[Tfug] Nice score at WorldCare..

[Bowie Poag]

Hey Tom,

Roxio 8 for the Mac comes with a nice little Tivo Transfer utility.  
You point it at your Tivo, select a program(s), click "Toast It", and  
it will handle the task of downloading, converting, and packaging  
those shows as a DVD. Instead of murdering an innocent DVD blank, you  
can just save it as a DVD disc image.

 From there, it's just Handbrake Lite. Point it at the DVD disc image,  
tell it to save the resulting transcoded movie into the iTunes Media  
folder, and you're done.

No command line work, no scripting, no endless package installations,  
no hunt-down-this-weird-15-year-old-Tcl/Tk-library-on-this-weird- 
mirror, no compiling, no switches, no arguments, no "go here and  
download this special MPEG-2 demuxer written by a guy named Michelle"  
crap.

It just works, and that's exactly what a computer should do for its  
user. Not just make it possible to do, but to do it.


On Sep 21, 2011, at 6:59 AM, Tom Rini wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 2:34 AM, Bowie Poag <bpoag at comcast.net> wrote:
>>
>> After 3 days, I've gotten around to installing OS X 10.5.6 on this  
>> thing,
>> adding another 2TB worth of SATA to it, making this thing a media  
>> server for
>> the whole house, and part-timing it as a Tivo-to-AppleTV  
>> transcoder. It's
>> now chewing through about 500GB worth of TV shows, and dumping the  
>> results
>> into my iTunes library so I can use it anywhere.
>>
>> There are plenty of really, really nice things about OS X, even  
>> though it's
>> a closed platform. It's heresy to say it here, but that's the truth  
>> of it.
>> In a closed system, you benefit from interoperability and well- 
>> defined
>> standards. Everyone knows the rules from the developers down to the  
>> users,
>> and everyone plays the same game, accordingly.
>>
>> All the apps related to burning/ripping/transcoding in OS X all  
>> know the lay
>> of the land, so to speak, so everything you would want to do is  
>> generally a
>> breeze to do. There's a common backbone to everything. Instead of a  
>> Rube
>> Goldberg contraption glued together with the aid of a shell script  
>> requiring
>> the user to install 30 different packages of 5 different types with  
>> 100
>> different dependencies, all in an effort to convert from format A  
>> to Z, you
>> just have one or two apps that are coherent in their approach to the
>> problem, and deliver their results in a format everything already
>> understands natively. It's drag and drop at that point. It ceases  
>> to be an
>> "MP2/MP4/DivX/XviD/AVI/WMV/FLV-to-BIN/CUE/VOB/DVD/VCD" issue. It  
>> just works.
>
> What did you find to transcode $random-media to something iTunes
> likes?  I actually was going down this path a few months ago and
> failed to find anything that wasn't some OSS app that was easier to
> use on the commandline and over in Linux too.
>
> -- 
> Tom
>
> _______________________________________________
> Tucson Free Unix Group - tfug at tfug.org
> Subscription Options:
> http://www.tfug.org/mailman/listinfo/tfug_tfug.org