Thursday, April 22, 2010

Auto-Ejecting Western Digital's VCD

You already know I'm not a huge fan of Western Digital's new MyBook Studio line. But if you need to use these things (I have one for a client still sitting here) and cannot stand that VCD (Virtual CD) mounting each time you plug it in and having to manually unmount it as well as the HD itself there's a simple AppleScript that will auto-eject it for you.

MacOSXHints has a little article about it here.

Just in the interest of it not being lost in the morass of the intertubes I'm posting it here.


tell application "Finder"
  activate
  try
    eject disk "WD SmartWare"
  end try
end tell

It was submitted by "Anonymous" over there, unfortunately.

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

StarFire - Yet Another Transcoder

StarFire, a new video encoder that is NOT free ($8) has been released and is making the news rounds. I haven't had time to try it yet but it's yet another transcoder which people are looking to to replace VisualHub.

It's at version 1.0 and lists these features:

StarFire lets you encode your favorite video files to iPod, iPhone, AppleTV and PlayStation 3. It also lets you export to various format like MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264, DivX, FLV and DV.