Creating an iTunes Dropbox on a Mac

As I’ve mentioned a couple of times before, one of my projects right now is ripping all the DVDs I own so that I can watch them on my AppleTV (or any AppleTV in the house). Well, one of the problems I’ve run into a couple of times is longer movies that are distributed on two discs. This is usually movies like the Lord of the Rings Extended Edition or The Ten Commandments. Really, they’re one movie, but are distributed as two separate movies because of the restrictions of physical media. Well, digital media imposes no such restrictions on us, so why have two separate movies listed on the AppleTV? So after much trial and error, I finally discovered a way to get everything play nicely together. Unfortunately, this is not an easy problem to solve and even involved me writing a small script that could merge chapter files together because every single method I could find would eliminate chapter markers. So here, in abbreviated form, is the process for merging m4v files together and preserving chapter markers. Note: This tutorial assumes some level of technical proficiency. This is not a point-and-click process (yet :P) and requires the use of multiple tools and the shell. Tools you’ll need: Handbrake or whatever tool you’re using for ripping your legally obtained DVDs. MetaX and/or iDentify Subler remux Quicktime, which is now built into Mac OS X. chaptermerge, a script I wrote that merges chapter files together. The proces: Rip both movies from their individual DVDs using Handbrake or whatever other tool you’re using. Be sure that you’re adding chapter markers. Load each movie into MetaX and download the chapter names. That’s really the only thing you need to add to the file. Save the files with chapter names. Load each movie into Subler and extract the chapter files. To do this, select the chapter track and select File -> Export. Now, open the first movie in Quicktime. Drag the second movie on top of the first one. Quicktime will add the two together. Save the movie for use on an AppleTV. Get a beer or 6, because this takes awhile. While the movie is saving, use chaptermerge to merge the chapter files together. See the docs on how it works. Once the file has finished saving as a Quicktime MOV (it’s actually still h.264 inside the file), fire up remux and convert the merged file back into an m4v. Drag the file into remux, set the output to m4v, and save. Should be pretty quick - a matter of minutes. Load the merged file back into Subler and add the merged chapter track. Drag the chapter file into the Subler window. Save the file. Load the merged file into a tool such as iDentify or MetaX and add the remaining metadata. That’s it! You now have a merged file with both parts of the movie, accurate chapter markers and full metadata, ready to be copied to iTunes and viewed on your AppleTV.

I have more than 20 various IM accounts set up in Adium on my Macintosh. But during the day, the only one I really want to be active is the one I use for work. The remainder, I want to leave logged in, but showing as away with a warning not to bother me unless it is important. But half the time I forget to set all those accounts as away, or I forget to set the work one as available, or some other issue that would arise out of a manual process interferes and too often it doesn’t get done. Enter AppleScript. I whipped up a surprisingly easy AppleScript to do just this: tell application "Adium" go away with message "Working. Please do not disturb unless necessary." go available first account end tell Because the work account is the first one, this makes it easy. It just sets all accounts as away and then sets the work one available. I shove this in my MarcoPolo ruleset to fire when I arrive at the office. The script to reverse the change when I leave is even easier. This is fired when I leave the office: tell application "Adium" to go available

Every day, when I get to work, there are a number of tasks I do. Among the first thing I do is connect to a number of servers via SSH. These servers - our development testing, staging, and code rolling servers - are part of the development infrastructure at dealnews. So every morning, I launch iTerm, make three sessions and log into the various servers. Over time, I’ve written some helper scripts to make this faster. My “go” script contains the SSH commands (using keys) to log into these machines so that all I have to do is type “go rpeck” to log into my development machine. Still, this morning, the lunacy of every morning having to open iTerm and execute three commands, every day without fail, struck me. Why not script this so that, when my laptop is plugged into the network at work, it automatically launches iTerm and logs me into the relevant services? Fortunately, iTerm exposes a pretty complete set of AppleScript commands, so with a little work, I was able to come up with this: tell application "System Events" set appWasRunning to exists (processes where name is "iTerm") tell application "iTerm" activate if not appWasRunning then terminate the first session of the first terminal end if set myterm to (make new terminal) tell myterm set dev_session to (make new session at the end of sessions) tell dev_session exec command "/Volumes/iDisk/bin/go rpeck" end tell set staging_session to (make new session at the end of sessions) tell staging_session exec command "/Volumes/iDisk/bin/go staging2" end tell set nfs_session to (make new session at the end of sessions) tell nfs_session exec command "/Volumes/iDisk/bin/go nfs" end tell select dev_session end tell end tell end tell What this little script does is, when launched, checks to see if an instance of iTerm is already running. If it is, it just creates a new window, otherwise creates the first window, then connects to the relevant services using my “go” script (which is synchronized across all my Macs by MobileMe). Then, with it saved, I wrap it in a shell script: #!/bin/bash /usr/bin/osascript /Users/peckrob/Scripts/launch-iterm.scpt And launch it with MarcoPolo using my “Work” rule that is executed when my computer arrives at Work. Works great!