Feb 22

A Rippin’ Good Time

Home Audio/Video, Mac OS X 2 Comments »

Now that we have an Apple TV 2 hooked up to our main level TV and have moved our Samsung Blu-Ray DVD BDP-C5500 player to another room, it made sense to see how we could back up our DVDs to our NAS server such that we could load the movies on our iPad for road trips and stream them on TVs via the Apple TV, our Samsung Blu-Ray player and a Sony PS3 in the basement.

Many tech savvy people have been doing this sort of thing for years, but I’m glad that I finally got around to trying it for myself.  The results have been worth it: Not only are we able to easily access our 70 odd videos from all of the devices mentioned above, it helped set the stage for our use of EyeTV to record over the air (OTA) digital TV broadcasts and store them on our NAS server.

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Jan 22

Solved: Videos Files Won’t Import Into iTunes

Home Audio/Video, Mac OS X 7 Comments »

Over the holiday break I ripped and encoded our DVD collection such that we could easily play our movies on various devices ranging from UPnP clients such as a Samsung BD-C5500 Blu-Ray palyer and PS3 to a set of Apple devices.  Getting the videos loaded into our iTunes library was key to sharing the videos with the Apple devices.  Although I was able to easily add most of the videos to the iTunes library, some files that were encoded via the exact same process wouldn’t load.  The .mp4 files played fine via QuickTime.  Initially, as a workaround, I ripped and encoded the problem videos over again and was able to add them to the library.  But I hadn’t figured out the root cause of the issue. 

Recently, while working on another home project, I ran into the issue again and finally tackled the problem.
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