I guess before we get into the players, we should talk a bit about the actual video files. For me, the two things I am interested in are regular DVDs and TV shows. I have a Blue Ray player, and for that, I just plan on buying the Blue Ray DVDs and playing them in the player when I want. Since I only plan on buying the really good stuff, its not a big deal (things like Planet Earth, which, if you have a BR player, should be the first thing get!).
The DVD file: DVDs are easy. You just need one free program: Mac The Ripper. (Interestingly enough, the official site seems down or was shut down), but google is your friend and the latest version I know of was a 3.x - 2.6 is a pretty easy find as well). Anyway, running Mac The Ripper will create a "Video TS" folder (aka "rip" the DVD) and in this folder will be all the DVD audio and video information from the DVD. It will name the folder whatever the movie is and you're done. The process takes about 15 minutes. You can play this with Front Row which comes built in to OS X Leopard. However you must do one more thing. Front Row only plays movies which are located in the "Movies" folder. What I recommend doing is having an external drive where the Video TS folders reside. The right click on that drive and "make alias". Drag the "make alias" into the Movies folder and that's all you have to do. Now press CMD+ESC or hit menu on your remote if you have a laptop and Front Row will start. Your movies are there. To make things look good, I would search google images for the movie poster and move that image into the Video TS folder. Rename this image as "Preview.jpg" and now Front Row will show the movie poster when you scroll through the movie names.
So this is great, with a few small flaws. One, you have to manually find the posters and insert them, and two, there isn't a way to input the movie description so you can read about it. The other flaw is that Front Row will not play .avi files - which brings us to the TV shows. What I was doing with the Apple TV was actually using another program called Handbrake to convert the Video TS folder into a Apple TV format file, and then drop it into iTunes. There, in iTunes, I could add the artwork and movie description and sync right up with Apple TV. It was a good system, but no DVD menus and of course, several steps. But, it did have 5.1 surround and looked great. (*Note - You don't need Handbrake for Plex or Front Row - only for Apple TV)
As mentioned before, one of the two goals is to stop paying for cable. Basically, its like cutting your phone land line and going only cell phone. Who has a land line anyway, lol :) The only reason I can think of having cable is if you're a sports person. I was planning on selling my Tivo, but it occurred to me next summer I will resubscribe to cable for the World Cup and will need Tivo to record all the games. But, sports aside, the reality I just don't need cable. I never watch local news (and if I did, you can buy an antenna for $100 and get HD local over the air for free), I never watch shows I don't record, and I don't channel surf.
The HT Guys just had an episode of their podcast talking about this as well, and one of them did calculations on purchasing shows from iTunes instead of paying cable, and he ran some numbers and if you're not watching like 100 different shows, its basically cheaper to cut cable and buy the shows from iTunes (although they did address the sports thing, which can be a deal breaker, I know). Definitely check out their site and podcast. They're always running a top 10 TVs to get, and the podcast is a great combination of news, listener questions and witty banter lol - I've listened to many podcasts, and delete most because they're just bad, but these guys are now part of my must listen to and I'm looking forward to more great episodes from them
So, where does that leave me with TV? Here's what I record on Tivo:
Lost, 24, House, Top Chef, Celebrity Apprentice, Survivor, Hell's Kitchen, Heroes, BSG, and I wish Top Gear (which I now watch all episodes of thanks to TVRSS which I'll talk about below)
All of these shows you can watch for free, most in HD, for free on Hulu or the networks web sites. Total commercial time is 2 minutes for most and never more than 3 minutes. And a note about HD - I know , there is always talk about the quality of cable HD versus "online HD" and iTunes HD, etc.. I'm not obsessed with it. Yes, cable HD looks awesome on my TV, but not $1,000 per year awesome. The video content from these sources into the 46" Samsung DLP looks very very good. Definitely better than standard TV cable signal.
I consider those a secondary source. The primary source are from Torrents. Torrents refer to a way of downloading files over a peer to peer client. To download them, I use a Torrent client, and in my case, I'm using the new Vuze. Although some people say it is a bit resource heavy as it is java based, I haven't found it to be a problem. I also like the new interface and the channels it has for outside content all free - from things like new footage of the Apollo landing to the animation of the US Airways Hudson crash, comedy, movie trailers, Leaning Channel type content - it satisfies any channel surfing needs you had with cable, and really, better, because its on demand surfing! And yes, its free :)
Ok, so you've got this great client to download torrents - where do you get the shows
from? TVRSS.net. If its on TV, its here (alomst everything mainstream, at least). Go to search, put in the TV show name, under quality put in HDTV and search. You can see all the episodes come up. When you download them, they are free of commercials, so no skipping required, and are in .avi format. But you don't want to have to go in and find each new show and download, which is why you right click on "search based RSS feed" and "copy link location" and now you have an RSS feed to that show with the parameters you set (in this case HDTV). Now open up Vuze, go to subscribe, then to RSS, and paste in this RSS link you've copied from TVRSS. It will populate, rename the Feed to the name of the show you found, click auto download new on the top right corner, and that's it. Go back, find more programs, add to Vuze, and now, every time you start Vuze, it will automatically search the RSS feeds for new episodes and start downloading them. There it is - a DVR, for free, no DVR fees, no cable fees, no commercials, nothing. A big shout out to my main man John for showing me the light! He is doing this on PC and using Micro, which he said has a way that he can set a timer for when the torrents run. So as not to interfere with regular surfing when he's awake, he has his set to only run from like midnight to 7am or something like that, so download bandwidth is while he's sleeping. I might run a mac automator script to do something like that, or just start it before I go to bed at night.Ok, so now you've got your DVDs and your TV shows , you need a nice, easy, good looking interface. We've talked about Front Row, but that doesn't really quite cut it for me. My first step was to try Boxee. Based on the XBMC (XBox Media Center), Boxee is a front end viewer like Front Row which can play lots of media including Video TS folders and .avi's. I had heard so much about it on podcasts and on forum it was the natural place to start. Also, since at the time I had an Apple TV, it made sense, since there was a hack which allowed Boxee to be installed on the Apple TV. I only got as far as installing it on the desktop. To be honest, I just didn't like it. I spent about 20 minutes with it and just wasn't to keen on the bubbly looking interface and more importantly, I couldn't get it to read my Video TS folders, get the posters, meta info, etc.. and in that time it crashed a few times as well. The reality is that I've got things to do, and don't really want to spend a lot of time hacking and figuring things out (which I like to do, and have done a lot of, but...) I just want this to work and work easy. So I kept looking and found Plex.
Plex is also based on XBMC and in my opinion, is just a million times better than Boxee. In less than 15 minutes, my movies were showing up in the movie section with poster art and movie info meta data and my TV shows were found and pulled up as well. They all played and I was good to go to start really getting into it Plex - and the interface looked awesome to boot. This was definitely the way to go.
Plex has excellent support in the form of a great wiki and user forum, all on their site. The few questions I had were SO easy to find on the wiki, it was a breeze setting things up. After spending a little time with it, I was able to easily navigate the settings and configurations.
Basically, you go into the Video section, and Add a Source. In my case, the "Movies" folder (which recall is an Alias dropped into the public folder) and the "TV Shows" folder, also an alias in the Public folder. From there, follow the wiki instructions, and you selected IMDB for the movies and TVDB for the TV shows, and a few other one time configurations, and now, Plex goes in, reads all your files, and pulls all the artwork, fan art, director, year, movie / show description and displays it in the Movies section and TV section as you browse your content. It is SO cool. As a kicker, when you go to TV shows, and you select "House" for example, it will start playing the theme music to House.
Once I did this , I added a really nice skin called Aeon which just has great wow factor on the screen. You can set up background pictures for the movies section, TV, weather, etc. In my case, I have set up a "folder" so I drop in about 10 or so high res photos (which you can get from the Aeon site, or from google) and it will scroll through them smoothly when you menu over the different categories. Here are some pics to see:
You can see I've limited my menu items to Music, Weather, Movies, TV shows. They also have Apps, Games, and a few other things. Also this is the Aeon skin. The Plex skin is also nice and they both offer a a little different way of displaying the movie or TV info. Also, you can select about 3 or 4 ways of showing the info as well. But in the example above with Volver, Plex found all this on its own. It went out behind the scenes, pulled the DVD poster, the year of the movie, director, IMDB fan rating, movie description, etc.. If you remember with Front Row, you have to do that all yourself and copy/paste it into the folders. Also, with the Plex main skin, it will show fan art of that movie behind everything. Like here, you see Dash from The Incredibles. It would be nicer to see Penelope Cruz for ex, so its less confusing, and maybe there is a way I haven't found yet, but you get the idea. It does pull all the information for TV shows too. Episode number, episode name, description, fan art, theme music, etc.. its really nice.
So, once Plex is running, CMD F for full screen and you're set. I've only really glossed over Plex, and there is more I want to talk about, like controlling it via remote or keyboard, and the 1080 vs. 720, both of which I am researching now. But I wanted to get this post up. I do have the Mac mini hooked up to the TV, it is pulling DVDs and TV shows from the Desktop Mac Pro shared folder (from external USB drives plugged in). The Mac mini is currently wireless off the airport extreme N router, and plays both DVDs and TV shows without skipping or hesitation. DVD quality is excellent, and HD TV shows downloaded are very good - not quite as good as cable HD, but better than standard defintion. And the mac mini to TV hook up was basically done in about 45 minutes from out of box to playing content on the TV (including mac mini primary setup, software downloads, and plex configurations).
Oh and I need to talk about the Apps. Plex has an "App Store" which is all free, but you can download apps which include: Hulu, CNN, TED, CNet, CBS for March Madness (which in part addresses the sports at least for this), MTV Videos, You Tube, and a lot more stuff. All this resides in your video channel in the menu, and you just select it and start watching. Its great! A few notes about this - Boxee techincally doesn't do Hulu anymore - Hulu asked Boxee to pull it, but apparently there is a work around using an RSS feed of Hulu, but here, its the full deal with an awesome menu. CNN App has all the current videos news clips on the TV.
So I'll be researching remotes / keyboards and be back with info on the that as well as more info on the setup and other topics about this.
Late post addon - Just read this on engadget about Vuze "Today, Vuze has announced a new iteration of its online video portal application that integrates playback with iPhone, iPod, AppleTV, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 devices. So far as we can tell, no other competitor offers that much integration (read: direct Mac / PC-to-device transfers) across so many products" - good stuff !
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