Is it possible to be more wrong?

Gruber (over at Daring Fireball) is on his I-told-you-so (or maybe you-told-me-not-so) horse again, but this one is just too good not to link it: Dvorak on the iPhone in 2007. My favorite quotes: “There is no likelihood that Apple can be successful in a business this competitive” and “ I’d advise you to cover your eyes. You’re not going to like what you’ll see.” Really, John? About a million people sure liked what they saw this last weekend…

Confessions of a Mac Junkie: Input Devices

By input devices, I pretty much mean “mouse and keyboard.” Keyboard first:

The best keyboard ever made in terms of key feel, for me, is easy to identify: the Apple Extended Keyboard II (AEK2). Unfortunately, Apple stopped making those in the early 1990s, and they never made a version using USB. I gave up using my AEK2 in the late 1990s when I started seeing compatibility problems with the driver for the ADB-USB adapter.

Frankly, I don’t like any Apple keyboard offering; I don’t like the key feel for any of them. For many years, what I used was a Logitech Elite keyboard. The feel is not great, but better than the Apple keyboards around or any of the other third-party competitors that I got my hands on. Most current keyboards use membranes rather than individual switches for each key, which is why most modern keyboards feel mushy. I tried the Matias Tactile Pro which is supposed to use individual switches like the old AEK2, but the one I got was defective and the manufacturer never returned my attempts to contact them or return it, so I dumped it (and never got my money back—great customer service!). So, the solution ought to be a keyboard based on scissor switches, which is how the better laptop keyboard are made. The problem is that I don’t like the feel of most of those because the finger travel distance is too small.

Anyway, I did finally tire of the feel of the Logitech Elite, and briefly reverted to my old AEK2 when I discovered that the OS X drivers for the ADB-USB adapter worked pretty seamlessly. While I loved going back to that old feel, I still wasn’t satisfied, for multiple reasons. First, the 18-year-old keyboard sometimes dropped keystrokes (very bad), there are no media controls on the keyboard, and the keyboard is really loud. Keyboard loudness never used to bother me, but my life has changed since the late 1990s and now I do enough teleconferencing that a noisy keyboard is highly inconvenient.

Fortunately, someone finally made a decent Mac keyboard: the Logitech DiNovo Edge for the Mac. Yes, it’s terribly expensive. Yes, it lacks a numeric keypad. And it’s a scissor-switch keyboard. However, they’ve increased the travel distance over other scissor switch keyboards and the feel is pretty good—no, still not as good as the AEK2, but better than the Elite or any of Apple’s offerings. It has a great set of media keys as well as a trackpad and scrolling controls. It’s quiet. It’s low and flat, so it doesn’t screw up my negative-tilt keyboard shelf. It’s Bluetooth, which so far seems much less flaky than the wireless USB solutions I’ve used before. And as a final side benefit, it’s gorgeous, though that’s also probably a significant factor in the expense (the top is cut from a single piece of glass).

Next, the mouse. This is a terrific example of a technology where what’s good for learning is not what’s best for the skilled operator. From my perspective, it’s great to have lots of buttons on a mouse. However, if you want to see how this can fail, try teaching a 3-year-old to use a multi-button mouse. I’ve done this with both my kids, who are both smart and were motivated to learn. Small fingers aren’t the whole problem, the issue is the fact that with multiple options for clicking, they’ll use them all, won’t remember which to use, and cause glitches when they click with the wrong one. It’s a mess, because the left button is the one used some 90% of the time and the other button is just a distraction.

On the other hand, I’m not a little kid. In fact, I’ve been using a mouse more or less daily for the last 22 years. (As usual, insert your favorite age joke here.) At this point, I want a mouse with some extra buttons—in fact, lots of extra buttons! Of course a scroll wheel, but not just any old scroll wheel, one that also tilts to do horizontal scrolling. I like programmable buttons for “back,” click lock, close window, gesture, and Exposé. I’d rather not have to go back to the keyboard if I don’t have to, and this array of extra stuff right on the mouse allows me to keep it to a minimum. This rules out any Apple offering; the mighty mouse or whatever they call it lacks for extra buttons.

So, that’s a lot of extra buttons. I also like my mouse to have a good feel in my hand, track well, and wireless is also nice (Bluetooth preferred but not required.) If wireless, that means it will have an on-board battery so a battery charge indicator right on the mouse is also useful. Obviously, I’m pretty picky about this.

So far the mouse that I’ve found that best does all this is the Logitech Revolution MX, so that’s my desktop mouse. It’s quite excellent. I almost gave up on it when I first tried it because the shape is pretty extreme and I didn’t immediately like it, but it’s grown on me. I’m still not sure the previous-generation shape (e.g., the old MX700 or more recent G7?) isn’t actually better but I’m willing to live with the MX. It’d be even better with Bluetooth, of course, because as I said, wireless USB is sometimes kind of flaky.

So, there are my choices for keyboard and mouse. Yes, I’m a little OCD about it, I know, but I put a lot of hours in on them, so why not get good ones?

Final note on Logitech: I never had any intent of becoming a Logitech fan. And Logitech has an extremely sketchy track record when it comes to the software on the Mac side; Logitech Control Center is notoriously buggy. Turns out the DiNovo Edge is already a Mac keyboard and works just fine without the Logitech software. The mouse can be driven perfectly well with third-party shareware; both USB Overdrive and SteerMouse work great with Logitech mice. So I don’t run the Logitech software at all.

Confessions of a Mac Junkie: Web Browsers

At any given time, I probably have five or six Web browsers on my hard disk. I’ll look at and briefly play with just about anything floating around, or at least I used to—this is one area that I’ve slowed down on a little bit. But why bother playing with Web browsers? Because this is one of the most important pieces of software on the machine—who doesn’t have a Web browser open most of the time? Anything that commands as much of my time as a Web browser deserves some attention in terms of looking for the best one.

The fundamental problem, despite the fact that so much development time and effort goes into these—or maybe because of that—I don’t think there’s a clearly “best” Web browser out there, which is unfortunate. Fundamentally, I spend most of my time using three different browsers.

The first is OmniWeb. This is the browser in which I tend to spend most of my time. It’s not especially fast, it’s buggy and crashes more than it should, and it has occasional issues with compatibility with some Web sites. After that ringing endorsement, why is this one of my favorites? Because it has two things that it does better than other Web browsers:

• Site-specific settings. If you want some web sites to behave one way while other web sites to behave differently, then you want site-specific settings. Here’s an example: on most sites, when I click a link, I want it to go to that link in the current browser tab. However, for some sites, I want all links to launch in a new tab (or window). For example, when I do a search in Google, I want all the links to launch in new tabs so I don’t have to go back to the original search. For some sites I want to block all images, and in others I want to permit all images. OmniWeb not only allows for this, but makes it easy to do.

• Thumbnail tabs. Tabs with text titles aren’t really all that helpful, as they depend on Web sites to have meaningful and differentiable titles, and reading titles is slow anyway. If you want tabs that really work well, thumbnails are the way to go. There are plugins for other browsers which give something like this, but OmniWeb has been it doing it from the ground up for a long time and has implemented it in a much more smooth and fluid way. Like this:

Untitled.NiuiKcRZQmg9.jpg

When there’s only a single tab open, the drawer closes automatically, so it doesn’t eat up the screen space when you don’t want it to. It’s really well done.

The next browser is Safari. Particularly with Safari 4, this is a speed demon that renders most web sites quite well, and it does have some great bells and whistles, too, like the Firebug-like inspector (which I actually like better than FireBug itself). Safari is what I generally run whenever OmniWeb has trouble with a site.

The other thing that WebKit-based browsers on the Mac have is the completely awesome ClickToFlash plugin. What does this do? I’ll quote from the site: “ClickToFlash is a WebKit plug-in that prevents automatic loading of Adobe Flash content. If you want to see the content, you can opt-in by clicking on it or adding an entire site to the whitelist.” Mostly I think of Flash as the scourge of the web. Yes, sure, occasionally Flash is cool, but most Flash is just annoying, and most Flash videos are really crappy quality. Plus Flash is a stunning resource hog. Having all Flash off by default, but still available when you want it, is terrific. This makes it hard for any non-Webkit browser to get very far with me.

Speaking of non-Webkit browsers, the third most oft-launched browser for me is FireFox. Basically, I keep this around to deal with Web sites that have obviously never been tested on a WebKit browser on a Mac. Since FireFox is common enough in the Windows world, it can handle the few sites that I have to deal with that the Mac/WebKit system don’t handle well. Those sites are decreasing in frequency, so I don’t use it all that often anymore. This is fine with me, as I dislike FireFox it for its non-Mac-like interface. There are some cool plugins for FireFox, but now that Safari has out-FireBug’d FireBug, I rarely feel the need to play around with those.

What about others like iCab, Camino, Opera, Chrome, etc.? Each of them has interesting features, but there are always problems with bugginess or inability to render many pages or something. The best of the lot of others seems to be Opera, but it just doesn’t offer anything compelling to take me away from the other choices. Now, I haven’t played with the beta for version 10 yet, so maybe it now does, but I don’t have a sense of this yet.

My default browser is usually set to OmniWeb, but Safari is increasingly also running…

WWDC 2009 Reactions

Everyone else in Mac blog-land has been doing this for a while now. I know I’m behind but I was traveling for work the week of WWDC and blogging had to wait.

So, my reactions, in no particular order:

• I was really hoping for a refresh on the MacBook Pro line, and so I was thrilled with the this part. I ordered a new 15“ MacBook Pro that night. I’ll be handing down my 2007 (that’s pre-unibody) 15” MacBook pro to one of my grad students. I plan to give up the Mac Pro in my office to my lab since some of the new research we’re taking on will require a little more horsepower, and I plan to make the MacBook Pro my primary at-the-office machine as well as my traveling machine. I think the new top-end MBPs will actually have enough horsepower and storage to make this practical.

• iPhone 3G S. I don’t know, I guess it’s good. I have an iPhone 3G and the changes would be nice, but aren’t compelling enough to get me to shell out the outrageous dollars AT&T wants for an upgrade. Magnetometer? Meh, don’t care. Better camera? OK, but not a huge deal. Video? The phone I had pre-iPhone had video, and I don’t think I ever used it, not once. Wake me when it’s 720p, until then, meh. Faster CPU and more RAM? Well, OK, that’d be really nice. But that alone does not even come close to justifying the upgrade expense. Voice control. Well, first, this should have been on the initial iPhone. It’s a good thing to have, but again, not a huge deal. The whole package together is almost enough to get me to think about it, but still too damn pricey. For $200 I’d do it in a heartbeat. (Certainly, next year when Apple does the next iteration of this and I’ll have met the two-year contract, I’ll be more interested,)

$99 iPhone. I think this has gotten short shrift in the press and blog world (I hate the term “blogosphere”) because I think this is a huge deal. For a mere hundred bucks, people will be able to buy an excellent mobile computing experience, particularly given the 3.0 OS. I think this will do a lot more to grow market share than the 3G S. I’m already pretty amazed at how common iPhones are, and I suspect this will draw in a lot of people, as price is one of the three main things keeping people from going iPhone. (The other two are not being willing to give up a physical keyboard and being locked in to AT&T, both of which have legitimacy. AT&T sure seems to be working hard to keep the latter group away.) I think $100 is the “well, crap, for that price, why not get one?” price point. I suspect not just entirely new customers, but that a lot of spouses and children of current iPhone owners are about to join the club, too.

iPhone 3.0. Look, 3.0 will be a significant step forward, but we already knew that. The biggest deal is that it’s coming out soon, which is good. The “find my iPhone” thing is a nice bonus, to be sure, and that I didn’t see coming. Mostly what the 3.0 OS does, though, is [a] provide things that should have been fixed a while ago (cut & paste), and [b] make AT&T look bad. MMS I don’t give a crap about since I can just send pictures in email, which is perfectly fine. However, I’d love tethering. Yes, I get that AT&T’s 3G network is already being maxed out in places, primarily by the armies of iPhones already on the market. What I’m really worried about is that AT&T will have only one price plan for this, and that it’ll be some enormous monthly charge for unlimited tethering. I don’t intend to use it much so I don’t want to shell out for an unlimited plan. I’d really like a plan that let’s me pay like $10 for a one-day window of unlimited use, which I’d only hit every once in a while. I am not, however, optimistic about this.

The other thing I’d really like to see come along with 3.0 is someone developing an app that allows the iPhone to take an external keyboard such as the Bluetooth-based Logitech diNovo Mini. I would pay $10 for that ability in a heartbeat. Any iPhone app developers listening? Please? (One wonders if netbook vendors would pay to keep such a thing off the market. If I were Dell and MSI, the apparently leading vendors of netbooks hacked into running OS X, I would pay significant dollars to buy out developers about to release such software.)

• Snow Leopard. Nice price point, that’s for sure. Clearly, Apple really wants everyone to upgrade. I’m glad it’s not too soon, too, as Leopard is itself very good and I worry about Snow Leopard breaking stuff, and I’m in no hurry for that. Hopefully it won’t break too much but you never know. One thing I’m still not sure about: will Rosetta still run under Snow Leopard? This is hugely important to me and if the answer is “no,” then it will be a long time before I upgrade. I know Apple is still trying to wean everyone off the PowerPC but dammit, I only just got a Lisp environment (niche enough for you?) that doesn’t suck that runs on Leopard in Rosetta, and if Snow Leopard breaks it, well, then 10.6 will just have to wait. Windows, with all its faults, does one thing incredibly well: backward compatibility. Not exactly Apple’s strong point. There’s something to be said for doing a better job of looking forward because they aren’t as concerned with looking back, but still, I’d like to at least occasionally be able to run something that’s really only a few years old.

OK, what’d I miss?

Ripped DVD vs. Blu-Ray Digital Copy

One of the serious drawbacks of blu-ray is that it’s exceedingly difficult to rip a blu-ray disc into a form usable on, say, an iPod or AppleTV (not that an AppleTV can actually handle 1080p, but that’s a separate problem). Blu-ray folks understand this limitation, and so some blu-ray movies come with a “digital copy,” which generally is a DRM-protected MP4 movie file.

When buying blu-ray discs for movies I don’t have, I’ve tried to to steer toward those with a digital copy included. However, some movies apparently include a digital copy even though this isn’t made explicit. In particular, the copy of the The Matrix that I picked up on blu-ray includes a digital copy, even though it doesn’t say so.

The Matrix was the first DVD that I owned, and was arguably the “killer app” that really launched DVD in the first place. I’ve ripped it many times at different sizes and bitrates; this is the movie I used to use to see how much playing with the dimensions and bitrates of the rip affected the picture quality. So, of course, I have a ripped version on my hard disk for watching on the AppleTV. So I thought I’d take a look at how it compared to the digital copy which came with the blu-ray.

First, some information on the the files: the rip was done using Handbrake 0.9.3, 63% quality, full-size loose anamorphic. The resulting file is 2.77 GB, 838 x 352 pixels. The digital copy is 1.59 GB, 853 x 354 pixels. So the digital copy is a much smaller file, but some of that is due to the fact that the ripped file has the full Dolby AC3 5.1 audio in it, while the digital copy has only a stereo AAC track. Still, the video-only part of the ripped version is about 2 GB, so it is running at a higher bitrate.

But how do the results compare? Actually the difference is quite striking right as soon as you see the Warner Bros. logo: digital copy and ripped. The colors in the digital copy are obviously much more saturated.

However, the ripped version appears to be a little sharper than the digital copy, at least on rendering text. I suspect that this is a result of the higher bitrate in the ripped version.

A great illustration of the difference between the two can be seen in this shot of Trinity: ripped vs. digital copy. The colors are much different and the digital copy shows some banding (particularly around the flashlight on the right), which again might be a bitrate issue. (Note that this is less visible when it’s moving video).

OK, so last one, not in the Matrix, but in the “real world:” ripped vs. digital copy. As per the other, the ripped one shows more detail, but the colors are a bit different; perhaps slightly better in the digital copy.

So, you can judge for yourself if the digital copy is acceptable. My take is that it’s OK for how I’ll actually use it; that is, primarily on my iPhone. I won’t watch it on the AppleTV since in my living room I can watch it in blu-ray, and the BD is absolutely fantastic. Now, when I travel I sometimes hook up my iPhone to a TV, but that’s at best with s-video, so the slight loss in detail and lack of 5.1 audio is acceptable, and the smaller file size is welcome. Overall, I’m happy with the digital copy and now I really wish all blu-ray discs came with one.

Confessions of a Mac Junkie: Introduction

OK, so it’s not football season and my blog is suffering from neglect. But classes are over and I can only watch so many movies, even on blu-ray, in a week. The last couple summers I’ve used the little down time I have in the summer to read a couple novels. Since the sequel to The Name of the Wind isn’t going to be out for a while, nothing on that front really grabs me right now. Thus I’m starting a new series on the blog, which I’ll try to update about once a week. So, what is this all about?

I’ve been using Macs since I started college in 1987 (insert your own age joke here). One of the things I often find myself asking when I meet other Mac aficionados is “what X do you use?” where X is software for some particular purpose, or hardware, or whatever. And I’ve noticed over the last few years that people ask me that question a lot.

So, I thought I’d document some of the storehouse of Mac knowledge and preference buried in my brain. Why should anyone care? Well, I have to confess that I have a problem: I’m a junkie. I’m completely addicted to Mac stuff, hardware, software, peripherals, you name it. There are (at least) four fully licensed word processors and at least three such spreadsheet programs on my hard disk. There are probably five or six keyboards in my study right now. I spring for MacUpdate Promo bundles and MacHeist bundles pretty much whenever they happen. I am, sadly but most definitely, addicted to this stuff—but it means my opinions are generally pretty well-informed and backed by a fair amount of experience.

Here are some planned topics, though I probably won’t go in this order:
• Word processors (and maybe reference managers)
• Mice & keyboards
• Web browsers
• Presentation software
• Utilities (this will take many posts as I’m especially addicted to these; I’ll need to generate multiple sub-categories)
• Spreadsheets
• Audio editing
• How I keep my multiple Macs in sync (I get asked this particularly often)
• Drawing and diagrams
• Graphing
• Outlining/brainstorming
• Text editing
• Image editing for the non-’shopper?
• Blogging/twittering?

And I’m open for suggestions on others. Let my addiction work for you…

One last sidebar. This will most definitely not be any kind of Mac vs. PC holy war stuff. I find that tiresome. I made a choice, it’s my choice, it’s not a choice borne of ignorance or incompetence, and I really don’t give a rip if there are people who don’t agree with it. Nor do I expect other people to be swayed by my choice, so I’m not going there. If you want that kind of utterly unproductive nonsense I’m sure there’s a thread on Fark or Gizmodo where people are fighting it out—there nearly always is.

Now, I will dip my toes into some the muddy waters of dissent on the Mac side, because it is germane to the topic. LaunchBar vs. QuickSilver. BBEdit vs. other text editors. There will be Microsoft-bashing, but only for some applications; and don’t worry, there will be Apple-bashing, too.

Catchup…

The problem with Twitter is that I post stuff there that should also be blogged… So, a bunch of quick hits:

• I’ve been thinking about getting a netbook. Based on specs, since the Dell Mini 10 supports a hi-res (720p) display and a six-cell battery, it looks perfect—except for one extremely major detail: it can’t be hackintosh’d. Total bummer. So, I either need to settle for a Mini 9, which seems too small, go for an MSI Wind, or wait for whatever thing Apple has up its sleeve. We’ll see how long it takes Apple to pull the trigger on whatever that is…

• I’ve almost completely given up on Facebook because of Twitter. Why? Because Twitter is lightweight and the mobile clients are just as good, if not better than, the Web client. (I use twitterfon on my phone and Canary on the desktop, both are free.) FB seems like work every time I log on, but Twitter is so lightweight that it’s just easy.

• I’m finally going blu-ray with the Oppo BDP-83. No, it’s not for sale publicly yet, but I tried to get on the beta program and wasn’t selected, so my consolation prize is getting to order it prior to its public release. This will be my first foray into blu-ray, but I’m a long-time Oppo fan, as the home DVD player is has been an Oppo DV-981HD for quite some time. I’ll post a review on it after I’ve gotten to play with it for a while. It should come in time for next weekend, so don’t expect to hear much of anything from me for a while once it gets here. The TV might now be the weak link in the chain…

AppleTV thoughts

I know I’m behind the curve, but oh well. A while ago Apple asked for feedback about the AppleTV and what Apple could do to make it better. Having owned a AppleTV for a while, I have some thoughts on this as well. I want to divide this into a few different categories:

[1] Things that don’t require changes to the hardware (I think), and therefore should be easy:

• Greater control over sync order. Apple allows users to say they want photos sync’d first, but there’s no way to specify the priority for other media. I’d like to be able to prioritize photos, then music, then TV shows, then movies. This should not be hard.

• Re-organize menus. In particular, it’s very annoying that “My Music” and “My Movies” are the last menu items in their respective categories, since I want those items over 90% of the time. This is obviously a lame UI stunt to have users rent/buy more stuff from the iTunes store whenever they use their AppleTV. It doesn’t work; in fact, it makes me less likely to buy because I’m annoyed by the transparent motive of this asinine choice. This kind of “annoy the user into buying more stuff” approach is very Microsoft—Apple, it’s not your style, cut it out.

• Better remote support. The Apple remote is cute and all, but the small number of buttons makes it really limited. Some of us have universal remotes with many buttons and it would be nice to be able to take advantage of those buttons. Yes, I know, the “Remote” program on my iPhone solves this problem, but sometimes I’m not home and I’m not buying an iPod Touch just to be a decent remote for the AppleTV when I’m not home. In particular, if people could use the number pad on the remote to enter text, that would be about a million times better than the current horrible text entry setup.

[2] Things that maybe require hardware changes:

• Support 720p HD at 30 fps. I know this may seem esoteric, but it’s really not. New solid state mini camcorders (e.g., the Flip HD and the Kodak Zi6) shoot 720p at 30 fps. This means one cannot view the raw video off of one of these devices on the AppleTV, even though it has the right codecs. One either has to drop the framerate down to 24fps or re-size the video to something smaller so that it’ll play on the AppleTV. This is just plain annoying.

• Enable the USB port for attaching an external hard drive. Yes, I know, Apple’s has a great scam going by charging like $100 for a mere 120 GB. But right now $100 buys you about 1 TB of storage; Apple is now off by about an order of magnitude. Apple, just suck up the loss of income from the few people willing to pay for the upgrade. You will get a lot more interest in the AppleTV if it can act as a home media server—that would be a brilliant product—and to do that, it needs to have a lot of storage at its disposal. Let us attach external hard disks!

See, this is a nice, short, modest list. There are lots of people clamoring for things which require completely re-engineering the hardware (e.g., make it a blu-ray player, make it a DVR), but I’m trying to stay away from those. That’s a total overhaul and I think would make it a fundamentally different product. I also suspect Apple doesn’t want to enter those markets (yet).

The other big thing I’ve read people on the Web asking for is support for other networked services like Netflix/Amazon/Hulu. Frankly, I don’t think Apple has any inclination to do anything that will so obviously cut into the AppleTV as a sales vehicle for the iTunes store. I would personally love Netflix integration, sure, but I won’t hold my breath on that one. That’d be like asking Microsoft to make iPod accessories—it just isn’t going to happen.

I think the changes I’m asking for are much milder but would still dramatically improve the user experience.

New Toy: Nanovision Mimo

So, I just picked up a USB-driven mini-monitor, which can be had direct from Mimo Monitors or from The Gadgeteers. It’s a little 7“ monitor which does 800 x 480, and the cool thing about it is that you don’t need a video card to drive it—it gets both power and video direct over USB, using DisplayLink technology. And, of course, it’s small enough to be portable, so it can be thrown in a suitcase easily and then hooked up to a laptop with no trouble, which is the main thing I bought it for. I really like having a lot of display space and working on a laptop always feels like looking through a keyhole; this should help with that.

So far, it’s very cool. The monitor can be used in either portrait or landscape, and it’s a great compact size for little windows that you need, but don’t really need, and that you don’t want to have covering or underneath a bunch of other things. Chat client windows, browser download windows, tool palettes, etc. The Mac driver installed without a hitch and everything just worked. Even the USB cable is cool; it’s a pass-through cable which will take another USB device so it effectively doesn’t take up a port when plugged in.

So far the only drawback is that 800×480 on a 7” screen means really high pixel density, which means tiny, tiny text. But since I don’t really intend to do any serious reading on it, I’m not too worried.

Not super-cheap, no—the entry-level UM-710 is $130—and of course for that kind of money you can buy a 19“ real monitor. But I can’t put that in my suitcase, and when I’m at home I’d need an additional video card to run it with my already two-monitor desktop (which doesn’t have space for another 22” monitor anyway). So now I’m running three monitors at home, and I’ll be able to run two when I’m on the road.

Definitely a cool new toy.

Kodak Zi6 and Apple TV

So, for xmas this year I acquired a Kodak Zi6, which is a pocket-sized HD camcorder. It seems pretty good overall—certainly more portable and easier to deal with than the old tape-based miniDV camcorder—and it’s trivially easy to get the content off, as it supports a direct USB connection.

The minor complication is that I want to play back the video on my Apple TV. Now, it’s trivial to copy a movie from the Zi6 into iTunes, but these movies don’t show up on the Apple TV. I was puzzled at first, but then I looked carefully at the Apple TV specs: “maximum resolution: 1280 by 720 pixels at 24 fps, 960 by 540 pixels at 30 fps.” Oh. The Zi6 shoots at 1280 x 720, 30 fps. And, the specs say a maximum of 5 Mbps for video, and the Zi6 shoots somewhat higher than that.

What really surprised me is that almost nobody else seems to have this issue, or rather, I’ve seen very little mention of it anywhere and Googling it has turned up nothing. (The only thing I could find was this thread on the Apple forum, and it’s pretty light.)

So, I have two options: scale down to 960 x 540 or drop down to 24 fps. One of the posters in the aforementioned thread says that changing the frame rate is worse; this seems somewhat reasonable. So, the question is, what to use to convert? I can think of a few options:

• iTunes. There’s a “convert to Apple TV” option that can be selected, but this is opaque; I’m not really sure what exactly it does to make it acceptable. Drop frames? Resize? Both? Ugh.

• QuickTime Pro. This can rescale and has the nice option of doing pass-through on the audio. But the video settings are a bit arcane, and this is slow.

• iMovie. This seems a lot like iTunes—maybe even identical. iMovie can slurp in a movie and export to AppleTV, but there’s a lot of compression there, I think. This might be worthwhile with iMovie ‘09 since that can do image stabilization, which is definitely an issue with these teensy camcorders, but I don’t know how good iMovie ‘09 is because it isn’t out yet.

• Handbrake. Handbrake 0.9.3 will take the raw Zi6 file as input, and then one can fold/spindle/mutilate as much as desired. But it doesn’t offer pass-through on the AAC audio, and it doesn’t seem to want to produce 960 x 540, it seems to want 960 x 528 only, which seems a little odd.

So, anyone else out there with an Apple TV and a Zi6 or one of the other pocket-sized HD camcorders, like the Flip Mino HD or the VadoHD or similar? If so, what do you use to convert to Apple TV?

@Gruber: You have an Apple TV and a Zi6, right? What do you use?