(This is a technical post, you may want to skip if you are feeling bored already)
I recently got
Front Row installed on my pre-IR iMac using
this walkthrough, Front Row being Apple's slightly basic alternative to Windows Media Centre, as a way of using that mac as a set-top box for your TV (in the case of the new Mac Mini) or as a replacement TV (if you are rich enough to own a 30" Apple Display).
Anyway, the app is all well and good using a keyboard, but the beauty of the newer macs is that you can use the Apple Remote to control Front Row from a distance. Enter
Salling Clicker, a brilliant little app that allows you to use your Bluetooth enabled phone to do most anything with your mac. From controlling a Keynote presentation, skipping a song in iTunes, to even controlling the mouse. With this functionality, and a little
plugin for Clicker which allows more refined control over Front Row, you are all set up to go with your new Mac Media Centre. Or are you?
Really, Front Row only acts as a composite front-end for iTunes, iPhoto, Quicktime and DVD player. So it turns out Front Row can only play a video that Quicktime can play. When checking my hard drive, it seems that not all the video files I have are Quicktime playable, seeing as I normally use
VLC for my visual needs. So when faced with a couple of WMV, OGM files and those god-awful Real Media files, I was stuck. Before anyone says 'why didn't you just use 'Flip4Mac' to play WMVs in Quicktime. I have, and found it very unstable, so I need to convert them.
As anyone would do in this situation, I gathered my senses, loaded Safari and headed over to
google.com. With the WMV and Real Media files I was in luck. A wonderful app called '
FFMpegX' is available that can convert almost anything to...well a smaller number of file types. But thankfully Divx/Xvid AVI is one of those formats. So off I go converting my video files to a common format. Real Media being the biggest pain in the arse for conversion time. 3 to 4 hours on a 2Ghz G5. Why do people use it? Real Media is a shocking format to encode anything in, audio or video.
Then I come across a .OGM file, I'd never heard of these before but it seems VLC can play them and Quicktime can't. FFMpegX also spits it out as being an unknown format. What do I do?
Well I google again. Googling does seem to be main vice at the moment. I google for everything. If you ever think I'm being clever when emailing you or over IM, chances are I just googled/
wikipedia-ed it.
Anyway, I found a
site linking to
couple of neat Unix terminal apps that can split an OGM file into its constituent parts. Once done I found there was a Divx .AVI file and a few .OGG (Ogg-Vorbis Audio) files, one being the English soundtrack and the others in those funny foreign languages. Anyway, FFMpegX also spat the .OGG files out when trying to merge the Video and Audio. So I then set about trying to convert the .OGG to .MP3. Again I googled and seems I was in luck.
Audacity is a free audio-editing app that allows you to export a .OGG to a .MP3, which took about 4 minutes for a feature-length audio track. Then the 'muxing' (Multiplexing) took another few minutes to combine the audio and video.
While apps like FFMpegX are coming together nicely and are supporting more and more formats, there are still a few that require such long-winded processes, some of which mean my processor runs at over 80% for extended times, which can't be healthy.
If everyone just used Mpeg or a common codec like Divx life would be so much more simple.
