How I stopped watching live television.

2008-01-17T03:51:49Z

I've spent way too much time on my little TV jukebox project, so in the interest of public service I thought I'd write up my techniques so far. This will be helpful if you too are sick of reality television, want to raise a child in a house without commercials, have a TiVo on its last legs or are becoming increasingly disgusted with your cable/satellite bill.

Having too much time on your hands will also be incredibly helpful.

How To Make A Computer Into A Multi-Channel TV Network In Your Living Room,
as long as you have all the same hardware and stuff as Giles

I'll say up front this is a Mac-centric installation. I'm sure it's doable on Windows, but that's not what I did it on.

Step One: Ingredients

Mac Mini hooked up to TV
My TV has a VGA port, I've seen them with DVI or HDMI which can both connect to the DVI port on the Mac with the right cable.

Big Hard Drive (I'm up to 1TB on Firewire now)
I like using an external so that when the drive starts making horrible noises like my first one did, it's easier to switch it.

Remote Control
I'm using a Keyspan IR receiver with an Apple remote (because the Keyspan remote broke and I never use the remote on my MacBook.)

Twisted Melon's Mira Software
Recognizes the remote commands and converts them into Applescripts or whatever is needed. Might not be necessary depending on what you have, but I couldn't get my Apple Remote working with the Keyspan software.

Lots of DVDs
Seriously, it's kind of pointless otherwise.

HandBrake Software
This is for ripping lots of DVDs. I've had very few discs fail to read with this.

MetaX Software
This lets you make a movie file all pretty with artwork, descriptions, cast members, MPAA ratings, etc.

"Set Video Kind Of Selected" Script From Doug's Applescripts
If you want iTunes to treat your TV Shows like TV Shows and not a stack of Movies, you'll need this script.

A Network And Another Computer
I guess you could plug a keyboard and mouse in and squat in front of your TV, but that would make me sad. I used OpenVNC/Chicken of the VNC/Screen Sharing depending on which version of OS X I had installed at the time.

Step Two: Content

Load up Handbrake, put in a DVD, and pick that DVD as the source for Handbrake. DVD structure varies a lot - basically you have to pick the title or titles off the disc that you want. But all you have to work with is a length of time for each title and one frame of video if you click on "Picture Settings..." Sometimes it's easy to tell what you're ripping - i.e. you're ripping a movie and there's only one 2 hour title on the disc. If you're doing a TV show it can be more complicated - most of the time you can just pick out the 20-ish or 40-ish minute long titles and hopefully they'll be in the right order, but I've had DVDs with the episodes backwards and of course you might end up ripping a bonus feature documentary thinking it's an episode of the show. If you're unsure just use generic filenames (but a different one for each episode, please!) and go in and name them later. You'll want to end up with a file that's named the title of the movie, or for a TV show something like "Show Title, S1E02 The Specific Episode's Title Here" (where S1 is season 1, and E02 is episode 2).

Handbrake lets you queue up a whole disc's worth of stuff at once, but first we need to setup the presets and preferences. The only preference I change is to use the .m4v "iPod/iTunes friendly" file extension. For the video preset I like to use iPod High-Rez but with 2-pass encoding and Turbo first pass checked. (I saved this as a preset called "iPod High 2 Pass"). Obviously there are higher quality solutions if you have the hard drive space to spare, but I'm not trying to run a film archive here I just want to watch some shows and movies - and if you can watch a YouTube video without vomiting at the quality then my settings should work fine. Once you have the preset ready, go ahead and set up each title you are ripping off the disc and hit "Add to queue" for each one. When you're done, hit Start... and go do something else for a very long time. If you're just doing a one-title movie then you can hit start without adding anything to the queue.

If you're working on a movie I would take it into MetaX where you can look up the info on Amazon (in various countries) and get some artwork and information to attach to the file. Useful in case you want to sort by MPAA rating or something later on, plus having some artwork looks nicer than the random video frame you'll get as a thumbnail otherwise. I don't bother with MetaX for TV shows.

Step Three: Organization

Once you have a pile of .m4v files ready, you need to add them to iTunes. This will vary a bit depending on what drive you're using but here's a helpful hint: if you start iTunes with the option key on your keyboard held down, it will ask you if you want to change Libraries or create a new one. For example, you could plug an external drive into your regular computer, tell iTunes to create a new Library on it (this will not hurt your existing iTunes library) and then when it's all set up plug the external into your TV computer and use the option-key startup to select that Library for use.

So, once you have an iTunes Library setup, go ahead and copy or move the .m4v files you have into the iTunes/iTunes Music/Movies folder. Doing this ahead of time instead of just dragging the files onto iTunes will let iTunes add them to the library quickly instead of copying them (which seems to take forever when it's iTunes doing the copying.) Then drag the .m4v files onto the iTunes icon! It'll probably start playing the videos automatically, go ahead and stop it for now and let's get things organized.

First, Movies. Easy - if you used MetaX they should already have a bunch of information attached and be ready to go.

For TV shows you'll want to sort the Movies list by name, then select an entire season of a show (click the first, shift click the last.) If you've installed the Set Video Kind Applescript I recommended above you should have a little script icon in your menu bar, click it and tell it to Set Video Kind of Selected. Another window will pop up - in here you just tell it the Video Kind is TV Show (this will make iTunes move it over into the TV Shows section and sort by show) and then type in the name of the show (be sure to be consistent with the show name across seasons!) and the season and episode number to start (so if you ripped episodes 1-6 earlier but now you're coming back to do 7-12, you can pick up where you left off at episode 7). Once everything's filled click "Done" and watch as your shows disappear from Movies and turn into TV Shows like they should be!

Once all your TV Shows are properly tagged, you could almost call it a day. If your Mac has Front Row installed, you can already fire up your Apple Remote and browse movies and TV shows all day long. But that's not what I wanted, I wanted channels.

For this example let's say we're doing four channels - though you can do as many as you like. First you need to divide your programming up into channels. Here's how I did it:

I created a normal playlist for each channel and stuck a ~ at the front of the playlist names. So let's say ~Action Source, ~Cartoons Source, ~Comedy Source and ~SciFi Source. Now into each of those I dragged the movies and TV shows I wanted in the rotation. Then I created a Smart Playlist for each channel using the following settings:

Match all the following rules,
Playlist is [insert source playlist here, i.e. ~Cartoons Source]
Last Played is not in the last [you need to set this amount of time depending on how much content you have - if you only have a few hours' worth of shows set it accordingly - in my case it's set to 5 days]
Last Skipped is not in the last [see previous]
Limit to [this depends how much choice you need] items selected by random
Live updating

So what we end up with is a smart playlist of a few items randomly chosen from the source playlist. Anything you've watched or skipped recently should be rejected, and it's live updating so whenever you watch something all the way through and it's disqualified another item pops into the playlist to replace it.

Oh - and put the smart playlist on "repeat" in the lower left hand area of the iTunes window so if you skip a bunch of tracks at once it will loop instead of stopping.

So now we've got some channels, and for a long time this is how I had things set up - I just connected to the machine through VNC or Screen Sharing and switched playlists in iTunes when necessary. But eventually I wanted something a bit easier.

Step Four: Control

I wanted to be able to skip shows and change playlists with a remote. This is how I did it.

The Mira remote control software I recommended at the start lets you assign functions to buttons on your remote. In my case I left the play/pause button on my remote as play/pause or "space bar" so I could stop and start the show. I don't much want to fast forward within a show so I just set the left/right buttons to Cmd-left and right arrow to skip back and forth entire shows or movies (Mira does have iTunes friendly options here for holding down buttons and so on, it just depends on your remote and what you want to do with it.)

For the up/down or plus/minus buttons I set them to trigger Applescripts. Ideally you'll want two, one changing channels in one direction and one changing in the other. Here's the ugly brute-force code I ended up with, modified to my needs from discussions in a forum thread:

[The stuff after this is AppleScript!]

tell application "iTunes"
activate

set curList to current playlist
name of curList

if name of curList is equal to "CH-Action" then set i to "CH-SciFi"
if name of curList is equal to "CH-Cartoons" then set i to "CH-Action"
if name of curList is equal to "CH-Comedy" then set i to "CH-Cartoons"
if name of curList is equal to "CH-SciFi" then set i to "CH-Comedy"

tell source "Library"
tell playlist i
set this_track to some track
set this_name to the name of this_track
set this_artist to the artist of this_track
set this_album to the album of this_track
play this_track
end tell
end tell

if name of curList is equal to "CH-Action" then set thename to "Science Fiction"
if name of curList is equal to "CH-Cartoons" then set thename to "Action"
if name of curList is equal to "CH-Comedy" then set thename to "Cartoons"
if name of curList is equal to "CH-SciFi" then set thename to "Comedy"

if thename is not "" then
set currVolume to sound volume
if currVolume > 50 then
set sound volume to currVolume / 3
else
set sound volume to currVolume / 2
end if
say "This is " & thename
set sound volume to currVolume
end if

end tell

[The stuff before this is AppleScript!]

So basically what happens here is you click up (or down) and Mira triggers this script, then the script checks what playlist/channel you're on. It takes you to the next playlist in whatever order you specify, and then cuts the program volume and speaks over it to say "This is Action/Comedy/etc."

So far I've resisted the temptation to set up a channel with nothing but the movie "300" on it, and when you switch to it it would say "This is Spartaaaaaaaaa." I'm weakening though.

Obviously if you want to change channels back and forth you do another script for the other direction with the order of the playslists/channels reversed.

That's about it!

Of course as an added bonus to all this you can turn on Sharing in iTunes and then you can play your shows and movie from any other computers on the network - and if you have AppleTV(s) they'll happily use it as a source for streaming as well.

Obviously this isn't a great plan if you have 5 DVDs lying around your house - but at last check I have 28 days of video ripped and I'm nowhere near done with the DVDs yet. I can set it up to switch between genres, specific shows, all feature-length movies, whatever I want. And there's never any commercials, and I can go to sleep watching cartoons and wake up with cartoons still on. Geek <3

For bonus points rip all your Angel and Buffy DVDs and try to mix the episodes together in correct chronological order :)

Good night!

giles @ 2007-08-26T21:52:00

2007-08-27T02:28:10Z

I know the internet doesn't need any more discussion of Bioshock right now. But I put off buying it, it's going to take 8 hours to download off Steam, and since I can't play it I'm going to talk about it instead.

I honestly thought I wasn't jumping on the Bioshock bandwagon. "I'll just wait for Tabula Rasa," I said, since I had already pre-ordered it on the strength of the words Lord, British, and Ankh. Plus I didn't want Bioshock once I found out that the big deep sea diver guy in all the press coverage wasn't the player character. I would love one of those things, I'd wear it to the store and then hang around in ponds all day.

So I downloaded the Bioshock demo anyway and it was all pretty and detailed. I didn't really want to shuffle around underwater murdering strangers for hours and hours though. I rather like games where I have a virtual friend or two hanging around with me, and the occasional helicopter box drone didn't seem to fill that requirement.

Yet I'm still downloading it because I read a review that mentioned moral choices in the game. And in that moment my will was broken. I love the choice to be nice, or at least decent, in video games. I played both KOTOR games and Fable as a good guy. I mean a really good, annoyed the robes off that old lady in KOTOR2 good guy. I go back and try to play them evil to get my money's worth, but I only get as far as seeing my character all cracked and mean with flies buzzing around him and then I lose interest. I have yet to finish a Grand Theft Auto game, just because they require me to be so criminal. I wish there was a GTA where I could turn myself in and do community service, I'd play the heck out of that one. Maybe some highway cleanup duty, targeting trash with the shoulder button. I'd like that, it'd be like baking bread in Ultima. I used to defend GTA on the basis that you didn't have to solicit prostitutes, beat them, and take back your money. But on the other side of that, are there any nice things I can do that I don't have to do? I've tried helping the police chase down and beat people they're chasing, but it always seems to cause a horrible misunderstanding. And stopping at red lights just seems to annoy everyone else!

So, yeah. I'll murder undersea ghouls all day as long as I get to make a choice not to murder someone at some point, especially if that choice actually has some impact on the outcome of the game. Plus I'm really looking forward to hacking more gun turrets by playing that pipeline game from the 80s.

Ooh, five hours to go. They underestimated my mighty DSL! I don't think I'll try to stay up though.