Movies- on your Mac, iPod and PSP

It’s worth noting that articles was written in early 2006. Since then we have had iTunes 7, new iPod’s with higher resolution video playback, the announcement of the Apple iTV, many of the apps mentioned here have been updated, not to mention that my hardware setup has changed about 3 times since I wrote this! I intend to update this article soon to reflect these changes.

With the proliferation of the various devices that you can view movies on now available, keeping track of all the files and their related metadata become increasingly more complex. Simply filing them using the finder can work, but what if you want more than this? As a Mac user one tends to expert more- something glossy that utilises the various powers of OS X in neat ways. Read on for the solution that I have come up with for creating, categorising, filing, archiving and generally keeping track of all of these high res movies files in addition to those for my new iPod, Sony PSP, and other devices.

Foreword

The following solutions and methods are those that I have found works best for me, and my personal solution with regards to the hardware, software and time that I have available. It is also worth clarifying that any video that you watch and keep you must have the rights to otherwise you are most likely operating underneath your local copyright laws.

Hardware

Main Machine: 20" iMac G5 2.1ghz, 1GB RAM, Superdrive, Airport

Extras- Lacie DVD burner, 2X Lacie External hard drives- 160 and 200 GB, Griffin Powerwave for audio out, Elgato EyeTV for DTT, iPod video 30GB, Sony PSP (512MB memory stick), 2 MB ADSL connection, and a D-Link Bluetooth Adapter. Location is in our Kitchen/Small living room, which means the 20" screen is just about wide enough for viewing movies full screen.

The iMac is the main computer in the household. It takes a beating on a daily basis, being used to watch and record TV and radio, listen to music, lightweight graphics work, email/web chat, as well as all of the video conversion mentioned in this article.I guess you could say it’s the `digital hub’ of the household, however cheesy that may sound.

Secondary Machine: Powerbook Titanium G4, 500mhz, 512MB RAM, DVD drive, Airport.

Extras- PCMCIA cards for Compactflash and Memory Stick. Location: Lounge, next to 21" CRT Widescreen TV, audio out into amp/speaker system, S-Video out into TV via Scart.

The Tibook is used for watching movies on TV in the Lounge, and works just about well enough with mirroring turned on.

Part 1 - Sources, Extraction and Conversion of Video into usable formats

Sources

In many ways this is the easy bit. There are limitless sources that you can use to get video onto your mac, ranging from conversion of your own DVDs, to using Bittorrent to find the latest TV shows. I’m going to explain a few methods that I use to get video, and the advantages and pitfalls of each.

1. Your own DVD collection

The pickings here are ripe, obviously, and it’s without a doubt one of the best ways to start building up that video library. There are a vast amount of tools available for converting video from DVD, and I obviously can’t cover them all here- just the method I use that works best for my particular situation. This, I will come to later.

I also enjoy watching the extras from the DVD immensely, however after watching a movie I tend to not want to sit around any longer- so taking them away from the context of the DVD and out onto something such as the PSP or iPod is a great way of watching them, and increases the probability that I will actually do so.

2. From TV

I have a neat Elgato EyeTV for DTT from Elgato that is excellent for recording TV (and digital radio, incidentally) at full resolution digital quality. There are also several other manufacturers of such products. You can schedule recordings easily, and the EyeTV application is fairly robust at exporting any shows you decide to record- they include settings for PSP and iPod video natively.

For some reason I generally tend not to keep most TV shows I record- they are pretty much one watch wonders. If I am going to keep a TV show I will normally end up buying it on DVD anyway, and then converting it from the DVD. As such the later part of this article is not so concerned with cataloguing and converting these shows to other formats as more with movies, trailers and other shorts. It is worth mentioning though that, in my region, the EyeTV records in MPEG2 format. This, I believe is similar to the format of DVD Video in it’s raw state off the disc, and I have had problems trying to convert a raw video file created by EyeTV using Quicktime Pro. It’s generally seems easier to use the EyeTV application to export the video in your required format.

As EyeTV is fully scriptable using Applescript, it’s quite simple to automate exporting/conversion of video once a recording has taken place, using say Automator and iCal to schedule the necessary tasks. I’ll cover scripting EyeTV in a brief follow up article at some point in the future.

El Gato also recently announced an update to their EyeTV software which adds auto exporting to iPod an adding to iTunes, which will make life even easier if you like to watch TV on the go.

3. Bittorrent

It has to be noted that the legality of downloading TV shows from the internet is at best shaky, and as such if you are unsure of the specific law in your area it is best if you are at all concerned to discount this method as a way of getting video.

Bittorrent is a decent way of looking for TV shows that you may have missed or aren’t available in your part of the world. I find mininova to be one of the best sites around for this- they claim that every torrent hosted by them is legal to download, although I highly doubt this considering the content available. Another good bet is torrentspy.

Either way, they offer a vast amount of content for download. Mininova lets you subscribe to RSS feeds of certain categories on the site, allowing you to keep tabs on what is new to a certain area- whether that be TV Shows, Lost, The Simpsons, or whatever else takes your fancy. The files downloaded using Bittorrent inevitably tend to be in avi format, for which you need the Divx codec (l, which is available for free and in paid versions.It’s worth noting at this point that VLC tends to play avi movies more efficiently than Quicktime, but more about playback further on in the article.

Extraction from DVD

One requirement I have is that the aging Tibook G4 used for video playback through the TV must cope with the files created, without losing video or audio at any point. There is nothing more frustrating than a skipping video which you can do nothing about. In addition, I also wanted to try and find the best trade-off between file size, playback capability and picture and sound quality possible. This meant a fair bit of experimentation with various tools and ripping methods. At first I started out using DVDibbler and encoding to avi format. This worked well once I had found optimum bit rates, mostly through trial and error.

Using DVDibbler isn’t exactly what I would call fun. The UI is a pain to get around, and although it’s a ton easier than the command line, essentially the UI is nothing more than a frontend to various command line tools. It always irked me slightly that you had to check that the right source disk was chosen, and then the converting would take place- normally overnight- in a command line window with no indication of an estimated time of completion or progress bar. This was remedied when I heard of Handbrake. This is a deceptively simple tool to convert DVD’s to a few formats that just works, all natively within the app itself without delving into the Terminal like DVDibbler. In addition there are easy previews of what you have selected to encode and all the necessary settings are in front of you- and no more that could potentially distract.

So, the settings I eventually found myself using in Handbrake look something like this:

This invariably produces files in the 1 to 2.5 GB range, depending on the length and exact composition of the movie, in about 6 to 8 hours. Setting the codec to h364 produces stunning results, with a significantly lower filesize, however the trade off is time- which runs about 1/4 as slow on my iMac G5 compared to encoding with MPEG4. Personally, file size is not an issue for me as I tend to burn any large files like this straight to DVD, so I’m happy to stick to MPEG 4 over h364. It’s also worth noting that as there are always a few DVD’s which refuse to play ball, for the short term you can use MacTheRipper to create a copy, and hope that some future software development will enable you to convert the DVD into a compressed format- or just make a note of the DVD and come back to these at some point in the future.

You can of course up these settings for higher quality if you wish- however for maximum playback compatibility with my Powerbook I had to keep the bit rate down- and to be honest, I am pretty happy with the video that pops out using these. It’s not quite DVD quality, but it’s not far off. You do lose the benefit of 5.1 surround sound too- but I don’t have such a system, so no big deal.

I use these files in many ways as my ‘masters’ for then performing other conversions, although they are of course not at a lossless quality. It tends to be much easier to work with MPEG4 files to downsize from rather than extracting multiple files optimised for different devices repeatedly from a DVD.

So we know of a few various sources for video, but how about viewing these files on other devices? What’s the best way to go about getting all of this content into your pocket?

Converting movies for PSP

Without doubt, the best utility for converting files for use on the PSP seems to be PSPware ($15.00) by Nullriver. It’s one of those applications that just seems like it was made by Apple. Converting video files is as simple as drag and drop, and the quality is more than acceptable. In addition you get a full media management suite for the PSP, integrating it into your Mac fully- iPhoto, iTunes and Safari bookmarks are all catered for.

Converting a full length movie using PSPware tends to take a few hours, and it takes care of all the annoying file and folder naming conventions that Sony have dictated for the PSP. When done, a movie simply appears in the PSPware movies pane, ready for syncing. The only downside to the application is the lack of organisation possibilities for the video content once converted- it’s alphabetical only, by file name. Slightly annoying when you are a stickler for detail, but I can put up with this as PSPware is a tool for syncing content primarily, with converting movies secondary- and not intended for browsing or using the content it syncs. It’s a one hit application- you open it (or it opens itself automatically when a PSP is plugged in), sync, and go.

Incidentally, videos converted by PSPware for use on your PSP also seem compatible with iPod Video, which is handy for avoiding duplicate conversions and wasted time.

Other options include the excellent and free ffmpeg which is a powerhouse of video conversion to many different formats. It remains to me a little bit of a mystery and it’s ease of use leads just a little to be desired, however its features and legions of users would seem to make it a great option.

Converting movies for iPod Video

The best quality option without a doubt is Quicktime Pro’s ($24.95) export to iPod option. This exports any video readable by Quicktime in high quality, low file size H.264 format. The cons- long conversion times, cost, and no fully featured batch conversion/queuing functionality. The length that Quicktime takes to convert video effectively only makes it an option for any video under 10 minutes in length. Otherwise, several utilities have recently come into the market vying for iPod video owner’s attention- iSquint (currently free), Podner ($9.95) and MoviePod ($9.95) being the few I have tested for my conversion needs.

iSquint, which is currently still in development and free for the time being, is a simple application which quite simply does the job, taking video and converting to iPod video compatible formats with minimal fuss. There are just 2 decisions that need to be made before conversion: intended use, either for optimal iPod or TV viewing, and quality- normal, or ‘go nuts’. Exporting for iPod using normal quality produces acceptable quality and size files in almost real time. iSquint currently uses MPEG4 as it’s output option, with support for h364 planned for the future. The MPEG 4 file sizes are acceptable, although not small.

Screenshot

Podner has had less of a workout on my machine as I can’t quite bring myself to pay the $9.95 fee for it. It is more fully featured than iSquint, and less rough around the edges too, allowing for h364 in addition to MPEG4 export options and decent batch conversion/queuing function. It is fairly usable, although has a few interface quirks, such as the need to drag and drop files onto it’s window as the only means of opening files, unless I am missing something. Having used it for several files in demo mode (converting files under 2.30 minutes long only) my conclusion is that the conversion quality is fine, but it’s UI weirdness and $9.95 cost means it’s left a bit out in the cold for me.

MoviePod

Made by the same software house as PSPware, MoviePod feels like iSquint in a neatened up and fully Mac-Like user-interface. That, for me anyway, is worth the $9.95, but as it’s only at version 1.1 at the minute, I can only foresee good things for this app. My only bug-bear with it is the lack of ability (currently) to sense the aspect ratio of the movie being converted, so you just have to keep an eye on the movies that you are converting and check you have the preferences set up correctly.

Converting Movies for other mobile devices (Palms, Smartphones, Cell phones etc…

The only utility I have heard of and really tried for other devices has to be Quicktime Pro. Although not 100% user friendly at this point, with no "export to Sony Ericsson K750i" option for example, if you can find out the movie playback capabilities and specs of your personal device you should be able to export movies fairly simply after some brief trial and error. I played around with movies and tv on my Sony Ericsson S700i and K750i for a while, but it never really came to much- the video was never of good enough quality for my liking, and the screen was just too small to enjoy it fully. Devices like the Palm Lifedrive for example though have huge potential for mobile video enjoyment, I just don’t have any in my possession to fully comment on the best way of converting files for them.

So now we should have a few files ready for use- both at home on your Mac, and maybe hooked into your TV, and also for out and about. But what’s the best way of seeing movies you have, cataloguing them and adding some other metadata? After all there are so much more to Films than simply a name- what about box artwork, directors, actors, release dates… hopefully part 2 can shed some light.

Part 2: Cataloguing, Organisation and Presentation

In ripping all of my DVDs I created over 100 movie files, 90% of which I have burned to DVD. From this I have then converted a fair number of these for use on my iPod and PSP. Storing these in a folder system, either on DVD-R or on an external drive is simple and works well- but how do you find which file has been put where?

Catalog

A neat application called Catalog, $20, comes to my rescue. It creates a quick, searchable index of any disk that can be mounted on the desktop. It’s simple and works well, with a great batch index feature that lets you insert disk after disk for it to index. It seems very stable and I have no issues with using to create searchable indexes of every disk with static content in my possession.

There is also a lot of peripheral data related to these files which is great to keep track of too, so-called metadata which is useful when, say, searching for a film by Ridley Scott, or one that stars a certain actor, or was produced in the 1960’s, or has a runtime of less than an hour and a half.. or all of these put together. This kind of filtering may seem familiar to you if you have used smart folders in OS 10.4 (link) or smart playlists in iTunes (link). So what I needed was an iTunes for video files in many ways.

iTunes

iTunes, in its latest incarnations, does support movie files in its database. There are some advantages to keeping your files within iTunes- it can keep them in a central place, they are easy to find and watch and you can add metadata to them fairly comprehensively. I personally don’t like to use it to keep references to all my master movie files for a variety of reasons, such as the inability to easily open them in my preferred video player or extensively edit metadata in the files- it’s a chore for example to categorise a file as a TV Show- but I’ll come to this later. Also, I am quite happy for iTunes to organise and keep track of all of my mp3s- but with movie files taking up gigabytes rather than megabytes of space, letting iTunes file them away in its folder structure eats up hard disk space at a rapid rate. Because there is no quick way to toggle this import setting (whether it moves/copies the file or not) I prefer to let iTunes only handle video for iPod.

Having tried many different video database applications, I can’t seem to find one which just works. iVideo from Waterfall Software is good program, but not built for indexing TV or Feature Films specifically. There are others too- but the closest fit was iFlicks, $29.95, from Helixent Technologies.

iFlicks

Its main advantage is that it is most definitely built with feature films and other movies in mind, rather than home movies and sharing via the web. There is automatic metadata input using information from Amazon (US only), including date, director, artwork and more. This works well, although not perfectly. In addition, it copes well with files which are located on different drives, including those stored on removable drives such as DVD’s, as it is possible to select new locations for movies easily allowing you to keep movies for a while in one place and then archive as necessary. You can launch any file with a choice of other movie players such as VLC or Quicktime for ease of watching, and the whole feel of the application is very iTunes like, with smart and regular playlists types and spotlight-like searching.

iFlicks is definitely, however, not perfect. You can’t edit the information of multiples files at once, meaning the import of data for TV series such as 24 or Lost is arduous. It is also expensive for what it is, at $29.95, and hasn’t been updated from version 1.1 in a long time- possibly over a year- meaning that the bugs and quirks are unlikely to ever be ironed out. Until something better comes along however I’ll be happy to continue using it. iFlicks is used mainly as a database of all the movies in my virtual collection, which incidentally also includes references to the physical files for easy launching. If I’m looking for something to watch it’s one place I would go to browse what’s available, what has been watched in the past and when, in addition to searching by actor or director.

Browsing files is quite easy. You can either view a big iTunes library-like list of titles and related data, or even skip through the movie file without opening it- when importing a movie into its database iFlicks grabs frames out of the video at set intervals, giving a quick preview of the file. You can’t however view box artwork easily, which seems to make its inclusion a little pointless.

iTunes- eye candy

Earlier, I stated that I only use iTunes for content that I have converted into iPod video compatible format. This however is a vast majority of my library, and as such whatever iTunes has in it is a fairly good representation of my whole library. Therefore I often use it as a means to search for something to watch without turning to iFlicks.

One thing I love about the latest version of iTunes is its eye candy when viewing artwork set using either iTunes or Quicktime- I believe this image is embedded into the file as its key frame, unlike the image in the iFlicks database which is held externally, away from the movie file itself. Embed in some cover art into the file, and you get cool reflections and a great looking dark background- almost as good as browsing along a shelf full of DVDs. One small caveat to note- embedding art into movie files using iTunes is only possible when iTunes is referencing back to the full, original movie file, not a Quicktime media link. I originally started out by creating media links to all my files and adding these into iTunes, thus eliminating my need to stop iTunes automatically moving any movie files into its database- the problem I mentioned earlier. This is best explained in the comments of this hint at macosxhints.com, and it’s a great way to add files to iTunes- if you don’t want to change the artwork.

For some reason, using media links in iTunes means no changeable artwork, and as this was a necessity for me I reverted back to square 1. I also started using the media link method as means to centralise my whole master movie library and move away from using iFlicks- until realising that this meant I couldn’t easily tell if a video in iTunes was iPod compatible or not, so I decided iTunes was best suited for storing iPod formatted video only. iPod formatted video is much less disk space intensive than full quality video, so I’m happy to let this sit on my external hard disk for easy syncing to my iPod.

Going back to DVD artwork, adding a high resolution image such as those from Amazon is probably more than enough for most people. This looks pretty good in iTunes, but knowing I could do better, I was determined to go one step further.

I also use Delicious Library, $39.95, to catalog all my books, games, DVD’s and CD’s (you have guessed by now that I’m a digital organisation freak) and it creates extremely realistic looking representations of the physical item it is cataloguing, using a combination of packaging simulation and lighting effects on the image it downloads from Amazon on import. It’s not immediately evident how to get this image out of Delicious Library for use in iTunes, as planned- drag and drop doesn’t yield any luck, and there are no menu options immediately evident. However, the contextual menu for an item gives the option to email this item to a friend which creates a new email in your default email application, with the artwork included- result! This can be dragged onto the desktop, and then dragged into iTunes. I tried in vain to work out an applescript or workflow that could be used for this- if you manage to succeed please let me know!

One issue, which seems quite odd really, is that it is not possible to easily set metadata for video files in iTunes which are reserved especially for movies- such as series, season, and also most annoyingly setting Kind to TV Show is not possible either (update: it is in iTunes 6.0.2, but this still doesn’t mean the movies will sit in the correct menus on your iPod). This means that the TV Show button (shown below) in iTunes is rendered useless unless you download TV Shows from the iTunes Music Store (Link). Now, other metadata such as Actor, Director etc. I’m not too worried about as iFlicks takes care of this. It would be great for iTunes to have it to, but it’s just too much work to get this in there too. The TV Show issue though does bug me, but thankfully there is a work around.

From this hint, again at macosxhints.com, a command line solution is given, and then in the comments someone points to a neat utility called Lostify (named after the TV show, incidentally) which can set this data for you. Thankfully I don’t have to use this too often as it’s a bit of a pain- although rapidly improving in usability.

Watching Your Movies

I’ll quickly round-up what I end up using to play back these movies on my iMac or Powerbook. With the Powerbook’s low specs, there are several factors which have to be catered for. It seems that reading movies off the hard disk directly causes stuttering. This leaves playing them over the network, or off an attached drive or DVD. Playing movies over ethernet works fine, and over old school Airport (not extreme) it’s too slow- so the lounge has been wired into the iMac via ethernet.

There are many dedicated playback applications you can use, but I tend to rotate between Quicktime Pro on my iMac and the lighter weight VLC on the Powerbook. Quicktime Pro is a useful tool, as you can edit out unwanted intros or endings, adjust volme levels, and import and export in countless different formats. Just for playback though, it has a few useful features with good multiple monitor support, but VLC definitely trumps it in the playback adjustability stakes- with playlists, equalisers and a myriad of preferences you can tweak to your tastes.

Turning display mirroring on on the Powerbook on gives smoother playback on the TV, using less video RAM I would imagine, while the iMac can generally cope with files played from anywhere using either Quicktime Pro or VLC. Of course iTunes and iFlicks both have inbuilt playback, but they are limited in functionality and don’t offer much control.

Both VLC and Quicktime Pro work well with the Keyspan Media Remote which is hooked into the Powerbook, and this can then be integrated in to the rest of the hifi/TV/DVD setup using the Philips multi function remote that lives in the lounge. This has programmable macros, so it’s possible to flick between the TV and start playback on the Powerbook at the touch of a button on the remote- you can even launch Automator workflows or Applescripts from your sofa.

The ultimate luxury however, is using something like Front Row from Apple, which works wonderfully on high powered new Macs, or MediaCentral from Equinux which works really well on my low powered Powerbook. Everyone has heard enough about Front Row by now, but MediaCentral Really is a dream- simple to use, and just works- and freeware! Just download it and give it a try.

Hopefully this little roundup of what options you have for watching and viewing video on the move, or on your computer or TV has been somewhat useful. If you have any comments, questions or thoughts please post them here in the blog section of newformula.org, or send me an email.