Jan
16
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MC20140116.mp3 [28.2MB 00:58:21 64kbps]
A podcast about all things Macintosh. For Mac geeks, by Mac geeks. Episode 474. In this episode of the Maccast we catch up Ara Dererian of the HDTV Podcast to get the latest updates on his Mac Home Theater set-up and find out what’s new in the world of Mac home automation and other technologies.
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Hi Adam,
thanks for a great episode, good to follow and compare notes with these HT guys being one myself. I have tried using the BluRay ripping method described: makeMKV followed by Handbrake. I have not yet managed to get subtitles across this way. Subtitles do not appear correctly in the selection list in Handbrake, and whatever I try does not work. Do I need to do something special or have I just used weird BluRays to rip from? I have tried using the Brorsoft ripper (in trial version to see if it worked and that gives the movie a water mark) which seems to work great. Do you have any experience with that one?
Keep up the good work!
Soren
Ah, subtitles! It’s a problem. I’ve had success just leaving the file as an mkv and having Plex serve that. That works — if I play the movie on the tv but not on an iOS device! On the latter, Plex displays gibberish instead of the subtitles. So I wind up watching movies with subtitles on the HTDV only.
The whole system almost works, but there are a lot of moving parts.
Nice to hear from Ara again. His tutorial on backing up disks is the best reference I’ve ever seen. I mainly use the MakeMPV step only. If I Handbrake the result, i go for 3.5-4.5 MB, average bitrate, two-pass, deinterlaced (sometimes, depending on the source), DVD only.
Also the podcast on encoding with Don Melton was terrific. That’s the standard for “deep dive”. Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.
I haven’t gotten into Blu-Ray because of the “bag of hurt” factor. The format is too aggressively anti-consumer for my taste. My rule of thumb is that I will consider buying the blu-ray if the movie is at least “Kubrick quality”. Needless to say, I don’t have many blu-rays.
Adam – I feel your pain dealing with the Plex solution in one hand and AppleTV/iTunes/DRM in the other. I want to go all in and rip all my DVDs but it would be nice if the main TV with the AppleTV could see them (without me having the movie in 2 places on the server). This might be a rationale for jailbraking the Apple TV?