Be sure to get MetaX to tag and give album art to your DVDs. Also get Muxo to convert SRTs to soft subtitles for all those Anime DVDs. The soft subs are great because you can turn them on or off (they’re not part of the video file). Works with iPod or Apple TV.
Huh. I actually had bad luck with Muxo for some of my DVDs – the resulting soft subs could crash Front Row or the AppleTV playback.
It’s a shame, 'cause in QuickTime Player they were awesome.
I got hung up at the same point last night. I had a torx t5 and several larger ones but no T6. Dammit!!! A quick trip to radio shack and I now have a whole torx set. Why couldn’t they just use normal screws like they do for the rest of the notebook???
I picked up the little apple IR remote ($20). Pretty neat for controlling front row, itunes, and to a limited extent the latest VLC. VLC btw is even more awesome on the mac. It plays everything and the interface is a bit prettier than the windows version. The remote should be quite useful when I travel.
I also tried the iphone remote app. Not bad for free if you just want to control itunes with it.
On the same note I was looking into a tv out (composite/svideo) solution for when in a hotel and that is your only input option.
I went ahead and ordered the parts from monoprice listed here:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=8375980
I’ll let you know how it works out.
FYI, mono price also carries all the mini display port -> dvi, vga, hdmi cables for quite a bit less. I ordered the hdmi one too.
So I plan to rip my dvd’s in ISO format to the hdd. I know vlc plays them just fine. Is there a way to get front row to play a mounted iso like a dvd disc? Or am I better off just transcoding down to h.264 using handbrake?
I bought RipIt as part of the recent MUPromo. It’s a great ripper. Yes, Apple DVD Player plays mounted ISO just fine.
DVD Player does, but it doesn’t seem to be quite so easy to integrate them into Front Row. DVDAssist is supposed to make it work, though it seems a bit kludgy.
So VMWare’s performance is pretty crappy even with 2GB devoted to it, and it’s a major battery hog. Disappointing. I’ll probably use Outlook Web Access for the most part and use Boot Camp more than not when I need Windows.
Now I gotta figure out how to (if I can) add my shared Windows printers on the Mac side of things.
So I decided to give carbon copy cloner a try. Everything seemed to go well. I was able to swap the drive easily now that I had a torx 6 screwdriver. The new 7200rpm 500gb seagate booted up just fine. So I go run bootcamp and it tells me I can’t repartition or something. I learned the hard way (again) that when I prepared the new hdd I picked something apple or another instead of GUID when I partitioned it. Yeah BAD BAD BAD. GUID GOOD. So I make a complete time machine backup. I then boot with my mac osx disc (I see holding down option on boot up lets you pick the device), delete the partition, recreate it using the disk utility. I then try and restore from time machine but it won’t see my new hdd as a destination. It took some fumbling around but I finally just rebooted and then it let me choose my 500gb hdd for the destination of my restore. After the time machine restore (which works surprisingly well) I was finally able to run bootcamp assistant and partition for windows. Uggggg!!!
I’m installing win 7 x64 rc1. I guess I haven’t had enough punishment for one night. I hope it goes well…
I wonder if I’ll need that LIMO patch…
Weirdly, I got my Dell 1710 working from the Mac – didn’t even think there’d be a Mac driver for that one. But my Canon Pro9000 isn’t printing. Hmm. Makes it as far as showing “spooling” in the Windows queue, and then it stops. The Mac gives me one of those brilliant error messages that I guess give the Mac its friendly reputation: “If an error has occurred, eliminate the cause of the error.”
Ah, the joy of troubleshooting.
ARogan, I couldn’t get the function key operations (such as volume) to work under Win 7 in Boot Camp. But I’m suspicious that VMWare might have screwed something up with my Boot Camp setup. At any rate, they work fine under Vista.
OK wow I’m pleasantly suprised. Win 7 x64 installed fine and boot camp drivers installed fine too. The only driver I had to manually install were the nvidia ones but that was easy enough to find on the osx disc. 70fps on rthdribl so I think 3D is working fine.
Hmmm I just tried and my audio buttons (f10,f11,f12) all are working fine.
I paired my bluetooth mouse too and all 5 buttons and scroll wheel are working.
I think I’ll hop into osx again and work on the printers. I was able to find my HP IP color laser printer no problem but was having issues finding my samsung laser that is shared off of a vista pc.
Got wow running in win7 x64. Seems fine. Performance is consistent with the osx version (40fps, good settings, stormwind).
DennyA, I’m having kind of an odd issue. It seems the max volume in win7 seems much lower than in osx. Are you having this issue?
I’ve seen/heard exactly the opposite on several Macs (and even Hacks!).
Cool, I’ll have to check those out.
FYI, I think I need to update my realtek sound drivers to solve my win7 sound issues. I’ll give that a try tonight.
http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/
The 13-inch MBP seems to have a Cirrus Logic chipset, rather than Realtek.
Found a bunch of people in the Apple support forum with the same issue, no solution. Someone mentioned it looks like the right sound channel is maxed at half volume.
Well that sucks. Let me know if you find a work around.
Huh, haven’t noticed that on mine. Is it only on Windows bootcamp?
Yeah, volume seems fine under VMWare, so it’s apparently the craptacular Cirrus drivers in Bootcamp 2.1.
On top of that, I noticed the optical emitter is always on in my headphone jack under Windows. Haven’t checked to see if the jack works properly under Windows yet.
So I gave fusion a try last night. It booted my win 7 x64 partition just fine, installed the vmware tools, and then I reactivated it. Yeah sound was fine in fusion. I also ran rthdribl which I got 30fps vs 70+fps in boot camp. So it seems direct3d works but at a pretty big penalty. I’ll have to load up more windows games and try it out some more. The unity view thing is pretty neat. Running fusion in its own “space” is quite convenient.
I did boot back into boot camp and can confirm all my function keys, brightness, and volume adjustment keys still work. So at least for me it seemed vmware tools didn’t screw up anything.
Now if they will just fix that sound drive…
I was hoping to use Fusion to keep an Outlook window open in a VM at work, but even with everything idling in the background, Fusion drops my battery remaining meter from about 6 hours to 2 hours. So I may have to brave Entourage.
Can you hold out a couple of months? Snow Leopard is supposed to arrive in September, and it includes Exchange support.
Is running Outlook in CrossOver any better?