Apple TV

[Christian Hewitt]

On 1 Nov 2010, at 19:34, Ian macdonald wrote:

> I know that get iplayer now saves mp4 in a format that is not
> compatible with the apple tv (older type with hard drive) I normally
> just run it through videora and that solves the problem.  However I
> was wondering how big a job it would be for me to alter get_iplayer to
> save the mp4 in the correct format? can anyone point me in the right
> direction?

get_iplayer uses ffmpeg to move flash video into an mp4 container so it's not impossible to change the ffmpeg commands to include cropping that resets the video dimensions to what the crippled QuickTime player can handle. The negative to this approach is that you perform a full re-encoding of the video file. Instead of a quick 2 minute swap of container formats it can take an hour or more to re-encode longer shows. I did some experimentation before and cropping is what you need. I can't remember the exact commands though - I ran out of patience and moved on to other ideas (read on):

The other solution for is to use an alternative media player on the ATV. I experimented with nitoTV and then Boxee for a while before settling on XBMC. I'm using the excellent "Get iPlayer Automator" app for MacOS to save content directly to an Apple TimeCapsule NAS and the ATV mounts the same NAS volume so that XBMC can discover and play the files on it. XBMC plays flashvhigh flawlessly on a standard ATV whereas nitoTV stuggles a little and Boxee was just generally flakey. I've since gone a stage further by swapping the ATV's internal wireless card for a Broadcom H.264 decoder that allows the ATV to play 720p flashhd content. XBMC took a bit of experimentation to figure out, and Get iPlayer Automator needs a few file naming wrinkles to be ironed out to better fit with XBMC's 'scrapers' that pull show info and artwork from imdb.org and thetvdb.org, but once you've experimented to understand how XBMC would like to see things it's a really great solution. I still use the original ATV GUI for music and photo slideshows as that side of XBMC does't cope with an ATV, but it's no big deal.

Christian