. I think it absolutely matches up with DVD quality but, again, I'm using my system on a standard definition television. I don't have a high-definition LCD or plasma. In your case, I think you're going to be much more critical of the picture quality than I am and so I don't think the Apple TV is for everyone. I don't think it is for someone who's really into high-def content; someone who has a real video file in the same way that I would argue that the current quality MP3s on iTunes is not great for a real true audio file. I hope that kind of makes sense.
As far as how I use my Apple TV and what I like and who I think it's for, I think it's great for the person who already has a lot of iTunes purchase content. I think it's great and one of the main reasons I got it was for video podcasts. There is 720P video podcast content and I have to tell you on my standard definition television it looks beautiful. That content looks just awesome. I also find myself using the YouTube features a lot. I had never really been into YouTube before, but with YouTube on my iPhone and YouTube on my Apple TV I'm viewing a lot more YouTube content and that looks great, especially the newer stuff that encoded in the H.264 format. That's been really great. Personally, I don't like photos on the Apple TV. I know a lot of people like it for the photo content. My main problem is that I don't have the flexibility to access my photos the way that I want. You simply can play and slideshow random mode. You can't just go in and view individual photos like browsing your iPhoto library, which I find a bit frustration because I'd like to go in and just look at certain events or certain dates and view specific photos. You can't do that very easily with Apple TV. I'm hoping that's something they fix with the software update. I'm also not really using it for the audio music steaming. Part of the reason for that might be the fact that I don't have my Apple TV hooked up to my home stereo, but I do have my Airport Express hooked up to my home theater system, so I tend to use the Airport Express for steaming audio content and not the Apple TV. You did ask about some of the connections. I already mentioned for digital audio you do have the Toss link that you can use. As far as hooking up with HDMI the Apple TV has DVI out, so you can get a DVI to HDMI cable and that works great. I did use that with a video projector to produce a demo one time and that worked very, very well. I would pick up the Xtreme Mac cable for that, which you can pick up for about twenty bucks and is a great cable.
As far as someone like you who is really a video file, you might be better off considering setting up a Mac Mini as your home theatre server and using external fire wire disks for additional storage, getting something like Remote Buddy for controlling the content and then you really can do really high-quality video using a Mac-based system. That might be a better option for you, unless Apple comes out with a new version of the Apple TV. There have been rumors about it, but Steve did come out and say, you know, Apple TV is really kind of a hobby product for Apple. It hasn't sold really well by most analysts estimates, so who knows what Apple is going to do with it in the future, whether we'll see high-definition content or not. I would say Apple TV is probably not for you. You might want to wait for the next generation, but I think it is a great option for someone like me that's doing a lot of video podcasts and has a lot of iTunes purchase content. I hope that helps clarify things and helps you make your buying decision.
Now, continuing on with some more iTunes discussion, I received an email from listener Rick. He has a dilemma I think a lot of people have and was wondering about putting together tracks in iTunes. This is the kind of situation where you have an album, say like Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon or Abby Road from the Beatles, where you're not supposed to have gaps between the tracks, but you have individual tracks. If you are using iTunes 7 and you've turned on the cross-fade feature you're going to get pauses between the different tracks within the album. By default now, iTunes 7 added a feature called the gapless playback, so if you don't have cross-fade on and you have one of these albums it will flow one track to the other without the pauses in between, but if you did turn on the cross-fade feature you're going to get those nasty gaps between the tracks. You can go in, leave cross-fade on and enable gapless playback manually. The way you do that is in iTunes you go select the track that you want to have play gapless and then go under the file menu, choose get info and then click on the options tab to go to the options pane and then within there you'll see a little checkbox that says “part of a gapless album”. Simply check that on and that will allow gapless playback between tracks within that album. That doesn't solve the problem that actually Rick was having, so I emailed him back and he said well no, technically, I knew about that. That wasn't what I was talking about. What I'm talking about is I have these little intro tracks or short lead-in tracks to another track and really if I listen to it on the CD it's supposed to be grouped together. One sort of flows into the other just for those two tracks and I want to keep those together and I was wondering about a way to do that. He actually emailed me the solution and that is you need to do this actually prior to importing the tracks from you CD. If you pop in the CD and you see the CD over in the devices area you want to open that up and then you want to select the two tracks that you want to keep together. You can do that by holding the shift key down to select the multiple tracks and then if you go under the advanced menu in iTunes you'll see an option that says “join CD tracks”. Pick that; that will keep those together. Then do your CD import and when you do that it will create one track for those two together, so you can keep them together.
Now, if you've already imported your tracks you're going to have to go through manually and actually stitch those together. A great program for doing that is Rogue Amoeba's Fission. That's great because if you have it in MP3 or AAC format you can actually stitch those together using Fission and then save out your file without having to do any re-encoding. That's the power of Fission, so that's an app to use. If you want to go a free route you can use a tool like Audacity, but you are going to have to do it manually if you've done it after the fact. I'm not sure of a solution if they're actually iTunes purchase tracks and they're not already stitched together. I'm not sure you're going to be able to use an audio editing application to resave those out because of the FairPlay DRM. If anybody knows of a solution for that send me an email maccast@gmail.com and we'll try and follow up with that on a future MacCast if there is, indeed, a fix for that. Thanks Rick for bringing that up and thanks for pointing out the solution on joining the tracks prior to the importing of the CD. I'm sure that is going to help out some of the other listeners out there. Another thing that will likely help some of you out there is a topic we've kind of covered here and there on the MacCast before. It's something that comes up often, especially with switchers, new users to the Mac, and this has to do with the whole paradigm of how installing applications on the Mac works. This came up recently with an email from listener Mark who just wanted me to go over sort of how installing works, how image files work, .dmg files and he had some other questions also about things like target disk mode. I just want to kind of clear up some of the installer confusion for maybe some of the new users to the Mac or maybe even some of you older users who just are wondering about how all this stuff works.
Typically most applications, especially if you download shareware, freeware, if you don't have an installer disk, come across as a .dmg file and this is an Apple image file. Most of us know that double clicking that file actually causes it, in essence, to mount on your desktop almost like connecting an external disk or inserting a CD or a DVD into the drive. Then the typical way to install an application, if it doesn't have, you know, a double click installer, is to simply drag the application into your applications folder. I do recommend that most people install all of their applications into the applications folder in Mac OS X. That's the default location where you want to install your apps. Installing them there will make your life a whole lot simpler and it keeps everything together in one location. There are some applications that expect the app to be there and don't function very well if it's not, so just go ahead and drag the application from the mounted disk image into the applications folder. Here's where kind of some of the confusion comes in for some users because you can actually run applications right off of the mounted disk image, but that's not what you're supposed to do. Some people actually end up doing it that way because they just don't realize. You know, they are used to having an installer and running that and there's no installer there. They see the app and go oh hey, I can run it from there. They run it and then, of course, you reboot your Mac and suddenly the application is gone. You don't know where it went. You don't see a mounted image anymore, so you definitely want to drag those into your applications folder and install them there. Once you are done you can go ahead and right click or control click or click the little eject icon next to that mounted image to actually un-mount it and then you can go back to the original .dmg file once you have it installed. You may want to back it up to a CD or DVD just so you have a copy of that installer around, but once you have that backed up or you don't need it anymore you can trash that. You don't need to keep it around. You already have the application copied into your applications folder. It's there safe and sound so you can get rid of that original .dmg file. You don't need it anymore. The next kind of big question for a lot of people comes up well, alright, I've got the application. It's installed now, what happens when I want to remove it? How do I uninstall it? The Mac way for uninstalling most applications is to simply drag the application to the trash, empty the trash and poof the application is gone. One thing for more complex applications, things like Adobe PhotoShop or say Microsoft Word, there occasionally is an uninstaller. A lot of times rerunning the original application installer, so if there was an application installer, rerunning it you'll see an option for actually uninstalling the application, so that would be the way to go. I usually try that. If there's an installer for the app I'll re-download the installer, run it and see if it doesn't have an uninstall option. Baring that and simply moving the application to the trash and removing it takes care of most applications. Occasionally there are little bits and pieces left behind. If you want to go in and clean those up the typical locations to check are in your home folder in the library folder in the preferences. You might find a preference file for your application. You can move that to the trash once you've deleted the application itself. The other place to check is in the home folder, the library folder and in a folder called application support. A lot of applications have support files that they'll put in there and that's a typical place to check. If you want to make the whole process a little bit easier on yourself there are some third-party applications that can help you out for uninstalling applications. One of my favorites is from Austin Sarner. It's called AppZapper and you can find that at appzapper.com. There are some other ones. Do a simple search on Version Tracker at versiontracker.com for uninstaller and you'll find some of those applications, but I prefer and like AppZapper. I think it's great, plus it makes that great zapping noise when you want to get rid of an application, which is a whole lot of fun. The last question Mark had was about target disk mode and this is something new for a lot of people. Mac OS X has this built in feature. If you have another Mac, a second Mac, say a MacBook, a MacBook Pro, a laptop and you have a desktop Mac, you can actually use your second Mac almost like an external hard drive and that's by putting it into target disk mode. The way target disk mode works is you get a fire wire cable, you need a fire wire cable to actually make this work, you hook the fire wire cable from your target Mac, in this example we'll say my iBook G4, so I have an iBook G4. If I wanted to use that as an external hard drive or mount it with my Mac Mini as an external hard drive, I'd get a fire wire cable, connect that to my iBook G4 and then power on the iBook G4 holding down the T key. That is going to put it in target disk mode. I'll be able to see on the screen on that iBook G4 a little fire wire logo will start bouncing around and then when I have it connected to my Mac Mini it will actually mount up and show up as an external volume in my finder. At that point, I can treat it pretty much just like any external disk. I can move files back and forth from it. I can see the files and folders in the directory structure and just treat it as a disk. A common use for this is when you are upgrading, you've bought a new Mac, you have an old Mac and you want to transfer files, folders and things like that, target disk mode can be very helpful. You can also use it along with the migration assistant. Apple's migration assistant will see the older Mac simply as a drive and you can move your user folders over, things like that, so target disk mode is very convenient. When you are done with it you simply un-mount it and you can disconnect it and power down that second Mac. Hopefully, Mark, that helps explain things a little bit and I'm sure that's going to help out some of the other listeners who are new to the Mac platform. With that, we'll closeout another episode of the MacCast. I want to thank you for joining me. 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