PUBLIC MARKS from sbrothier with tags tv & mac

One delicious anecdote from the recent biography Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson, involved the Apple founder’s decorating problem: It took the Jobs family eight years to buy a sofa. “We spent a lot of time asking ourselves, What is the purpose of a sofa?” Jobs’ wife told the biographer. To Jobs, the choice about which sofa to buy and where to place it in the home could not be made without a full understanding of exactly what role the object should play in their lives.

You don’t have to be a movie buff to appreciate a good foreign film, but unless you know the language, you will need to watch with subtitles. Adding them to your movies, TV shows and video files can be fairly easy, and you have a few options to do so. The file format of the video usually doesn’t matter when it comes to adding subtitles, but naturally, playback is another story depending on how and where you want to watch it. If you’ve got a film that doesn’t have any subtitles at all, you can usually find them at websites like MovieSubtitles.org and AllSubs.org or by simply checking through a search engine. Subtitle file formats are typically found in .srt, .sub, .ssa, .ass and MicroDVD, and all of them should work with the options that I’ll outline here.

One of the very best reasons to hack your Apple TV was to get more storage. With 2.0 and iTunes 7.6.1 onwards you get much better sync / stream options. The ATV used to distinguish between "Shared" iTunes libaries, from which you could stream content and that which was synced. Now, you can select what to sync and what to stream from a library and as long as the iTunes Mac/PC is on, all the content is available seamlessly - whether local to the ATV or not.

Sapphire Browser is a plug-in designed to take all the hassle out of managing media collections connected to your AppleTV. Sapphire has the ability to identify TV Shows and Movies simply by looking at the filename. Once identified, Sapphire will download show/movie information and cover art (from TVRage / IMDB / IMPAwards ) turning your stale file list into something worth looking at. More detailed information can be found in the Screenshots section and under Sapphire Info (on the Right —>).

Lostify is a metadata tagger for MP4 videos. It runs on Mac OS X, and the tags it produces aim to be compatible with iTunes, the iPod, iPhone, Front Row and Apple TV. This means that after you tag a video using Lostify, it will show up in iTunes, iPod etc. appropriately as a TV Show, Music Video, etc., with all the episode information, season information, etc. intact.