Low Fidelity

Having decided to wait until the cold light of day before posting a response to Apple’s 1st September media event – in order to minimise the effect of the Steve Jobs’ Reality Distortion Field – I find myself marginally impressed with the offering that was placed before us yesterday. I often find myself feeling a bit “meh” about Apple keynotes, as they never seem to deliver what they promised. However, I think they’ve done a pretty good job with their lineup this time.

So what have we got? We’ve got all-new iPods, that’s what we’ve got. A new Shuffle, a new Nano and a new Touch.

I was never taken with the third-gen Shuffle, with its lack of buttons and “voiceover” function. This, to me, screamed just one thing – “you can’t use your own headphones any more”. Being a bit of an audiophile, I had no intention of using Apple’s earbuds, so the Shuffle was off the cards. I had been perusing eBay in the hope of finding a 2nd-gen to overcome this problem, but they’re going for silly money (probably because no-one liked the 3rd-gen). Naturally, now Apple have seen the error of their ways and (sensibly) decided to put the buttons back on the Shuffle, I’m very happy. And at £39, I hope one will be coming my way this Christmas.

Onto the Nano then. Or should that be more accurately named the “iPod Shuffle Touch”? Not much bigger than the Shuffle, it now has a 3cmx3cm touch screen – just big enough to display 4 icons at once. I’m not really as convinced by this idea – it just seems too different to the original concept of the Nano. Yes, we still have a decent amount of flash storage, but over time the Nano had become a genuine competitor to the Classic in terms of its capacity and functionality. Hell, it even had a decent camera on it – which now, unfortunately, has disappeared. In an effort to make it smaller, it seems to have lost some of its “essence”. And it’s a bit pricey too. I’m sure it will sell well, but not to me.

And onto the iPod Touch then. I, personally, think Apple have done a brilliant job with this – although some will disagree. Slimmer casing, Retina display (very nice indeed), A4 chip (bringing performance on a par with iPhone4), front and rear cameras, Facetime, HD video recording, Game Center – the list goes on. So what is there not to like? Well, one of my Mac-loving compatriots has decried the Touch in no uncertain terms for the quality of its rear camera. If you were hoping for the (rather good) 5MP unit from the iPhone4, you’ll be very disappointed. The Touch’s camera manages all of 0.7MP. That sounds pretty poor (and, to be fair, is), but that does equate to HD-resolution video (960×720). In company with the iOS iMovie app, this will make a lot of YouTubers very happy indeed. And, for my money, the camera is perfectly capable of doing all the fun stuff with apps that I would want – Evernote snaps, barcode reading, Dropbox, Twitpic etc. The front-facing camera/Facetime combination is also a very pleasing offer.

As for the iPod Classic, this is the only iPod that didn’t get an update – but then, what is there to update? Massive storage, brilliant UI, plays anything you throw at it, sounds great, lovely screen. End of.

I’m interested to see whether the upcoming iOS 4.1 update makes my current iPod Touch run any better. At the moment, it’s a bit laggy. Steve promised that 4.1 will fix “iPhone 3G performance issues” so I hope that goes for iPod Touch too.

So, finally, onto Steve’s “One More Thing”, or as he quipped last night “One More Hobby” – the AppleTV. I’ve admired the AppleTV from afar ever since it was released, but I’ve never quite got round to taking the plunge. The price was a bit steep, and the implementation was always a bit half-assed and I never quite convinced myself that I genuinely needed one. However, now things are different. We now have ourselves a second-generation AppleTV. And the best bit? £99. That’s a price point I can like, and cheap enough to make it worth a try. Recently, the movie collection on my Mac has been growing (mainly thanks to the brilliance that is Handbrake) and getting those movies to my televisions has been a bit hit and miss. I bought a WDTV Live recently, and it’s very good. It’s very similar in functionality to the new AppleTV, insofar as it is able to find media on my Mac and stream it to my bedroom TV over the network. However, there are a few things I don’t like about the WDTV – the UI is ugly, its networking is wired only and it has no integration with iTunes, meaning that I just get a massive list of folders and filenames instead of the glossy artwork and metadata that I’ve painstakingly added.

The lack of purchasing content from the AppleTV isn’t an issue for me – I neither purchase nor rent video content from iTunes. I merely want this unit to plug into my TV, display my iTunes library (movies, TV shows and music) on the screen and play it. Hopefully that’s exactly what it will deliver. I’ve got my preorder in, so in four weeks’ time I’ll be able to tell you whether it does.

I’ve had my new home cinema toys for a few weeks now, and I’ve had a very enjoyable time getting everything up and running and configured just the way I like it. Sometimes that is the best part of getting new kit – once it’s all sorted out, there’s very little to do with it (which is nice in itself) but the gadget freak in me likes to mess about with settings and make sure everything is as good as it can get.

Whilst the new AV receiver (the Sony STR-DA2400ES) has automatic calibration, it didn’t get the levels quite right as far as I was concerned. Not enough centre channel, too much sub and rear effects. With a bit of fettling, I’m now much happier with it – so the moral is to not necessarily blindly trust the microchip, because undoubtedly your ears are better than an algorithm.

My next issue was that I had acquired a very low level hum from the subwoofer. It was never there before with the old amp. With a bit of Googling, I found out that it was most likely a ground loop hum – and this was backed up by the fact that my old amp only had live and neutral wires in the plug (the earth pin was plastic) whereas this new amp has all three pins wired up – essentially this creates one great big circuit around the earth loop, which adversely affects the sensitive audio circuitry. I don’t fully understand the physics of it (maybe Olitee will stop by and explain it) but as far as I could tell, the common solution was to wire the ground pin on the back of the amp (usually used to ground record players) to a metallic part of the subwoofer casing.

I went out to Maplins, bought a packet of ring terminals and a couple of metres of thin wire (total cost, £2.38), soldered it together and then sanded the paint off a small portion of the sub’s metal backplate. Then I attached the wire between the amp and that part of the sub, and hey presto, no humming. As far as I’m concerned there’s some sort of witchcraft going on there, but if it works, I’m happy.

Another bit of fiddling (as I alluded to last time) has been getting this new system to play digital video files successfully. I’ve discovered that the Blu-Ray player will happily playback my MP4 files that I’ve encoded with Handbrake, and even better it will also decode the Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtracks from these files as well. However, it will only work with storage attached directly to one of its two USB ports – not over the network (despite the fact that it is connected to it). This has made me hanker after some kind of dedicated solution for playback of video files, because the Blu-Ray interface is, at best, slow and clunky. It works, but it ain’t elegant.

This got me thinking about investing in some kind of small Nvidia Ion-based computer to run a combination of Ubuntu and either XBMC or Boxee. Both have their advantages, and having tested both out on my iMac, I can see that this would be a superb solution. However, we’re looking at around £200 for a capable computer like the Acer Revo or similar, and when there are a lots of rumours buzzing around about an imminent new AppleTV (allegedly much cheaper than the current one) I would be daft to invest now. I’ll hang on.

Finally, I’ve just found out that Lovefilm have added four hours per month of digital movie streaming to my current package at no extra cost, and rather pleasingly I can use this via the Blu-Ray player. I haven’t tried it yet, but I shall report back.

I’ve been toying with the idea of implementing some kind of home media network for a while now – being able to move audio and video files around the house over the network between multiple devices. As I’ve reported a few times in the past, I’ve had great success with the music side of things, being able to get my iTunes library to both my Roku Soundbridge and my Apple Airport Express.

Video is quite a different beast though. Being quite the Mac fan, I’ve been coveting the AppleTV for just such a purpose although I can’t justify the cost at the moment. I wanted to get my toe in the water relatively cheaply, just to see what was possible.

My first purchase was a D-Link DNS-313 Network Attached Storage (NAS) enclosure. I had a large SATA drive kicking around doing nothing, so I thought that having a network-accessible repository for my video files – in the form of the NAS – would be a good starting point. My idea was that any media streaming devices I subsequently got would be able to see the NAS, browse the files, and then the data would be able to cross the network and play. That was the theory anyway.

Part of the reason I chose the D-Link is that it was advertised as having a built in DLNA/uPNP compatible media server – meaning any devices that adhered to the DLNA standard would automatically work together. This sounded ideal.

After installing my SATA drive into the DNS-313 (which was a pleasingly simple process) I copied a few video files over to it. I discovered that the process of sending 2GB movie files over the network was, unfortunately, excrutiatingly slow – but I figured the end justified the means. The video files were encodes of some of my DVDs, which I had ripped using Handbrake into M4V/H264 files – which is the standard format for Apple devices, and generally thought of to be a good combination of quality, size and compatibility. A superb tutorial on the process is over at the blog of Olitee.

So, I had my “media tank”, complete with video files. Now I needed something to play them with.

For a while now, I had been lugging our laptop up to the bedroom to use as a DVD player with our 22″ LCD TV. The laptop has an HDMI output for simple connection to the telly. I thought that the laptop would be able to see the files on the NAS and play them. I opted for the well-regarded VLC player for this purpose, due to its open-source nature and ability to deal with virtually any kind of file you throw at it.

And this is where problem one arose. I could see the files on the NAS, and VLC played them without an issue EXCEPT every few minutes, the playback would stop, VLC would rebuffer, and then the file would start to play again. This, in my opinion, rendered the whole thing unwatchable. I wasn’t sure why this was, but I decided to try alternatives.

I’d had my eye on the range of Western Digital TV (WDTV) devices for some time, and they had been getting good reviews. The basic model relied on local storage of video files, whereas the better “Live” model had a network connection, and seemed to offer what I was looking for – “playback of files up to 1080p from local or network storage”. When I secured a brand new one for £43 on eBay, I decided that it was definitely worth a try.

The WDTV Live is a very small unit, offering HMDI, component or composite connections to your TV. I opted for HDMI as the single cable carries both picture and audio. I hooked it up to the network and tested it out. Now the WDTV could see the NAS unit in two different ways – firstly as a basic SAMBA network share, or as a DLNA media server. Thinking that the media server seemed like the best option, I tried it. But what’s this? Where are the video files? They’re not there! The WDTV resolutely refused to display the M4V files contained on the NAS. Weird. I thought that the WDTV had fallen at the first hurdle – no M4V support.

So then I tried connecting to the NAS using the SAMBA share option. This time, all the M4V files showed up without a problem. Excellent. Maybe it wasn’t a file format issue after all. So I tried playing one, and encountered exactly the same stopping/rebuffering/starting problem I had with the laptop. Bugger. But at least they played.

I decided that my network was to blame. Clearly, the videos can’t transfer across quickly enough to satisfy the demands of the playback unit. I tested a few files playing back from a USB memory stick connected directly to the WDTV, just to check that I got smooth playback from the files and it wasn’t my encoding that was to blame. This worked flawlessly, as I suspected it might. No problem with the format of the files themselves, obviously.

It was then that I saw my desktop iMac’s shared “Movies” folder also displayed the WDTV’s network menu. For the sake of completeness, I thought I’d try playing back the files from here, instead of from the NAS. And guess what? Once again, flawless uninterrupted playback. Obviously, the network speed wasn’t an issue after all. This led me to suspect the blame lay with the NAS.

I had almost given up hope with the NAS as a source for my media files, but I thought I’d give it one last test before deciding to ditch it, and this test came in the form of a shiny new Sony Blu-Ray player, the BDP-S370.

This, in addition to being able to play blu-rays and DVDs was network-capable (having an ethernet port on the rear) and DLNA-compatible. Maybe I’d have more luck with the NAS’s DLNA server this time. After setting it up and getting it on the network (which was incredibly easy!) I went to the menu and tried to find the NAS. There it was! Superb. So in I went, and encountered exactly the same problem I’d had with the WDTV. No M4V files. At all. What’s up with that? I again hooked up my USB flash drive containing a few movie files to the bluray player’s USB port to check compatibility, and unsurprisingly I got excellent playback without a problem.

I came to the conclusion that the DLNA server on the D-Link didn’t like M4V files. I tried copying some AVI and DIVX files to it to test out this theory, and the WDTV and BDP-S370 could see them just fine. Playing them back smoothly, was – yet again – a non-starter though, and anyway, I wasn’t about to start re-encoding my files. Olitee tells me MPEG4/H264 is the way forward, so that’s what I’m sticking with.

So one upshot of all this is that my NAS is rubbish. So rubbish that I’m getting rid of it – it simply doesn’t do what I need it to. It’s DLNA-implementation doesn’t support M4v, and as a SAMBA share it’s simply not fast enough.

Overall, the issue is that I still don’t have a “one stop” solution – yet. However, at least my encoding “strategy” works and my files are compatible with my devices. How I get those files to my devices, is – for the moment at least – open for discussion.

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I’d had a bit of a tricky time with getting my new Android phone to display album art properly in its media player, and I also mentioned that I’d discovered why. Here’s an attempt at an explanation…

iTunes – which you’re probably familiar with – has a very useful feature that automatically fetches album art for any CDs that you import into its library. It’s a simple case of right-clicking and selecting “Get album artwork”, and hey presto, you have a beautiful album cover to look at instead of that sad, generic placeholder.

This is not without its problems though. I discovered that if you use this feature of iTunes, the program doesn’t embed the artwork into the music files themselves. Instead it creates a separate folder inside your iTunes library called “Album Artwork” and stores everything in there. The music file in iTunes has a link to the requisite album art in this folder, and displays it when required. This has the advantage of making the files themselves a bit smaller – however the converse of this is that outside of iTunes, the files don’t have any artwork of their own.

So how to fix this? Well, I purchased the Macheist bundle a couple of months ago, and part of that bundle was an absolutely FANTASTIC program called CoverScout. This went right through all 600 albums in my library, located the artwork in the iTunes album artwork folder and copied and embedded it into every file. Superb! Took a while, but it needed absolutely no input from me – all completely automatic.

However, if you don’t have CoverScout (and you’re too cheap to pay for it) there’s an alternative in the form of Doug’s “Embed Artwork 2.0″ Applescript which will do the same thing (only without the pretty interface and all the additional useful features!).

Once your artwork is embedded in the files themselves, wherever you take your music files, the artwork goes too. Now, my Android music player looks much prettier and my computer-related OCD is satisfied – at least until I discover the next problem!

Needless to say, these solutions are Mac-specific. If you’re a PC, then I have no idea what you should do (apart from get a Mac, obviously).

When I finally decided to get my Android-based phone, one of my first considerations was how I would sync the data I currently had stored in my desktop Mac applications with the ‘droid. I had been relying on iCal and Address Book for some time to keep my contacts and appointments in order, and when I had a Nokia phone, iSync took care of getting it all synced together.

With no desktop sync software available for a Mac/Android combination, I decided that the obvious answer was to migrate everything into Google’s cloud. I have been a gMail user for a long time now, but I had never really used the Contacts or Calendar options in anger. In case you’re interested, here’s how I went about getting my precious data into the right place, ready for pairing with my new phone. Needless to say, all this assumes you’ve got a Google account!

Firstly – and most importantly – I backed all my existing data up. Of course, Time Machine had been faithfully doing this anyway, but I wanted to be doubly sure that I had a safe, up-to-date copy of everything in case the plan went south. To do this, open up iCal and go to File -> Export -> iCal Archive and choose where to save the file. I decided on the desktop for ease, but you can put it anywhere really. This will back up all your iCal calendars into one easily restorable file.

In Address Book, the process is very similar. Fire it up, and go to File -> Export -> Address Book Archive. Again, this will back everything up into one file.

Save both of those archive files somewhere safe in case the worst happens. You can always get back to square one by importing them back into their respective programs if things don’t work out. Once you’re happy you’re all backed up, the fun can start.

iCal to Google Calendar:

In iCal, your next step is to export each of your calendars – if you’ve only got one, then you’ll only need to do it once. If, like me, you have more than one (one for home, one for work) you’ll need to export each one separately. Click on the first calendar in the list on the left of the iCal window, and then go to File -> Export -> Export and select a destination. Repeat for each separate calendar, making sure your file name is different and easily identifiable. Your files will have the suffix .ics on the end.

Then fire up your browser, and go to your Google Calendar – http://www.google.com/calendar/. In the left hand column – under the heading My Calendars – by default, you will just have the one calendar. This is fine if you’re only importing one, but if you have more then you will need to create the necessary extras. To do this, click on the little “add” hyperlink, and go about creating the new one. Then, to avoid later confusion, I named my Google calendars as the same things as the ones I was importing – so in my case, I had one called “Home” and one called “Work” to match the .ics files I had exported earlier.

To import your iCal files into Google, the process is quite simple. Click on the “Settings” hyperlink under “My Calendars”, and it will take you to a separate settings page where you can see your calendars listed, along with import and export options.

Click on the “Import Calendar” option, and another dialog box appears.

Click browse, navigate to where you saved your .ics file, and then use the dropdown at the bottom to choose which calendar to import into. Repeat for your other calendars as well – choosing a different destination calendar for each of your .ics files. If your calendar is big with a lot of appointments in it, importing might take a while. Just be patient and let it do its thing. Once it has finished, hey presto, you have all your data in your Google Calendars.

Importing Address Book into gMail Contacts

To perform a similar feat with Address Book and Google Contacts, you need to go into Address Book, and choose “Select All” from the “Edit” menu to highlight all of your contacts. Once this is done, go to File -> Export -> Export vCard and a dialog box will ask you where you want to save the resulting file – which will automatically be named “vCards”. This is a single file containing all the data from all your contacts, in a form that Google can read.

Then, in your browser, fire up gMail and navigate to the “Contacts” section. Once there, you will see three hyperlinks in the top right hand corner of the window – “Import”, “Export” and “Print”. Choose “Import” and another dialog will appear.

Choose “Browse” and find your way to where you saved your “vCards” file. Then select “Import” – after a few seconds all your contacts should magically appear, complete with photographs if you used them in Address Book. Success!

These steps, by themselves, will do all you need to to get your calendars and contacts (as well as your gMail) onto your new shiny Android phone. The tight integration between the phone and Google means that you only have to input your username and password once, and then everything syncs up quite seamlessly.

Next steps – if you’re interested…

Once your calendars are imported into Google, you can then go about subscribing to your newly-created calendars from inside iCal. This uses CalDAV to allow you to view and edit your Google Calendars from within iCal itself.

The first step is a bit drastic (and you can miss this bit out if it’s too scary) and it involves deleting your current, locally-stored, calendars from iCal. This will give you a clean sheet to start from, and it will avoid any duplication problems later on. Right click each of your current calendars and choose delete, and they will disappear. You won’t be able to delete all of them though – iCal will force you to keep at least one. No matter, because once you’ve linked to your Google Calendar, you can then delete that stubborn one that won’t go away yet.

To link to your Google calendar, go to the “Preferences” menu for iCal. Then click on the “Accounts” tab, and then the little plus symbol in the bottom left of the dialog box. This will present you with the following:

Keep the “Account type” as automatic, and then input your Google email address and password. Click “Create” and iCal will do the rest. You should see your primary Google Calendar appear in the list on the left of the iCal window.

If you’ve only got one calendar, then that’s it – you’re done. However, if you have another one (or more) to link to there are further steps to be carried out.

Head back over to your Google Calendar in your browser. Click the “Settings” link again (the one you used before) and then click the second calendar on your list. This will take you into the detailed settings for this particular calendar. Down at the bottom of this screen, you will see a section called “Calendar Address”. This will list a Calendar ID – a random string of numbers and letters, followed by “@group.calendar.google.com”. Highlight this whole entry and copy it.

Then you need to paste this calendar ID into the following address: /calendar/dav/yourcalendarIDhere@group.calendar.google.com/user/ - obviously replacing the underlined bit with the ID you copied in the previous step. You can do this in Textedit or something similar. Once you’ve done it, highlight the whole lot, and copy it all again.

Head back to iCal, and go back to the preferences screen. Click the plus sign on the accounts tab again, but this time, instead of going for the “automatic” option, choose “CalDAV” from the dropdown instead:

Type your normal Google username and password in, and then paste the long address string (that you copied previously) into the “Server address” box. Click “Create”, and – if you’ve done your copying and pasting right – your second calendar will appear in iCal underneath your first. Repeat ad infinitum for as many calendars as you’ve got. Sorted!

Keeping things synced in Address Book is much, much easier. Go to the “Preferences” dialog, click the “accounts” tab and check the box that says “Syncronize with Google”. It’ll ask for your username and password, but then that’s it. Google and Address Book will stay in sync.

So there you have it. I’ve still got all my contacts in Address book, and all my appointments in iCal – however, they’re now also in my Google account too, meaning that my phone is seamlessly and constantly synced as well.

I’m open to any questions, comments and improvements. Just let me know!