Two Help Menus or more

If you're seeing two or more help menus in an app or two the prevailing theory is that it's caused by the DivX extension somehow. Although not everyone is seeing this errant behavior.

I'm not seeing it on any machine here and some people report that they have multiple help menus even without DivX installed. I dunno. I wasn't aware of it until I received a few emails about it.

Dying Hard Drives Confuse Disk Utility

This post and this post describe some dying Hard Drives I ran across recently.

I found a screenshot I took while messing with one of the dead drives which is interesting and kinda funny:



After the drive failed to mount (and stopped screeching and clunking) I tried to mount it via a PATA-to-USB adaptor and saw the above. The funny thing to me is that the drive is actually 300GBs, not 2TBs. Maybe 2,199, 023, 255, 552 bytes is all the USB adapter can handle.

iVideo Converter is no longer available

I'm a bit late posting this (been busy) but iVideo Converter is gone...for now.

From Macupdate's page:

EDITOR NOTES
iVideo Converter is currently unavailable. The developer has requested that MacUpdate no longer link to iVideo Converter, as changes in PayPal fees have made the app less viable to develop so it can no longer be purchased. This situation might change in the future, but no solution is expected short-term.

The last version released was 2.1.7 and can't be downloaded from Macupdate or Versiontracker. iVideo Converter's site is down and if you purchased it their contacts page is gone as well.

As far as alternatives go there is still VisualHub - if you can find it.
Handbrake - but only outputs a few formats.
iSquint - Discontinued.
Or some of the on-again, off-again VisualHub replacements, like FilmRedux, Redux Encoder, VideoVangelist (discontinued), etc...

Then there are other converters out there with hit-or-miss reviews like Episode, Video Monkey, or others.

And there's also MEncoder if you like to type a lot. And iSkySoft's simply named "Video Converter".

For clients I find myself using Apple's Compressor and Adobe's Media Encoder a lot. Oh, and Mpeg Streamclip for the odd Flip HD video client's love for me to "incorporate" into their "vision". Gah...when they're sitting watching me work I make them watch FCP render Flip .mp4's because I'm evil like that.

Ripping just Audio from DVDs

Mac OS X Hints has an interesting post about how to rip just the audio from DVDs. I've only really had to do this a couple of time, but when I get a chance I'm going to test out some new methods.

They cite this method, which uses Mac The Ripper to rip the AC3 audio and then ffmpegx to transcode it to mp3, but the apps are a bit long in the tooth (ffmpegx's last update was January 26th 2008) or a bit tricky to get a copy of a recent version.

An alternate to ffmpegx is MAC3dec but that's a bit of an old app as well. Apparently last updated on August 26th 2004.

Mpeg Streamclip is probably the best way to go that I've seen so far.

(Yes there's OSex but it's pretty old.)

Tiffen's SteadiCam for iPhone

Tiffen has made a SteadiCam for the iPhone called The Smoothee.

You can see it in action here. While it's not exactly "based on the same technology as the big $60,000 rigs used in Hollywood" it does seem like a fun toy. I think it'll be expensive. I think I'm going to end up with a lot more iPhone footage to "inject" into some client's "creative".

3 Hard Drives Die in 8 Days.

An earlier post about an editing place's dying hard drives never mentioned the type of HD that was dying. Turns out it was a Maxtor DiamondMax 10 300GB PATA133. Model 6L300R0.

Actually, it turns out it was THREE of these drives. The first one, the one I recorded the sounds from (lets call it Drive A) died first.

Drive A was rarely accessed, but it was nearly full with only about 200MBs of room left.

Drive B died about 3 days later and was used for hourly secondary backups for a long time and had maybe 50GBs left on it.

Drive C died 4 days after that, yesterday. It's not exactly dead, but it's making horrible noises and access time is quite long. It was used constantly as a Render/Test Export drive.

So, three DiamondMax 10 PATA 300GB drives all dying within about 8 days. All on separate busses and two being on separate Macs.

All three were in external cases and all power supplies were attached to UPS's.

Loose FW800 Cables

xlr8yourmac.com has a interesting observation on clear-jacketed FW800 cables:

FYI on Loose Port fit with some FW800 cables (seen w/several clear-sleeved cable samples) - Twice in the last few days I've seen problems with some FW800 devices mounting. In all cases it was due to a loose/sloppy fit of the cable's FW800 connector in the Mac's FW800 port and with some (even slight) tension on the cable connection end. (Seen with FW800 ports on a Mac Pro and a MacBook Pro.)

Each time the sloppy fit was with a clear jacketed (showing shield braid) FW800 cable. (Clear sleeved cables with black FW800 connector tips.) These cables all came with different products, bought at different times but I suspect they may be from the same OEM cable mfr.

In fact after seeing this twice in the last few days, I went back and checked a similar made (clear sleeve) cable I've had for a couple years but rarely used - a FW800 to FW400 cable.

Hardmac's Suggestion of a MoBo for FCP

Hardmac has a quick article on an EVGA motherboard that would be nice in a new Mac Pro.

EVGA has a pretty cool dual-monitor as well called the Interview which has an interesting feature in which one of the screens can be rotated so the client/customer/patient can see things on their own screen...but I can see how it would be a little imposing or maybe even impersonal in some situations.

zonMotion & Time Lapse Assembler

zonMotion is a cool little FREE app to help make stop-motion animations.

In a similar catagory Time Lapse Assembler is FREE app that outputs quicktime files comprised of still images. I know QuickTime can do this but options are always a good thing.

1080p HD playback on MacMini

Several of my clients have older MacMini's set up in conference rooms or as lobby displays (rotating company bio videos) or as media servers in break rooms. Playing 1080p has been troublesome and I've had them ask a few times why don't I produce things in "full HD" for them until I show them the hardware trying to play it smoothly, but apparently Broadcom's Crystal HD Hardware Decoder enables hardware decoding of 1080p content...but only with XMBC.

Through hard work and the joint efforts of several TeamXBMC/Redhat developers and the Broadcom Media PC Group, cross-platform hardware decoding of mpeg2, h.264 and VC1 video content up to 1080p will be coming to XBMC on OSX, Linux, and Windows via the Broadcom Crystal HD Hardware Decoder (BCM970012).

The Broadcom Crystal HD is available now in a mini-PCIE card with ExpressCard and 1X PCIE form factors to follow. This means that the AppleTV and all those lovely new netbooks, Eee Boxes and older Intel Mac Minis have exciting new potential.

Looks like it's about $69. The model number is BCM970012.

Be aware that OSX drivers for the card are pretty green as of this post so Use At Your Own Risk.