Appleosity

[serinde]

I have been steadily turning to the Candy-Colored Side since the beginning of my employ. (Including spending most of today frobbing new machines, including the 24" iWhack I was not actually supposed to get, whoopsie!.) Earlier this week I made the final test: I had Boot Camp put a Windows partition on the laptop, booted into it, installed CoH, and tried it out. Seems to work fine, modulo the annoyance of trying to play with a trackpad. (Ah. Mem.: try TeamSpeak.)

So the kool-aid is delicious and fruity, and it seems likely that the next time we need to upgrade something (which is probably soon), I will be switching to a Mac. Jury is still out between iMac and a Mac Pro. Obviously the Mac Pro would be much sweeter, but iMacs are considerably cheaper, and if they are butch enough to do what I need, I may restrain my greed as it is likely to be a generally expensive year.

Comments

[spride.livejournal.com]

I just meant for the user interface (your original point 1).

By "ripped DVDs" you mean what exactly - a collection of VOB files in a folder, DVD-Rs burned from a copy of a DVD, or something else? If I had ripped DVDs (which of course I don't, Mr. MPAA) I would actually rip the decrypted VOB files to H.264 MP4 files using Handbrake (http://handbrake.fr/) rather than keeping the VOB files lying around making the place look untidy. But as that would be illegal, of course I don't. But these would then show up in Front Row's Movies category very nicely.

You can control iTunes from the command line (http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20011108211802830) - check out the 'osascript' command that sends Apple Events to aware apps (basically any Cocoa app). Where are you actually playing the music? What we do is have our iTunes running permanently on the Mac Mini media center. If we want loud music we play it back via the big TV and subwoofer, and if we want private music, we start up iTunes on our local machines and connect to the iTunes library over Bonjour sharing; that way the Mini's library appears as if it were local and outputs to the local client's audio hardware. This is a very much better solution than mounting remote file systems and feeding them to local iTunes clients, and is how iTunes is meant to work with networks.

[sweh.livejournal.com]

By rip, I do mean exactly keeping the VIDEO_TS folder containing the VOBs from the DVD. For the main feature only (no extras, no menus etc). I didn't want to convert to mp4 format because the aim of the game here is to keep things at as good a quality as possible (hence the earlier moan about iTunes not supporting FLAC). I have 4*500gb disks in a RAID5 array, so I have approx 1.5Tbytes of usable space. I've got my movies ripped, but that's only 15% of my DVD collection. I need bigger disks!

And if the MPAA want to come and deal with me then they'll be on the losing side. I have paid for all the movies I'm talking about. I have them on the shelf in the next room, nicely ordered. The only reason I want them on a hard disk is for ease of use. I'm lazy :-)

As for controlling stuff from the command line... http://sweh.spuddy.org/rubbish/mac are my current scripts to control iTunes and DVD Player. The main "itunes" command was based on that article, but I've enhanced it a fair bit since then!

I don't any other Macs other than the mini under the TV. But I do have many other Unix machines (Linux, Solaris primarily. Occasionally a BSD install, or something else random for test purposes). No iTunes, other than on that machine. I'm an old-school Unix-type :-)