Apple customer service.. so good.

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Deleted member 651465

Deleted member 651465

Last night I ordered a Mac Mini, Apple Wireless keyboard, and Mini DisplayPort to DVI adaptor through the HE store...but no mouse.

I was originally going to order a Logitech MX but then thought, this Mac is going to be used under a TV as a dedicated HTPC so would I really want a big mouse? How would I use that on the arm of my chair if I want to browse the net (when not running as a HTPC).

Anyway, I did something I wouldn't normally do. I wanted to add to my order, I wanted to add the standard Apple mouse; the Magic Mouse.

I thought this would be a case of adding an item to the existing order via the "Order status" page at Apple.com/uk/thestore, seeing as it doesn't ship for 3 days. Unfortunately I could not do this online so I had 2 choices.

  1. Purchase the magic mouse on a seperate order and pay for courier shipping (+£10)
  2. Call Apple and try to see if they would add it to my order

So.. I call Apple this morning and the kind American lady says she could not add any items as it's a CTO order and it will be dispatched in China :(

...however, she would place a seperate HE order, upgrade it to courier shipping then refund the shipping.

Can't fault that :cool:
 
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Yeah. That was a pretty appalling experience in a lifetime of good ones..

This being another good one. Oh, and they could have told me to bugger off and took the extra £10 for courier shipping ;)
 
YOUR SUCH A COPYCAT!!!!!!!!1111one

:D:cool:

Good on' ya pal, these Mac Mini's are the future!

I hope you also purchased the new remote? I'm after one for my MM.

I seriously want to upgrade my HDD though, just not happy with a 5,200rpm drive considering how a) cheap b) just as quite as the WD's (and others) 7200rpm 2.5" drives are!

Just need one of them putty knifes or whatever they are to crack it open! :o
 
I believe you are the original copycat, AmTechFox :p

Yeah, purchased the Apple remote.. looking at a Drobo now too. Possibly even the DroboPro.

I'm not gonna bother upgrading the Mini's internal drive. It's coming with a 500 gigger which is plenty enough considering all the media is external and it will sit under the TV (for now.. in the new house it's going to be sat in a 19" rack, piped around the house via HDMI matrix).

I was considering the Mac Mini Server but to be honest I'd have to buy the external superdrive to rip DVDs and it wasn't cost effective.
 
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EVH, don't get a Drobo for a HTPC, they're too loud.

I sent mine back and got a Western Digital MyBook 2TB drive and it's amazingly quiet (running a Mac Mini too).
 
Noise isn't really a concern.

As I said above, it'll be housed in a 42U rack under the stairs in the near future. In fact, the more storage I can cram in to it, the better as I'm looking to rips all my DVDs and Blurays. I've estimated that will take around 5TB when all is said and done :)

I know we've gone off topic here but what is everyone using their Mac Mini's for? There seems to be a surprising number of people using them as HTPCs.
 
A HTPC, naturally. :p

I'm running Plex with all my stuff ripped from DVD (TV Shows, Movies, Stand-up). Although lately I'm just buying Blu-Rays for movies. Perhaps the path from Blu-Ray disc to Blu-Ray rip will be easier in the future but for now it seems too much hassle.

I've got VOBs on there now but the rewinding/fast-fowarding is completely lost in that format on Plex - changing them to an MKV fixes that although I'm not sure how future-proof that format is (incase I switch players) so I'm holding back for now. Plus it's a lot of bloody work.

The Drobo is a good device, a little expensive for what it is in my opinion but the ability to pop a drive in to upgrade the storage is very useful for this type of purpose. Because I prefer my storage locally (physical connection rather than over the network) I found it gave off too much of an offputting hum.
 
The cheek :p;)

Yeah, as I am currently Mac-less (have been since February 2009) I have been trialling methods for backing up my DVDs on my father's MacBook and I certainly prefer to keep them to .VOB files for ease of use and speed (have about 400 DVDs).

I was contemplating a whole disc transcode using Handbrake but my God it takes an age and you inevitably lose visual quality which defeats the purpose of backing up the things. I want to keep the movies as lossless as possible, but don't want to have to navigate the DVD's menu in Plex.

On the Bluray rip scenario.. I won't discuss how it's done but there doesn't seem to be any way around .MKV for the forseeable future as Plex cannot handle the native Bluray file structure (like it can with DVD). Also Windows is required which is another major pain (45 Blurays)

Drobo S just released yesterday. Now with eSATA and 5 drive bays. Tempted....
 
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As someone who had ripped their entire DVD collection under Apple > Universal in Handbrake (for use with Front Row), I would definitely recommend going down the VOB route. The quality difference was definitely worth the effort of doing everything over again.

The VOB route can be very annoying given that you have to pull out the certain sections from the disc but when everything is said and done, it's great to have everything a few clicks away with no menus.

Be wary though that TV Shows need to be a singular file to work on Plex - given that the VOB format creates a new VOB file for every 1024mb, you end up having to join VOBs together. This doesn't have to be done for movies, thankfully.

It's not really that difficult and I use a utility called D-Vision 3 (Mac) to do it, but it's an extra step to be considerate of before launching an attack on your DVD collection.
 
Hmmm.. I assumed you could rip out the individual episodes and put them in a folder structure for Plex to scrape?

E.g. TV Shows > The IT Crowd > Season 1 > S01E01.VOB, S01E02.VOB...

:(
 
I've just had a look at a few Plex threads there regarding the issue. Some as far back as January and August 09 have been requesting the feature you mentioned (in terms of scraping like that) and the devs have said it will come with the 'new library'.

Whether that new library has been released or not, I'm not sure, I'm going to test it out now. Will edit this post letting you know what went happened.

-Edit-

Looks like they still haven't updated it. Just dropped a renamed video_ts folder (S2E01 & S2E01.VOB) into my Flight of the Conchords folder and as soon as you go to play it, you get 'Error! Error While Opening File'.

I assume it must not be that far away though or that difficult to implement, given it's possible with movies.
 
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Sent you a trust message Slogan.

It's possible to get 1 .VOB file per episode, but I obviously cannot link to it here.

Will test the method later and confirm if it works.
 
I've found the only way is to have one VOB per episode. My folder structure sits like this, for example;

- Flight of the Conchords (main folder)
----Season 1 (sub folder)
----Season 2 (sub folder)
-------S2E01 (Season 2 sub folder - usually named video_ts after rip)
------------S2E01.vob (file that plays - episode)
-------S2E02 (Season 2 sub folder)
-------etc...

My S2E01 file there is actually made up of two VOBs (weighing in at 1.07GB and 39mb) joined together, to make one.

If the folder structure is something like this:

- Flight of the Conchords (main folder)
----Season 1 (sub folder)
----Season 2 (sub folder)
-------S2E01 (Season 2 sub folder - usually named video_ts after rip)
------------vts01.vob (files that play - episode pt1)
------------vts02.vob (files that play - episode pt2)
-------S2E02 (Season 2 sub folder)
-------etc...

Then the episode doesn't play because it's not smart enough to make the jump from the vts01.vob to the vts02.vob. It doesn't seem smart enough to actually recognise there are VOBs in there and play even the first one.

If you meant a straight rip into one VOB then that may be useful as it eliminates the need for the join although I imagine one is happening courtesy of the ripper anyway.

Most TV Show episodes I find weigh in under the 1024mb limit anyway so a second VOB is never usually created. But some do require it.
 
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It worked! :D

Ripped each episode of The IT Crowd separately to test if they would work (if ripping 1 VOB file per episode).

Went in after they'd finished ripping, and fudged around with the naming and put them in the following structure..



Loaded up Plex
Added my "TV shows" folder as a source
Set scrape to fetch meta data from TVDB.com
Visited the TV show menu and Viola!



Obviously I've picked to enter the Season 1 sub menu but you can see the episodes are listed correctly :)

Not sure what I'll do if I encounter a VOB split, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.
 
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Very nice. Much tidier than mine. I've included everything in the rip (.ifo etc) per episode in case it might be needed in the future.

6h3nk7.jpg


Might be tempted to make it look tidier now though. :p

You will definitely encounter the split VOB but it's no biggy with the app I mentioned.
 
Ahhh that's why, you're using a full disk extraction.. not a "title only" one.

I get no other files when ripping.. just a folder with a load of .VOBs.
 
That makes sense. :) I had a look at the title set extraction but I could only get the bulk of the episodes on DVD altogether (which was like 6odd GB).

But I've found the one you use now (title - chapter and title 01 etc I'm assuming). That is definitely a tidier extraction to be honest. It actually does the join as well so thanks for that tip. :cool:

I started using individual vobs for the PS3 but it had a nightmare with my Canadian DVDs - had them in some bizarre ratios on screen. It also handled The Office (UK) pretty horribly. I therefore had to use the IFOs to try and feed that information into the VOB files but it still turned out to be pretty poor.

Thankfully with the Mac Mini things are back to their normal way so I may be able to get rid of all those surplus files.
 
EVH said:
I know we've gone off topic here but what is everyone using their Mac Mini's for? There seems to be a surprising number of people using them as HTPCs.
Click to expand...

I think Minis only really have three sensible uses.

1) HTPC
2) Second machine/taster OSX machine for someone who already has all the gubbins
3) Home server

Mine's an HTPC
 
Just back to update you, Dan. I started to use that chapter extraction method and I am noticing that the quality of the rip is actually lower than that of main feature.

Perhaps quality isn't the right word but chapter extraction seems to be introducing problems into the finished VOB file. For example:

Main Feature:
wgueqt.png


Chapter Extraction:
bi2h43.png


I since tried Main Feature again and that visual issue isn't there. This has been the case with a few different shows (and obviously different discs).

Just might be worth bearing in mind if you are close to becoming rip-happy with your collection.
 
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