The AppleTV

It started last summer when I was sitting around talking with some friends about what a pain a large media collection is. With music - a lot of people have migrated over to mp3 and I have to say that with a decent ripper (EAC) and compressing to 192 kbps VBR I struggle to tell the difference between the mp3 and the CD - I can tell there is a difference, but can't tell which is better. This means my CDs can be stored somewhere in a big box. Someday I'd like to go back and re-rip them to FLAC or some other lossless file to have a perfect digital copy for archival purposes. The trouble is DVDs. Initially, having a big collection was something to be proud of, but as I've moved around, transporting all my disks was starting to be a handful. Unfortunately, unlike CDs, a full DVD rip would take up 6-8 GB per disk, and at a collection of some 300 discs, that can add up. We talked about how there should be a way to have your DVDs on a hard disc allowing you to box up the discs in long term storage. I didn't know it then, but such a solution already existed. When Apple launched the AppleTV it flopped. They tried again with updated software and the response was still tepid. Then came tools such as Handbrake, which allowed you to compress films down. DVDs are encoded in MPEG2 which was developed in the early 90s so the technology looks pretty ancient today. The modern Blu-Ray discs tend to be encoded using something called H.264 which is much more efficient and allows you to get the same quality from a smaller file. Thus, using Handbrake it's possible to extract and compress down a 6-7 GB DVD film to a 1-2 GB mp4/m4v file. This file can then be "tagged" with metadata in the same way an mp3 file can using tools such as MetaX (mac/windows). It can retain multiple audio tracks (except DTS for now) so you still got 5.1 sound out and this can then be copied over to the AppleTV or streamed.



There are a few problems.

Firstly, this normally just preserves the film. There are no menus or extras (unless you rip the extras too). In theory I don't mind cos I normally only watch the extras once. Also, some discs with seamless branching have to have each version of the film encoded separately

Secondly, some of the tools (for example Subler to insert subtitles) are still Mac-only

Thirdly, Apple still only sells the aTV with a maximum drive of 160 GB. They also use old-styl drives so the maximum you can upgrade it to is 320 GB, so big collections still won't fit, and Apple still insists you can only stream stuff via iTunes which needs a PC on running iTunes. There are ways around this, such as using hacks to install things like XBMC which can stream from network hard drives.

Right now I've got all my music and most of my TV show DVDs stored on my aTV with my non-DTS films available to stream when my PC is on. I can see why Apple don't put large hard drives in the aTV - so you can copy music to it and use a bit of storage for rentals/buffering and rely on streaming from a large hard drive somewhere for videos - but I don't understand why they won't move away from requiring a PC to be on with iTunes running to do it. I'm hoping the next year will bring some solutions allowing me to rip my DTS films which will reduces the physical size of my collection. We are slowly creeping towards a total digital solution with books, papers, photos and films stored on "cheap" storage and kept in small boxes that can be connected to the internet allowing us access to our data anywhere in the world we can get a connection to the internet. I say, bring it on!

Foreign Conferences

In 2008 I got to go to two international conferences. the first, in July, was the Fpi8 conference in Graz, Austria. The FPi series alternates between Europe, the US and Japan and Fpi8 marked my attendance of the complete set - Ithaca 2004, Osaka 2006 and now Graz. I was going with Martin, Mustafa and Pete from Chemistry and Torsten from CDT. While the others opted to fly down to Stansted and then out to graz, I thought of my FlyingBlue miles and flew to Austria via Amsterdam and then got the train to Graz. Both options turned out to work well and by the end of the Sunday we were all sitting down to a large Austrian meal under a large canvas roof. Soon, the rain developed into a full blown storm which made sitting outside interesting.




The difference between this and other conferences I had been to was that this time I was making an oral presentation rather than just defending a poster. Before that though I sat through 4 days of talks on functionalised pi-systems. Since Ithaca, academic interest has shifted from OLED materials to transistors (OTFT) and solar cells (OPV). Infact, most OELD talks were towards the end of the conference. The talk went well, even though I was introduced as "mister" grrr. The first one is supposed to be the hardest, so that boded well for the next conference. Instead of going on the organised excursions, Pete and I wandered around graz - which is a fairly small city - taking in all the sites from the weird "alien" buildings of the culture centre and the river-slug to the Schlossberg and clocktower that overlooks the city (taking the hillside train was a much better option than walking).




The second conference was at the start of September in Dresden. This time I was the only chemist in our visiting party made up of Andy, Olivier, Ben and mot of Andy's Ph.D. students. A flight via Dusseldorf left us in the tiny Dresden airport trying to figure out the ticket machine. It ended up stumping us. Our hotel was next to the train station and, apart from registering at the conference site, out first day and a half was free so we made good use of it wandering around the reconstructed Dresden.
Unlike blitzed cities in the UK, Dresden took a long time to be rebuilt and the extra care that's gone into it is evident - the buildings have been rebuilt to maintain a traditional feel rather than just throw up concrete buildings like we did. The end result is a much more pleasant cities than somewhere like Coventry.



A with Austria we enjoyed some excellent food - and took advantage of Andy's knowledge and contacts to get to some restaurants most tourists wouldn't including a Thai restaurant on the edge of the city and a chicken restaurant. The conference ws solely focussed on OLEDs with an emphasis on device physics and engineering, but there was still a bit of chemistry. The session my talk was in lost most of it's participants as the first 2 of 4 speakers hadn't shown up, but some of the audience had returned for my talk - which was a more complete version of the one from Graz. A Special mention has to go to the conference banquet which had some awesome food on offer, including the very moreish veal slices... Hopefully 2009 will bring a few more conferences my way.

Two Weddings

In an effort to get the rest of last year blogged, here are a couple of big events from 2008. The first was the Wedding of college friends Matt and Mel in Melbourne near Derby. A group of us from Durham drove down on the Friday night to the East Midlands' Airport Travelodge (actually built into the service station). Luckily, our room didn't overlook the Burger King. Not only was I a wedding guest, but I had also agreed to act as one of the two photographers for the day. When we rolled up to the church I was handed a d-SLR and some memory cards and had a few minutes to get used to how it worked and figure out the different shooting modes before I was off taking pictures of the area and guests. I won't go on about the ceremony as I'll just post some pictures (more on my Flickr site). I will say that as a photographer I didn't get the chance to relax and chill out until the meal, after which I handed over the camera and became just a guest again. Of the hundreds of shots Caz and I took, a lot turned out really well which I'm happy about.






The second wedding was over the summer in Durham and saw Alan and Lucy get married. This time I was involved as an usher which simply involved shepherding guests around at the church and then the reception. This time it was a pretty miserable day with rain and drizzle throughout the ceremony. As we arrived at St Mary's College for the reception the sun broke out and the afternoon and evening was very sunny and warm so the drinks reception took place outside. Again, more pictures are on Flickr.