Apple

I’ve been a Mac user since 1991, so it’s inevitable that I’d have this as a category.

Time to put my money where my mouth is?

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Ten months ago, when I was trying to figure out BitTorrent so I could keep up with Battlestar Galactica, I wrote this in a comment:

As it is, I’d gladly pay a few dollars per episode to download high-quality versions of this show (and, theoretically, other shows that I might be interested in in the future), much like I currently do with music from the iTMS (with the caveat that I’d expect any DRM to be no more restrictive than what the iTMS uses).

And wouldn’t you know it — Battlestar Galactica is now available through the iTunes Music Store at $1.99 per episode! Very nice.

Of course, over the past ten months I’ve become accustomed to the quality afforded through captures of HD broadcasts: the episodes I download through BitTorrent are ~350Mb each and widescreen at 624×352 pixels; the episodes Apple offers are ~200Mb and shown at the ‘standard’ (pan-and-scan? cropped?) 4:3 ratio at a much smaller 320×240 pixels. Of course, there is the risk of getting a bad quality rip from BitTorrent that wouldn’t hold up to the norm, while it’s probably safe to assume that the officially sanctioned videos from Apple will be consistently good quality.

As an experiment, I purchased the most recent episode of BSG (‘Pegasus’) and compared Apple’s version to the version I downloaded via BitTorrent.

Battlestar Galactica’s ‘Pegasus’
iTMS BitTorrent1
Filetype: .m4v .avi
Length: 45:27.04 44:19.03
Filesize: 207.26 MB 345.80 MB
Time to download: I didn’t immediately think to time this, roughly 20-30 minutes on my connection. Varies depending upon the number of active BT clients: at best speed should match the iTMS time; at worst speed could take anywhere from hours to days.
Dimensions: 320 x 240 624 x 352
FPS: 24.00 23.98
Video encoding2: -NA- Generic MPEG-4
Audio encoding3: AVC0 Media MPEG Layer 3
Data rate: 636.72 kbits/sec 1106.58 kbits/sec
DRM: Apple FairPlay v2 None
Comparitive: At native sizes, the iTMS video is sharper but noticeably darker. The BitTorrent copy isn’t as crisp, but being a few notches brighter makes it easier to see (a situation exacerbated by my using an old 17″ monitor that already has its brightness and contrast at maximum and really needs to be replaced when I can afford to do so). Even so, the iTMS video is gorgeous: darker and smaller (2/3 the height and 1/2 the width), but better quality — at native size.

At full screen, the smaller size, greater compression and lesser data rate of the iTMS track is very obvious. Compression artifacts not noticeable at 320 x 240 are very visible when blown up to my monitor’s standard setting of 1152 x 870. The BitTorrent video, while softer, doesn’t show nearly as much artifacting (but then, given the larger native size and widescreen ratio of the video, it’s also only being enlarged 247% as opposed to the iTMS version’s 360%).

All in all, while the iTMS video is better quality at native size, the BitTorrent copy is far more watchable when blown up to full-screen.
Notes: 1: Due to the distributed and decentralized nature of BitTorrent, the reported statistics, while representative of the quality of most BT downloads I’ve received, are only definite for this particular copy of this episode.
2: As reported by QuickTime Player’s ‘Window > Show Movie Properties” window under ‘Sound Track’.
3: As reported by QuickTime Player’s ‘Window > Show Movie Properties” window under ‘Video Track’.

So, now what? I did say in the original quote that I’d happily pay for “high quality” copies. At the moment, with Apple’s focus on optimizing the video for the iPod, I’m not sure that the video offerings are quite enough to tempt me away from BitTorrent on a regular basis. It’s close…but not quite there.

Unless someone gives me an iPod video for Christmas, of course. Then I may need to re-evaluate. ;)

Webpage Screenshots on OS X

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One of the perpetual “how am I going to do this?” questions that will pop up from time to time when working with websites is how to get a screenshot of an entire webpage. Most of the time it’s not at all easy to do, and unless you’ve stumbled across some specialized software, involves taking a screenshot of however much fits on your screen, scrolling down, taking another, repeating until you’ve captured it all, and then stitching the images together in Photoshop.

Enter Paparazzi for OS X: give it a URL and dimensions, and get a single image of the entire page. Quick, simple, and occasionally very handy.

A sample image follows behind the cut…

Read more

Quick Black and White viewing in OS X

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A quick Mac OS X tip for photographers that I’ve found to be really handy in instances where you’d like to get an idea of how those color shots from your digital camera would look like when converted to black and white.

When you have your latest photos displayed in iPhoto (or whatever photo management software you use), just go to System Preferences > Universal Access and click the Use grayscale checkbox.

Simple Black and White previewing in OS X

Your entire display will switch to greyscale mode, and you can flip through your entire photo album to get an idea of which shots work in black and white and which don’t without having to tweak each photo that might work one-by-one. Obviously, it’s probably simple desaturation and not the same quality you’d get using Photoshop’s channel mixer or some other fancier technique, but it’s quite handy for a quick overview to narrow down which shots are the best candidates for black and white work.

iTunes “Running Wild” by Soup Dragons, The from the album Hotwired (1992, 4:02).

iPhoto Quandries

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A few questions about iPhoto — things that don’t make sense to me.

  1. Why can’t I export items that are on a burned DVD (or CD, I assume)? I’d certainly understand not being able to edit photos, rename them, assign tags, and so on — it’s stored on read-only media. But why in the world can’t I export unless the photos are stored on my local hard drive?

  2. When I drag photos from an archive on DVD into my local photo library in order to export them, why can’t iPhoto keep track of the correct tags? While the tags are fine in the archive, as soon as I copy them into the main library, the photos end up tagged semi-randomly, usually with only one or two tags (and those often seem to be “wedding” and “family”, for some reason).

  3. What is iPhoto doing when it loads an archive from DVD that was created with an older version of iPhoto and it presents you with the “Updating iPhoto Library” dialog box? Obviously, it can’t be updating the database on the DVD, that’s write-only media. I think that it’s creating an updated copy of the archive’s database on the hard drive to use, but if that’s the case, why doesn’t it save that archive for later use? It seems to me that it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to do that, and yet every time I try to load an archived photo library, I have to sit and wait for iPhoto to think.

Thanks to these three issues, I may end up re-importing my three DVDs of archived photos so that they’re all on my hard drive — and then hope that having all the photos available doesn’t slog iPhoto down too terribly. Not my preferred approach (especially as, given issue number two, I’d likely have to go through and re-tag all the photos), but as it is, I dread having to go back to old photo archives.

iTunes “Shining Star” by Earth Wind and Fire from the album Pop Music: The Golden Era 1951-1975 (1974, 2:50).

Initial thoughts

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Some brief initial thoughts on today’s news…

  • There’s a rousing snowball fight going on in hell right now.

  • IBM just got spanked. Hard.

  • From a user-standpoint, this may not be as big of a deal as some might fear. Apple has plenty of past experience dealing with potentially difficult and disastrous transitions. Most recently, of course, the OS transition from OS 9 to the UNIX-based OS X; more applicable to this situation, however, is their earlier switch from the Motorola 680×0 processors to the IBM/whoever-else-was-involved (I’m on lunch and trying to post this quickly, so I’m not looking up all the little details) PowerPC processors.

    From my standpoint, both prior switches were handled quite well. With the number of ways that things could break, it’s amazing how much didn’t. Case in point, just this weekend I downloaded the game Crystal Crazy from the Macintosh Garden, a repository for “abandonware”. This is a game that was written for 680×0 systems, so it’s outdated by many years, one software transition, and one hardware transition…and it still works. Granted, the sound doesn’t work, and it has to be run from the disk image instead of being copied directly to the hard drive, but the fact that it works at all (680×0 code running through the PowerPC emulation inside the Classic environment on an OS X system) is a rather resounding testament to the work Apple did in ensuring backwards compatibility — and I have no doubt that they will do everything they can to continue this trend.

  • This certainly doesn’t mean that the Mac is suddenly going to turn into Windows. No matter what kind of processor is providing the underlying power, it’s OS X that is the heart and soul of the Mac “experience”, and that’s not going to change (well, not beyond future OS upgrades that is).

  • I think it’s extremely unlikely that we’ll start seeing “install anywhere” OS X boxes that will allow OS X to be installed on any random x86-based system. Much of what makes a Mac a Mac is the tight integration between the OS and known, Apple-approved system components, and I don’t see them giving that up and attempting to support the nearly-infinite possible hardware configurations of homebrew PCs. The processor may be going to Intel, but that doesn’t preclude Apple from keeping tight control of their motherboards and keeping OS X on their proprietary hardware.

    That said, I expect plenty of hackers will be doing everything possible to circumvent that. It’ll be interesting to see how successful they are, and how soon they pull it off.

  • I expect that Virtual PC will be undergoing a major shift in a couple years, possibly moving to something closer to the fabled ‘Red Box‘ of the Rhapsody years. No more emulation layer to worry about — Windows will be able to run native code on the Intel processors that it’s written for, at full speed. In theory (and this is definitely theory, as I’m no programmer), all VPC would really have to do is create an isolated virtual machine for Windows to run inside, much like the Classic layer already does for pre-OS X applications. Perhaps we could even see Windows apps running outside of the VPC window, side-by-side with OS X and Classic applications? It’d be a UI nightmare, sure, but it might not be outside the realm of possibility anymore.

  • I can’t wait until I get off work and can really dive into all the various analysis and speculation after this. I’m going to have a lot of reading to do tonight!

Any other thoughts?

Slashdot Slashdotted

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Here’s an amusing little something that I’d never seen before. I tried to take a look at a Slashdot story about the Apple/Intel switch, when…

Slashdot slashdotted

Apparently everybody was trying to get to that story, and for once, Slashdot couldn’t keep up! Pretty impressive, and an indicator of just how big this news is.

iTunes “My Dark Life” by Costello, Elvis/Eno, Brian from the album X-Files, The: Songs In the Key of X (1996, 6:20).

Apple and Intel

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There’s a lot of rumbling in the Mac world today thanks to a Wall Street Journal article reporting rumors of Apple talking to Intel about using their chips.

Apple Computer Inc. has been in talks that could lead to a decision soon to use Intel Corp. chips in its Macintosh computer line, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.

The report, citing two industry executives with knowledge of recent discussions between the companies, said Apple will agree to use Intel chips.

Neither company would confirm the report and an Apple spokeswoman told the Journal she would characterize it as “rumor and speculation.”

This, of course, has led to the usual fooferal about whether Apple may be looking at either moving away from the Power PC chip and onto X86 chips, or possibly simply releasing a version of Mac OS X for Intel processors.

Personally, I think a few of the Slashdot crowd have a better grasp of what’s probably going on here.

/ASCII: My guess is they really are planning on using Intel chips – just not processors. Remember, Intel produces wireless chips, Flash memory, Ethernet chips, and Salt and Vinegar chips.

Halo1: The gigabit ethernet chip in my old G4/400 in fact is an Intel chip.

arloguthrie: Most notably, the XServe Raid runs on an Intel processor. There are tons of reasons Apple would be meeting with Intel. One day, perhaps “the news” will actually be news and not gossip based on “a friend-of-a-friend told me…”

(via /. and many other sites this morning…)

Pop-Lock

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Pop-n-lockApple’s just posted their latest iPod commercial, this one titled ‘Pop-Lock’, after the style of dance in the video.

Watching it, I’m struck by two things.

  1. Daft Punk still bores me. The only time I could ever get “into” most Daft Punk songs was when I was under the influence of acid, and as I stopped bothering with recreational pharmaceuticals a few years back…well, that ended any real interest in Daft Punk.

  2. Is there any real difference between what’s now called “Pop-Lock” (or “Pop-n-Lock”, as I’ve generally heard it) and what used to be called “The Robot” back in the 80’s heyday of breakdancing? I can’t really see much difference at all, if any.

iTunes “Rock Star (Jason Nevins Edit)” by N.E.R.D. from the album Rock Star (2003, 7:42).