As you might know the AppleTV is very limited in HD playback. According to Apple it supports MPEG4 H.264 Low Complexity 1280x720 at 24fps. Anything beyond that won't play.

So if you took a HD Video with your own camera or you got a MKV, AVI file with HD content you need to convert this to 1280x720 at 24fps. I'll take a look a two scenarios:

1. The HD-Video is already edited etc. and just needs to be converted (or better transcoded) for the AppleTV
2. You are editing the file in iMovie and you need to export it after you have finished editing. (coming soon in Part 2)
   

Converting HD-Video for AppleTV

If you already have a completed Video file, you just need to convert it. The easiest tool for this is probably Handbrake. Handbrake is free and available for Mac, Windows and Ubuntu-Linux. For other Linux distributions there is only a command-line version of Handbrake available.

• Open the file in Handbrake.
• If you use Handbrake for the first time better choose the Menu item Presets/Update Built-In Presets once.
  
• Choose the template AppleTV. If you can't see this, click on Toggle Presets.
  
• This chooses the settings to create a Standard definition (SD) Video. It keeps the AC3 Audio if it exists and adds a second Audio Track with a stereo down-mixed Dolby Surround Pro II soundtrack.

• Choose Video and click on Picture Settings.
  
• At the top right corner click on Anamorphic and select None.
• Change the Video size with the arrows to 1280 x 720. If the video has a different Aspect ratio than 16:9 increase the values until the width is 1280 or the height is 720.
• Click Close to close the Video Window.
  
• Click Start  to start the encoding process. This will take a long time. On my iMac 2.4GHz it encodes an average of about 7fps. So for a 2 hour Movie this will take about 6-7 hours.
  
• You can try to adjust the different Video/Audio settings of Handbrake but I found the default settings work quite well.
• Unfortunately I had some Videos that made Handbrake crash. I am not sure why, maybe there was a glitch in the HD broadcast. Once I tried the same file again and it worked the second time.

Yesterday I got my refurbished iMac 20" from Apple and I just want to share my experience so far.

Background

My wife complained about the slowness of her old Windows XP machine so I decided to get it replaced. Since my experience with my old Mac Mini was quite pleasant we thought about passing this to her and getting a new Mac for me. The old Windows XP machine will probably serve as a Linux mail server soon, no more Windows!!

So looking at the Apple store the cheapest iMac is HK$ 9400 at the moment. But I remembered a saw this link on the Apple web-site to their refurbished Macs and iPods. A long time ago I looked at that and there was not much there (at least for the Hong Kong Apple store). So I did not have much hope to find a good deal there.

But...

Alright, a few days ago I got my AppleTV. You might wonder why:

• Easy to use (important if you're married)
• Plays all iTunes Videos/Music out of the box
• Plays more or less all Videoformats you can find when you install XBMC or Boxee. This requires a very easy hack (and a Mac at the moment)
  If you need a Boxee invite, please leave a comment below or send me an email.

The only downside is that it does not have enough power to play High Definition Videos, unless they are in a standard Quicktime format, i.e any Matroska (MKV) or AVI file won't play smoothly, Video with 720p might play, but 1080p is just not possible.

Though all HD content from the iTunes store plays flawless. Why? Well Apple knows how to utillize the graphics chip to accelerate the Video. XBMC/Boxee only use the CPU, which is not fast enough.

Goal of this tutorial

I have to give credits to all the great guys who made this now so easy. Over at AwkwardTV tyou can find many more Guides etc. This tutorial is just a quick summary of thw 2 most essential points in my opinion:

• Install XBMC/Boxee, this automatically enables SSH, so you can remotely log into your AppleTV.
  
• Setup Samba (SMB) so you can copy files fast to the AppleTV.
  I wasn't able to install AFP, but SMB works just fine.

When will Apple finally give us a new mouse? (or even something better)

On each event I am silently hoping for, this sentence: “One more thing, we have a new Mouse!” Well, hasn't happened yet, but Apple, come on, for the next event please! Apple made some great user interfaces for OSX and for the iPhone/iPod Touch, so I can't quite understand why they haven't changed the mouse in the last few years, the current model was released on August 5th, 2005 .

I wouldn't mind if the current mouse would be flawless, but my colleagues and me use this everyday and nobody yet said, “Wow, great mouse !” just the opposite.

Major annoyances:

• no clear line between left and right mouse button, so it happens very often that you click on the wrong button.
• scroll wheel ball is too small and it will stop working after a while (dirt problems).