After a bit of an absence, I’m back. The last month has been busy for me, but that’s the past time to move forward and share some Apple TV love.
A quick tip today for all of us evil PC users. As we all know one of the best parts of Apple TV is we can stream content to it. I have a 500gb external drive hooked to my PC, unhacked Apple TV, and a Apple airport extreme base station for wireless goodness. Like most of us I use Handbrake to convert my videos to the proper format, but unlike on the Mac side I can’t just pop in my DVD and let it run. Unfortunately some mojo must be done first to overcome the encryption, and while there are programs that can do it for me most take some time to give me a “clean” file. That was the case before I found DVD43, this little plug-in un-encrypts in real time. A smiley face in the system tray is yellow when not being used, pop in a DVD after about 30sec it turns green and you’re ready to go. Go into Handbrake, select the Video_TS folder, and convert away. This is extra handy when converting a TV show, because I can then select each episode individually, que them, and convert a whole disc at one time. DVD43 has cut my conversion time down by about 25%, and has resulted in less stack dump errors.
As a side note, after the last update I can’t seem to get my Apple TV to go into sleep mode. Anyone else having this issue?
