Some new notes about AppleTV

Another braindump so I can actually put in public what I’ve been doing in my spare time lately, given that most likely a lot of that won’t continue in the next months, as I’m trying to find more stable, solid jobs than what I’ve been doing as of lately.

If you follow me for a long time you might remember that a few years ago I bought an AppleTV (don’t laugh) for two main reasons: because I actually wanted something in my bedroom to watch Anime and listen to music and was curious about the implementation of it from a multimedia geek point of view. Now, a lot of what I have seen with the AppleTV is negative, and I’m pretty sure Apple noticed it just as well as I have. Indeed they learn from a lot of their previous mistakes with the release of the new AppleTV. Some of the “mistakes they learnt from” would probably not be shared by Free Software activists and hackers, as they were designed to keep people out of their platform, but that’s beside the point now.

The obvious problems (bulkiness, heat, power) were mostly fixed in hardware by moving from a mobile i686-class CPU to an ARM-based embedded system; the main way around their locks (the fact that the USB port is a standard host one, not a gadget one, and it only gets disabled by the lack of the Darwin kernel driver for USB) is also dropped, but only to be replaced with the same jailbreak situation they ahve on iPhone and other devices. So basically while they tried to make things lot more difficult, the result is simply that they hacked it in a different way. While it definitely looks sleeker to keep near your TV, I’m not sure I would have bought it if it was released the first time around this way.

At any rate, the one I have here is in its last months, and as soon as I can find something that fits into its space and on which I can run XBMC (fetching videos out of a Samba share on Yamato), I’ll probably simply get rid of it, or sell it to some poor fellow who can’t be bothered with getting something trickier but more useful. But while I want the device to actually accept the data as I have it already for what concerns Anime and TV series (assuming I can’t get them under decent terms legally), some months ago I decided that at least the music can bend over to the Apple formats — for the simple reason that they are quite reasonable, as long as I can play them just fine in Europe.

Beside a number of original music CDs (Metal music isn’t really flattered by the compression most online music stores apply!), I also have (fewer) music DVDs with videos and concerts; plus I sometime “procure” myself Japanese music videos that haven’t been published in the western world (I’m pretty much a lover of the genre, but they don’t make it too easy to get much of it here; I have almost all of Hikaru Utada’s discography in original forms though). For the formers, Handbrake (on OS X) did a pretty good job, but for the new music videos, which are usually in High Definition, it did a pretty bad job.

Let’s cue back FFmpeg, which, since last time I ranted actually gained a support for the mov/mp4 format that is finally able to keep up with Apple (I have reported some of the problems about it myself, so while I didn’t have a direct bearing in getting it to work, I can say that at least I feel more confident of what it does now). To be honest, I have tried doing the conversion with FFmpeg a few times already; main problem was to find a proper preset for x264 that didn’t enable features that AppleTV failed to work with (funnily enough, since Handbrake also uses x264, I know that sometimes even though iTunes does allow the files to be copied over the AppleTV, they don’t play straight). Well, this time I was able to find the correct preset on the AwkwardTV wiki so after saving it to ~/.ffmpeg/libx264-appletv.ffpreset the conversion process seemed almost immediate.

A few tests afterward, I can tell it’s neither immediate in procedure, nor in time required to complete. First of all, iTunes enforces a frame size limits on the file; while this is never a problem for content in standard definition, like the stuff I ripped from my DVDs, this can be a problem with High-Definition content. So I wrote a simple script (that I have pasted online earlier tonight but I’ll publish once polished a bit more) that through ffprobe, grep and awk could maintain the correct aspect ratio of the original file but resize it to a frame size that AppleTV is compatible with (720p maximum). This worked file for a few videoclips, but then it started to fail again.

Turns out, 1280×720 which is the 720p “HD Ready” resolution, is too much for AppleTV. Indeed, if you use those parameters to encode a video, iTunes will refuse to sync it over to the device. A quick check around pointed me at a possible reasoning/solution. Turns out that while all the video files have a Source Aspect-Ratio of 16:9, their Pixel Aspect-Ratio is sometimes 1:1, sometimes 4:3 (see Wikipedia’s Anamorphic Widescreen article for the details and links to the description of SAR and PAR). While Bluray and most other Full HD systems are designed to work fine with a 1:1 PAR (non-anamorphic), AppleTV doesn’t, probably because it’s just HD Ready.

So a quick way to get the AppleTV to accept the content is simply to scale it back to anamorphic widescreen, and you’re done. Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to cut it just yet; I have at least one video that doesn’t work even though the size is the same as before. Plus another has 5.1 (6-channels) audio, and FFmpeg seems to be unable to scale it back to stereo (from and to AAC).

Why I’m upset by Mininova possible shutdown

I’ve been reading some worrisome news about Mininova being requested to filter down the torrent links (to the point that it’ll have no more sense to exist in the first place, I guess). This actually upsets me, even though not in the way most people seem to be upset.

First of all I have to say I don’t like copyright infringement (even though I dislike calling it piracy in the first place): Free Software licenses are based on the idea of respecting copyright and thus I don’t like being the kind of hypocrite who asks to abide to licenses and at the same time infringe on others’ copyright. On the other hand, I find myself thinking about double-standards pretty often. Mostly, when there is no real other option from doing something illicitly.

For instance, anime and, even more, Japanese drama are sometimes impossible to find without having to wait for years, or often have bad translation or some kind of “localization” that ruins the pretty much (usually watering them down with political-correctness, censuring and cutting down anything that might make them unsuitable for children — even when the original version was simply not aimed at children but rather at young adults, but I’m going down a different road now).

Now I don’t want to play saint, it happened to me, and sometime happens still, that I went to watch something that was illegally downloaded; on the other hand, I don’t do this systematically, and I spend a few hundreds euro each year in original content (DVDs, BluRay, games for PS3 and PSP, software — if I do count this year I guess I’m well over €1K thanks to software: between Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and Microsoft Office 2007 I already reach €600), and these usually include more than a few things that I previously watched downloaded (The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya I had seen fansubbed, but I bought the Italian original box set earlier this year, for instance).

But there is one thing I absolutely rely on Mininova for, nowadays, and I’d be pretty upset if it was shut down: Real Time with Bill Maher ! Yes I do like this show, I have seen a piece of this some time ago in relation to an article by Richard Dawkins and then went on to listen to it (in podcast form) and then watch it (when the audio podcast was obscured for a while, and had to work around the US-only limitation, and found the full-fledged video podcast), up to now that I actually watch it downloaded from torrents each weekend.

Now, I know this is illegal, but HBO does not really provide me any other mean to watch it. And mind you, I’d be happy to spend €5/month to subscribe to it; I could even live with downloading it with iTunes, and having it DRM’d (which would upset me a bit but would be bearable). It’s a friggin’ late night show, not a movie, and not some general show like Mythbusters, which actually gets translated, dubbed and aired in other places, like Italy, although an year after the original American airing (on a related note: finding DVDs in Italy is still impossible; and region 2 DVDs from Amazon UK are limited to the first season…).

So if this for some reason arrive on the screen of some HBO guy: please, think about us, Bill Maher fans on the other side of the pond, and give us the chance of legally follow the video episodes. I’m sure that I’m not the only one who’s going to pay for the subscription, if given the chance. Then we can stop illegally downloading this through Mininova…

The mad muxer

I have expressed my preference for the MP4 format some time ago, which was to be meant mostly over the Ogg format from Xiph, most of the custom audio container formats like FLAC and WavPack (to a point; WV’s format could be much worse), and of course the AVI format. Although I do find quite a few advantages of MP4 over Matroska, I don’t despise that format at all.

The main problem I see with Matroska, actually, is the not so widely available implementation; I cannot play a Matroska video on either my cellphone (which, if somewhere were to think about it, is a Nokia E71 right now, not an iPhone, and will probably never be, I have my limits!), the PlayStation3 or the PSP. Up to last month, I couldn’t play it with my AppleTV either, which was quite a bit of a problem. Especially considering a lot of Anime fansubbers use that.

Now, since I was actually quite bored by the fact that, even though I was transcoding them, a lot of subtitles didn’t appear properly, I decided to try out XBMC; it was quite a pleasing experience actually, the Linux-based patch stick works like a charm, without going too much in the way of infringing Apple’s license as far as I can see, and the installation is quite quick. Unfortunately the latest software update on AppleTV (2.3.1) seems to have broken xbmc, which now starts no longer in fullscreen but rather in a Quartz window in the upper half of the screen.

So I ditched also XBMC (for now) for a derivative, boxee which, while being partially proprietaryware, seems to be a little more fine-tuned for AppleTV; it’s still more free software than the original operating system. Both XBMC and Boxee solve my subtitles problem since they both have a video calibration setup that allows to tell the software how much overscan the LCD panel is doing, and which pixel size ratio it has. Quite cool, Apple should really have done that too.

Also, I started using MediaTomb to serve my content without having to copy it on the AppleTV itself; this is working fine since I’m using ethernet-over-powerline adapters to connect the office with my bedroom, and thus there is enough bandwidth to stream it over. Unfortunately, here starts the first problem: while I was able somehow to get XBMC to play AVI files with external .srt subtitles, it fails on Boxee. Since the whole thing is bothersome anyway, I wanted to try an alternative: remux the content without re-encoding it, in Matroska Video files, with the subtitles embedded in them as a third track.

This seems to work fine from an AVI file, but fails badly when the source is an MP4 file, the resulting file seems corrupted with MPlayer and crashes Totem/GStreamer (that’s no news, my dmesg output fills easily with Totem’s thumbnailer’s crashes when I open my video library). Also, I have been yet unable to properly set the language of the tracks, which would help me to have the jap-sub-eng setup automatic on XBMC. If somebody knows how to do that properly, I’d be glad.

Anyway, there it goes another remuxing of the video library…