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A podcast about all things Macintosh. For Mac geeks, by Mac geeks. Show 348. Apple patches location tracking bugs. Apple reiterates stance on location to Congress. iOS 5 focus on voice. Details on new iMacs. MACDefender malware in disguise. Smash and Grab a new Apple Store Trend? Apple’s Customer Pulse survey system. Adding AVI files to iTunes. Battery Guesstimating. Quick switching audio sources. Using Spaces with multiple monitors.
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Hi – i found this little free app very useful for tracking the health of my MacBook pros battery
http://www.coconut-flavour.com/coconutbattery/ worth running if you have a kind of MacBook.
regarding the question about AVI files…. Yes, I agree that the best solution long-term is to transcode to mpeg-4/H264. About 2 years ago I found a wonderful little transcoder, iVideoConverter, that I use for all my transcoding needs. I think it was only about $12 but the price was in euros so I don’t remember the exact amount. Wonderful, especially transcoding wmv to H264, so they play on your iOS stuff w/o any issues.
As for iTunes, I’m tired of trying to fit video into something designed for **TUNES** (and podcasts) so I now use Plex to power my little HTPC, stream to the iOS stuff, and play on the TV. (http://www.plexapp.com). It’s designed from the ground up to work with feature films instead of short-form audio files, so it’s vastly superior. It does the on-on-the-fly transcoding (including wmv) but I have better luck going through iVideoConverter first.
Dave