OS X Hacker

Monday May 07th 2007, 8:18 pm

By Theron Parlin

Tags: TV, iPod, itunes

…and no, this is not a post about Apple TV.

I’m talking about watching the videos and movies from your iPod on your TV, with excellent quality. I don’t know about you, but in my house, DVDs don’t get the best treatment (especially with a 2-year-old running loose). And after we’ve owned a DVD for a while, when we try to play it, it starts to skip, pause and do all sorts of funky stuff. After Apple TV came out with their mediocre solution for watching movies that you download form iTunes on your TV, I decided investigate my own solution. I came across this video, where I learned it was possible to play movies and videos from your iPod, right on your TV. Excited, yet skeptical of what the quality would be like, I raced to RadioShack to make my purchase.

Much to my delight, it worked as advertised and the quality is perfect (not bad for 40 bucks). Now, I know what your thinking…. “That’s fine Theron, but I have over 300 movies in my collection.” No problem. If you really want to ditch your DVD player, download HandBrake for the price of FREE, pick yourself up a nice large external storage disk and start converting your DVDs to MPEGs.

Friday April 27th 2007, 9:41 pm

By Theron Parlin

Tags: itunes, quicksilver, tips

This one’s probably obvious to most Quicksilver users, but one of the things I hate is when I’m deep into writing some code and a song comes on iTunes that I want to skip. Most of the time when I’m working, I have iTunes running some playlist on random, and when a song comes on that I don’t want to listen to, I have to switch over to iTunes from whatever application I’m using to click “next.” it’s a pain in the ass and can easily distract me from my workflow. So, today I set up a couple of Quicksilver triggers to give myself easy access to the next and previous songs in my iTunes playlist. I set up CMD-ArrowRight for next song and CMD-ArrowLeft for previous. It’s simple, but a lifesaver when the need arises. Just go into Quicksilver, type CMD-’ to go to the triggers section, click on the iTunes icon for the iTunes triggers and activate the triggers for next song and previous song.

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