The title pretty much says it all. With more and more mini’s making their way into our lives, sooner or later you might just need to know how to properly open yours.

Further instruction on how to open a Mac mini can be found here.

B.Greenway

The PSP can do music (MP3 and ATRAC3), photos, video (MPEG-4) and of course games. I’ve played with photos and music, but have spent the bulk of my time with games and video and in this post I’ll talk about transferring video content to the PSP from your Mac. The PSP uses a new disc format called UMD which is a compact 1.8GB disc mainly for games, though there are a handful of titles (Spiderman 2 comes in the box) available for purchase. I won’t cover this aspect of things either…

The main limitation of the PSP is the lack of a hard drive. It would certainly be nice to have video out, but for me that’s far from a deal breaker since I am encoding content I can watch on my theater when at home. The PSP as video player is purely for on the go access and in that regard, I don’t think I’d see myself really looking to connect it to a TV in a hotel… if I really wanted to do that I’d probably have a laptop handy or could simply watch on it’s larger screen. The other limitation is that while the PSP supports MPEG-4 video, the files are somewhat unique to the PSP and have to be encoded separately in most cases in order to play and be recognized from your memory stick.

Ah yes, memory stick… The PSP uses a newer more expensive and harder to find memory stick called memory stick duo (there are also pro and high speed varieties). In general, the cost of a memory stick is about twice what an SD/MMC card costs and they are roughly the same size. At this time it is basically impossible to get a 1GB or greater size card. 2GB cards are due out late sprint early summer in Japan and will hopefully make it stateside soon thereafter. My current rig has the 32MB stick from the initial box and a 512MB stick I was able to locate – though even that was hard to track down.

I’ve found quite a few ways to put the video on the PSP but only one that I like for managing my content and that’s PSPWare. There is also iPSP, though it would not run on two of my computers, PSP Movie Loader and the old manual copy method. Both PSPWare and iPSP will sync movies, photos and music as well as backup your game save files which is quite handy and a good thing to do regularly. PSP Movie Loader seems to only work with special files from 29 Guide, which are mainly movie trailers and short clips of some action motor sports. You download a file which PSPML uses to then download and add the video directly to your PSP. They have recently added the ability to download .zip versions of their stuff which allow you to manually add things to the PSP rather than use the download tool.

This brings me finally to real heart of what I wanted to share. How do you get video to the PSP?? Well, as you might have seen elsewhere you can mount either the Memory Stick in a card reader or the PSP itself from within Settings menu (USB Connection – Hit X with a cable connected) and it should just mount on your system. A properly formated Memory Stick will actually be without the appropriate Video folder – thanks Sony! – but it’s easy to add and Sony actually posted a Tutorial on the topic. Manual is fine for the occasional file or for the mega-file that is going to take up all your space, but it’s not going to enable any sort of file management once you’ve converted your content to the appropriate PSP MPEG-4 format.

Enter the Tools…

I’ve tried the various Sync / Backup tools for the PSP and they for the most part can deal with your content whether it’s photos music or video. For me, the almost ideal solution is PSPWare. It can convert almost all the media I’ve thrown its way, with the occasional and rare miss. When that’s happened I’ve used a combination of FFMPEGX and altShiva to create the .THM file which tells the PSP what the call the file (an actual name, not just the file name) and can create a nice preview image so when you browse what’s available for playback you get a richer experience. The .THM file is not necessary – it only adds a bit of flavor and is a great way to impress your friends if you are showing off the new toy.

In my case, I’ve got a pretty handy selection of archived DVDs sitting on my mini waiting for Matinee to queue them up for DVD playback and this makes for a terrific source for conversion since all I need to start are the unencrypted VOB files. As you will most likely notice in your Video_TS folder there is more than just a single .VOB to potentially utilize for the process… yade X to the rescue! Yade X (Yet Another DVD Extractor) allows you to select multiple .vob files from your hard drive or directly from the DVD and create a single .vob file… quite handy for what we need.

It’s possible to convert VOBs directly in PSPWare, though large (GB plus) tend to take a seriously long time and the current release (1.5) does not yet give you a sense of status on the process. I’ve been testing the 2.0 release of PSPWare and while it remedies the status issue, it still takes way too long. Instead I just drag the VOB to FFMPEGX and create a DivX ffmpegx file. I’ve tried going straight the the PSP MPEG-4, but I’ve found the files to be considerably smaller with the interim step. Once you have the DivX file you can either convert it back in FFMPEGX again this time using the PSP output format, or drag it over to the Movies pane within PSPWare. I’ve been mainly choosing the latter for a few simple reasons. The first is that I have been using my mini, not my primary computer for the conversion and file management so it’s much easier to off-load the task elsewhere. At times over the past week or so, I’ve been ripping and converting video files on several machines and queueing up the batch conversion within PSPWare. PSPWare easily takes a variety of files at a time which lets you in the immortal words of Ron Popeil… set it and forget it! You can leave it running overnight and find a nice selection of video for your PSP in the morning just in time for your commute or simply to watch over a nice espresso at breakfast.

File Management (and two more tools)

I was using two systems to convert files up until today. This has worked great to get a good head-start creating or converting content for the PSP. It also created a system of files named sequentially on both systems, which was making it more difficult than I wanted to manage a single collection. PSPWare stores video by default in /Documents/PSPWare/Movies. Within this folder is a set of folders named sequentially : M4V00001, M4V00002 etc. You can add a layer underneath that is the name of the file (Toy Story) and within that folder you can drop your .MP4 and .THM files which have to have the same naming as the parent folder (M4V00001). If you refresh the Movies tab within PSPWare, you’ll see your newly added files. I was doing this and manually naming my files as I went from FFMPEGX directly to the PSP. PSPWare does not like to import the PSP .MP4 files… but this manual drag and rename works just fine. There is a drop folder system in 2.0 of PSPWare that can put files on your device, but does not move them into the main PSPWare library for now.

In any case, my two system conversion was creating 2 sets of folders with identical names and I was looking at a pretty intense mess of manual renaming… something I was trying to avoid at all costs, given the time required. I was led to an amazing utility called conveniently A Better Finder Rename, (thanks Sandro!) which you can launch once you’ve selected your files (including files within sub-folders) to rename. It took a bit of figuring out, but once I got the gist, I was able to change all the numbering of my files by simply adding onto their ending sequence (in my case by 43) which got the right sequence created for the main library I am now using on the mini.

I have been connecting my PSP to my Powerbook mostly since it is right in front of my at the desk and I remotely connect to the mini’s library using a Symbolic Link rather than an alias which did not work. It takes a bit longer to transfer the video across my home network and pass down the USB cable to the PSP, but it’s simple enough now that it’s all configured. As I create or get files I want to convert for use on the PSP now, I just FTP them over to the mini and drag them into the PSPWare conversion queue.

A few final words…

FFMPEGX is an excellent tool and one you might enjoy using for non-PSP related tasks. The main feature I would like to see added is the ability for batch conversion. On the PSP side it would be great if the .THM was created at the same time.

Still with me? As you might have guessed by now, this is not a small task given the number of processes you noticed I’ve been running in order to get all this working. It’s actually simple though – I promise. The main issue is really just time. It takes time to convert and compress video files and you just have to wait while that happens. At least you have your PSP with you to distract you during the process. You could be enjoying any of the features of your MacHTPC that we’ve covered previously. The conversion process works just fine in the background.

– Jonathan Greene

Buy Your PSP today!

Well with a little coaching and luck I was able to navigate my way through installing and removing a few apps, and generally feel comfortable with the different install packages now. But like so many other things in my life, once I bore down and worked through it the hard way, I ran across some really valuable references that would have made it much easier the first go around. First up is a nice little tutorial from “Lori’s spot on the Web”, (sorry that’s the only description I noticed), which is basically a graphical walkthrough of disk image installation and package installations. All of the examples are numbered which makes for a nice easy to follow presentation.

Now I know you guys n’ gals are very particular about what apps you install on your beloved Mac, but just incase you happen to decide one isn’t for you, you’ll need to keep in mind a few do’s and don’ts associated with removing applications from OSX. The most obvious difference new Mac users, migrating from a windows machine, will notice is the lack of a add/remove program. I’ll let this article by Brad Smith speak to that but suffice to say, the omission isn’t an oversight. Simplicity often looks lacking to those conditioned to the overcomplicated. I hope these tutorials are helpful, and as always if you encounter something a little confusing with your new Mac just ask, you’ll often find Mac users very willing to help out.

B.Greenway

We are of the belief that you are within your right to backup your digital media for personal use. If you live in another country you might want to check your local laws. The US has a certain grey area here… the tools are currently free to use and not being prosecuted for being publicly available.

I thought it would be helpful for people stopping by, not yet up to speed on the ease and convenience of storing and playing your DVDs from hard disk. There are several paths you can consider, including compressing the disk into other formats, but with available disk space on either your mini, other mac or external drives, you can easily create a full-quality copy for your personal use.

In my experience the easiest tool to use for the task is MacTheRipper. In about 30 minutes, you can archive a DVD to a your system making it available for playback without needing the DVD. This is a great way for families to protect DVDs likely to get trashed by young kids (ahem) or simply for ease of use in your Mac home theater.

This will not be a deeply technical piece, but rather something you can follow along and get going with quickly. There are a great deal of options you might be interested in within the program, but for that I will simply steer you towards the excellent documentation included in the disk image.

You first need to get the software.

If you plan on ripping more than an occasional disk, you might want to start by first changing your system preferences to open MacTheRipper instead of DVD player each time you insert a new disk.

The next thing is to insert a DVD… after it has been scanned, you should see something like this:

The default for MacTheRipper is for the full disk. If you would like to alter that to conserve space, you can choose the Mode tab and select from the various options. Some offer a further level of selection so if you want the 4:3 vs 16:9 .vob you’ll want to browse about…

In my current configuration, I’ve been selecting only the feature. This eliminates the menus and extras from the DVD and lets you cut to the chase to simply watch the movie. The current screen shot still has Full Disk Extraction selected…

There is an option on the initial screen that lets you attempt to disable the UOPs or User operation prohibition – the limits placed on your DVD to prevent you from skipping the various warnings or even previews. I’ve had limited success with this, each disk is different and will require some trial and error if this is an important thing to remove.

MacTheRipper is also capable of defeating the region encoding and Macrovision to allow for your backups. For the most part these options will simply work. Again, there is a considerable amount of helpful information to be found within the documentation.

The last thing you need to do here is click Go! You’ll be prompted for a save location and the disk will begin to get backed up. A disk usually takes anywhere from 20 to 30 minutes to rip.

While the disk is ripping you might want to consider how you plan to access and play it later on. You can open the Apple DVD player and chose the OPEN VIDEO_TS FOLDER… browse to the recently saved location and pick the folder. Hit play and you are in business.

We’ve mentioned Matinee a few times here already, and it’s been the nicest way I’ve found to playback your saved DVDs. Once you’ve set the location for your saved media, it provides an intuitive interface to located and play from your collection.

That’s pretty much the deal. It’s simple to do, though takes a bit of time per disk as well as an appropriate storage solution. I’ve actually played saved disks from local, firewire and network drive and they’ve all worked quite well.

Have fun!

– Jonathan Greene

Have you ordered your Mac mini yet?

First – it seems it’s absolutely required to use a transcoder in order to get the component to properly receive a signal. The two devices I’ve seen mentioned are the Audio Authority and the Key Digital. Key Digital is what I found locally in my quest (and desire not to wait yet another day for fedex), but it’s a bit more expensive, even via a discounted online reseller. The nice thing about the device for future use is that you can actually run a second VGA connected monitor through it at the same time you run an HDTV system. I don’t have that need today but who knows…

Second – You need a cable to connect between your VGA adapter on the mini to either of the Transcoders. They are both female and not expecting to see each other. I found a few varieties in my travels. I noted a cable yesterday, but instead I opted for a custom cable I found today at DataVision here in NYC. (The monster cable is only VGA and the cables I found today are SVGA and rated for larger screens.) It’s very similar to a cable from Belkin, though costs $10 instead of $30 (don’t buy it from Belkin for $60…) and actually reportedly has a higher level of output. I’m pleased with it. The part number is 800991116595 and I purchased the 6′ version… it was the shortest length I could find and I actually left most of it wrapped and bound.

Actually seeing my screen connected through component felt so good after a long (ok it was only a few days but still) road of effort. I was not psyched to see I could only get 640×480 however… When I initially connected things I was running  SwitchResX, but I’ve actually found DisplayConfigX ($12) to be much more friendly and I was actually able to use it. Unless you are intimately familiar with the litany of potential settings I would not tinker too much with SwitchResX. DisplayConfigX let me control the range for refresh and add or tweak a few settings for certain HDTV sizes and I was good to go. After a few adjustments and a reboot, I could tell DisplayConfigX was working for me so I purchased it.

The tricky part… You’ll have to really play with your HDTV rig in order to find what your system supports. For mine I can now do 896×504 960×540 and 1920×540 in addition to my original 640×480. I have it set to 960×540 at the moment and things are extremely easy to see from the couch, image quality is crisp and bright and I am generally very pleased. It took some time to get through all the resolution possibilities and I can actually probably do a few more. The main thing when trying is to note what HD formats your set can manage. Andy resolution ending in 480 will most likely work at 60Hz. If you can do 720p native you can also probably get 1280×720 again at 60hz. I had to customize the default 1920×1080 to 1920×540 – half but still configures as 1080. You might have to try some options like that as well if you are going this route.

The road was frustrating I hope it’s easier for you.

– Jonathan Greene

Have you ordered your Mac mini yet?

I recently added a VGA to Component Cable to the mix and it also failed using the included DVI to VGA Adapter. It’s not to the point of a personal challenge, so I called around town to find the Key Digital VGA to Component Adapter today and then raced out to get it (paying a bit more) rather than waiting yet another day for it to arrive via Fedex. As you might have guess now it also failed – but because both it and the Apple VGA adapter leave you with female connectors making the hook up impossible without yet another cable or adapter.

I’ve located what I think will work and am planning an early morning run to B&H to get it. More tomorrow… for now though this is proving to be quite a challenge and has added a nice bit to my cost. Just don’t tell my wife…

– Jonathan Greene

Have you ordered your Mac mini yet?

Second Stop – Video

If you like, you can just pop a DVD in the drive and begin to watch. By setting the preference to both play the disc and activate in full-screen by default you get going within minimal intervention. The trick comes when you begin to digitally archive your DVDs to hard disc for playback. Easy playback is potentially a harder goal to achieve when you want to do it without a keyboard and mouse… how do you access the files?

I wanted to find a way today – not waiting on possible projects in development. The answer was actually easier than I thought but definitely involves a bit of both manual labor and repetition. The end is worth it though as I can now pick movies from my digitized DVD collection with a remote and launch the DVD player with a single click.

I knew I was going to need a launcher application for the job and I after a bit of research came back to DragThing($29), which I’ve customized just a touch for my needs. It’s actually a very powerful application and hopefully some of you will get the bug and take this further so we can all benefit.

Drag thing can accept anything you drag onto it and you can choose to create as few or as many tabs (or layers in the DT parlance) within a floating dock. I am using a single dock with one layer currently dedicated to applications and the remaining for DVD movies arranged by genre and a final layer for all movies. I discovered pretty quickly that you can drag the Video_TS archive to the dock and even set the action to open in DVD Player, but it fails… A bit of googling and thinking about the task at hand led me to the following AppleScript solution:

set movie_folder to "/Volumes/X250/DVD/Comedy/ANCHORMAN/VIDEO_TS:"
set movie_path to POSIX file movie_folder
tell application "DVD Player"
	activate
	open VIDEO_TS {movie_path}
	set viewer full screen to true
	set controller visibility to false
	play dvd
end tell

All you have to do is change the path statement to be whatever you have for each movie archive you wish to include. When you Save As (remember save as) you want to save the script as an Application and check the Run only box.

Since the AppleScript above is saved as an application, it can be launched from DragThing as though it were any other app you might launch. One immediate issue you might notice is that the icon is pretty ugly and if you add a bunch, they’ll all look the same. A great free application called Pic2icon solves that as it converts any image file to an icon. The way I’ve been using it is to do a quick lookup on Amazon for the movie, click the box image to get the fullsize version and saving it down to my system. I then just drag that image to Pic2icon and voilá you have a box art icon. You just need to copy and paste it on your script and it’s all good.

That’s pretty much my system in a nutshell. It’s an evolving work in progress and is working quite well so far. I still use my main remote to switch our system from watching TV / PVR to activate the MacHTPC, but once there I can much of what I need with just the keyspan remote in hand.

I set up a tab as you probably noticed for applications I might want to load directly with the remote as well. Here’s a shot of that one:

While this is not the Mac media center interface I’m sure many of us covet, it works, it’s simple and it’s something you can do today with a bit of time on your hands.

– Jonathan Greene

Have you ordered your Mac mini yet?

First Stop – Music

iTunes is the clear weapon of choice here and if you’ve used it, then you know how powerful it is at ripping and managing your collection making it easy to find, burn and play. The trick for me is how to use it without a keyboard or mouse whenever possible. I honestly cannot find a way to manage it all yet via simple remote. The frames are not easy to jump back and forth between and moving the cursor through the library is brutal without some contexual help.

Salling Clicker is simply the best. It does require the use of bluetooth and means you need it installed on your mini as well as some other device – either a phone or PDA. Currently there is support for Palm, Sony Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola and Sendo devices. I am using my Palm Tungsten T3 and am happy to have brought it out of semi-retirement for the task. The cheapest device might be a free cellular… Palm’s cheapest Bluetooth enabled unit is the Zire 72 at just under $300. I realize that does not fit the budget minded… just pointing it out as one way to go.

When running you can get access to your full library, queue tracks to a live playlist, search and view covers while they play — all while the Mac runs headless if you choose. My library (currently 1809 albums, 21,433 songs by 734 artists) quickly displays on six pages through the Palm UI. It’s simple to scroll to where you want to go, pick an artist, album and continue jamming.

Here are a few shots of Salling Clicker in action:

Salling Clicker can control many media oriented applications and even automatically start and stop playing based on proximity or whether your phone is in use. I’ve barely scratched the surface here… focusing purely on some of the capabilities for iTunes remote management.

The next installment will dive into video (DVD archive) management…

– Jonathan Greene

Have you ordered your Mac mini yet?

HackTV is actually an application that works in OS 9 and X and definitely gets me thinking once again what Apple might be hiding up it’s sleeve. The technology from a software perspective is certainly there… it’s up to a nice companion for the mini to do the rest. By the way… HackTV can be controlled by AppleScript which means some glue through iCal could enable the scheduling of recordings.

I’m quite sure that the EyeTV 200 can do much that is described in the article and am looking forward to testing it out when I get one for review. It boasts PVR as well as a D/A connection for capturing video like the separate bridge devices mentioned. The main difference aside from dedicated encoding hardware is the the EyeTV can capture in MPEG2 and HackTV is capable of recording directly to MPEG4 (H.263 for now). EyeTV can export captured content to MPEG4, but not record to it directly – at least today.

– Jonathan Greene

Order your Mac Mini from Amazon Today!

For now, since you get iLife with your purchase, be sure and install it so you can immediately take advantage of the the new power within iPhoto as it can manage not only your pictures but your video content as well. Thanks to a post by Chris Karr, we know it can handle MPEG2 which is excellent because that means a quite an array of video content (movies and tv) can be enjoyed with just a few clicks. This is great, but will only play in a Quicktime window rather than in full-screen mode which is certainly preferred for Home Theater applications.

I was unable to find a standard way to get Quicktime to launch in full-screen and in my goal of getting our Mini HTPC up and running with as few keyboard maneuvers as possible I’ve discovered a nice alternative. By purchasing Quicktime Pro ($29.99) you can easily launch movies fullscreen with a simple Command F (Command is the Apple Key for switchers). I’ve created a macro on my system that automatically enables full-screen so anytime a movie is launched it goes full-screen and starts to play. You can easily do this as well using the ever-helpful Keyboard Maestro which costs $20. When Tiger launches, there is an excellent chance you’ll be able to do this right out of the box with Quicktime 7 (probably will have to pay for QT 7 Pro) and Automator a new graphical scripting tool that lets you program your mac without knowing a damn thing about apple script – just what actions you wish to take place. More when Tiger is released…

A tip or two for Quicktime usage… Open the prefs and check the box to Automatically play movies when opened and un-check the box to Show hot picks movie when opened. Until Apple has something truly of interest to share, you’ll want to focus more on your own stuff.

In Keyboard Maestro, I’ve actually exported my macro and you can just download and import it from the site via this link.

This process will only get better, but for now this should hold you over for a bit.

I wrote and “tested” this from my Powerbook without iPhoto 5…if I missed something critical, please let me know.

– Jonathan Greene

It’s always a good time to get your own Mac mini from Amazon!