My Apple-powered home continues to grow – to go with the medley of Apple powered computers, screens and wireless kit, I’ve just added an Apple TV. I previously had no interest in them since as I really only use iTunes for music, and still haven’t bought in to the whole downloading and renting TV over the wires.
But when I learned that AirPlay – a feature of iOS 4.2 – would support streaming video over the air, it instantly had new appeal – I have an old TV that has no digital box so is essentially useless but AirPlay in theory meant that I could stream iPlayer from my iPad to the AppleTV and watch it on the TV.
Any H.264 content from the web can be broadcast over Airplay to your HDTV.
I’ve used AirPlay extensively in the house (with three Airport Express…) so figured this was a good solution, and reason enough to invest in an AppleTV. Apple’s marketing confirms this:
If it’s on iPhone, iPad or iPod touch, it’s on Apple TV. Coming Soon.
You can already stream music and video from your computer to Apple TV. With AirPlay, you can stream music and video from your iPhone, iPad and iPod touch too. So if you feel like watching a film you have on one of your devices, you don’t need to rent or buy it again. Just tap to start playing content on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch, then tap again to instantly stream whatever you’re watching — or listening to — directly to Apple TV. AirPlay is coming soon to an iPhone, iPad or iPod touch near you.
Simple right? Except, it doesn’t work like that. Now that it’s hooked up, the only video that can be streamed to AppleTV from my iPad is from Apple apps, like the Video app. But since the video needs to be synced to the iPad (via iTunes) and then streamed, this is of little value. Embedded videos (e.g., YouTube) can stream their audio to the TV, but that’s of no value. Most pertinently, I can’t watch iPlayer off the iPad on the AppleTV. It’s unclear whether this is something the BBC could fix by creating a dedicated iPlayer App.
So for the first time in a long while, I’m left disappointed by a piece of Apple kit and the promises I’d heard. Maybe things will improve in time, but until then, it’s just going to be an albeit good looking but nevertheless very expensive dust catcher.
Let’s say that you happened to have a folder of MP3s somewhere. Perhaps on a disc. Perhaps on a drive. Perhaps it was on a friend’s computer. Perhaps there were literally tons of awesome albums that you would quite like. You know, for, erm, backup purposes.
Well you might get as far as importing those in to your library and they would probably work. But if the tracks/albums weren’t labelled very well, then your library would get ugly. And if you tried to use the CDDB iTunes “Get CD track names” functionality, you’d be presented with a message along the lines of “iTunes can only access CDDB track names for CDs that it imported itself, please reimport the CD” – or words to that effect.
Your options are to burn Audio CDs of all the albums and then import them, which is a time-consuming hassle, or to use one of the various iTunes Applescripts available to try and hack the names in from the various sources. My experience of these scripts/sites – it doesn’t work. (You could of course import them and name them manually… but, well, let’s not even go there.)
The way around this is through Toast and a variation on option 1. I have Toast Titanium 8, but I know this functionality goes back at least as far as 7, if not further. It’s a little fiddly, but definitely better than creating real CDs of these albums. It’s quite simple – create an Audio CD in Toast as usual, but rather than burning it to CD, look under File > for an option to “save as disc image” (or Apple + D). It’ll create an .s2df file, which, again using Toast, can be mounted as a disc image (under Utilities or Shift + Apple + M). As soon as you do this, iTunes will likely spark in to life and start importing for you.
Far quicker than creating CDs, and yes, it’ll quite happily query CDDB to get the track names for you. Job done.
I keep forgetting a nifty thing about Firefox. You have the quick search area at the top right corner of the browser. When you’re visiting a page that has a search box, if you click the icon to the left of the box, you might see the option to add that site to your quick search list.
The site will need to be implementing the Open Search kajiggers. For anyone wanting to do this, add the following line to your document:
and then create a file called Search.xml in the root of your site that looks like this.
replacing template=”" with the correct search URL for your site. Notice also the image is the base64 encoding of your 16 x 16 icon. Marvellous.
Anyway, it seems that Google UK doesn’t do this and I imagine, due to the availability of the above, Mozilla aren’t really maintaining the search extensions part of the Mozilla Org site, as searching for a Google UK quicksearch, isn’t helpful.
So here’s the XML you need. It will also make the default to use only UK pages.
In OSX, save the file in
YourUser > Library > Application Support > Firefox > searchplugins
In Windows XP:
C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins
Enjoy.
As a fully-fledged Apple fanboi (as the idiots would call me), I was waiting with great anticipation for the iPhone to arrive in my area. In mainland UK, the iPhone is locked to o2, but here in Guernsey, we have three mobile carriers (none of which are o2) so there was a long, long wait for them to arrive here. And when they did, they were by no means official – that is, the two carriers offering them are importing them certain European countries for sale unlocked, and I’m reasonably sure Apple has little to no idea about it. As I was on the waiting list, I was one of the first to get my hands on one.
I’d needed a new phone for ages, as the ghetto orange Sony Ericsson I had been using was both a) a girl’s phone and b) a lesbian one at that. Not to mention totally beaten to hell and displaying typical “old phone” behaviour in randomly turning off when it ballywell felt like it. Not a good look. When the iPhone arrived here, it was a no-brainer to get one. And, as it turns out, I really had disengaged my brain in getting one.
You may find you get the following problem when trying to stream music to multiple speakers. Streaming to either local computer OR your airport express works, but when you try to stream both, you get an error message that looks like this:
“An error occurred while connecting to the remote speaker ’speaker_name’. An unknown error occurred (-3256).”
This is most likely caused by a firewall issue. If you’re running Tiger, then there’s a fix here. If, however, you’re running Leopard, then it’s a little different:
1. Open System Preferences
2. Click Security
3. Click Firewall
4. Either:
a. “Allow all incoming connections” – but I don’t recommend this, so
b. “Set access for specific services and applications”. Click the + symbol, then find iTunes in your Applications folder. Then set its permission to Allow incoming connections.
You should now be able to stream to multiple sets of speakers. Whilst you’re playing about in the firewall settings, click Advanced and enable the stealth mode, which seems to be off by default. You should also check that logging is enabled, as it’s possible that the change to your firewall settings will interfere with other applications you have installed.