Its been too long. So how about a Tip, for us PC guys.
After a bit of an absence, I’m back. The last month has been busy for me, but that’s the past time to move forward and share some Apple TV love.
A quick tip today for all of us evil PC users. As we all know one of the best parts of Apple TV is we can stream content to it. I have a 500gb external drive hooked to my PC, unhacked Apple TV, and a Apple airport extreme base station for wireless goodness. Like most of us I use Handbrake to convert my videos to the proper format, but unlike on the Mac side I can’t just pop in my DVD and let it run. Unfortunately some mojo must be done first to overcome the encryption, and while there are programs that can do it for me most take some time to give me a “clean” file. That was the case before I found DVD43, this little plug-in un-encrypts in real time. A smiley face in the system tray is yellow when not being used, pop in a DVD after about 30sec it turns green and you’re ready to go. Go into Handbrake, select the Video_TS folder, and convert away. This is extra handy when converting a TV show, because I can then select each episode individually, que them, and convert a whole disc at one time. DVD43 has cut my conversion time down by about 25%, and has resulted in less stack dump errors.
As a side note, after the last update I can’t seem to get my Apple TV to go into sleep mode. Anyone else having this issue?
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Comments
I’ve personally used DVD Decrypter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_Decrypter) to rip my DVDs to the hard drive as ISO images first, then mounting them using a drive emulator called Daemon Tools (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_tools) to appear as an actual DVD disk to the system before using handbrake or other encoding software.
The advantage of this method is that 1) DVD Decrypter has already stripped off the encryption, 2) I can leave the images on the drive for later use, 3) Daemon Tools can mount multiple images, which is great for TV Shows on DVD and 4) the encoding process seems faster, as it’s taking it from the HDD rather than spinning up the DVD.
The main drawback I’ve found is that the versions of handbrake I’ve used to date have not had an “encue” option, so I have only been able to encode one disk at a time with that software. Other encoders are available that do have queueing options, making it easier to encode those TV Shows.
However, I just got a Mac Mini from eBay, so my whole process will change in the next week 
“The main drawback I’ve found is that the versions of handbrake I’ve used to date have not had an “encue” option, so I have only been able to encode one disk at a time with that software.”
I don’t know what version of Handbrake you are using, but as far as I know, Handbrake has always had an “Add to Queue” button.
I, myself, use DVD Decrypter or DVDFAB HD Decrypter on Windows, or Mac The Ripper on OS X (when it works). If only the AppleTV natively supported playback of Video_TS files, I would be a happy camper.
you have to be at the main menu and hold the play/pause button for around 6 seconds. This does the job. Or you can just go to the “sleep command” on the menu list. I don’t use this command, so I don’t know exactly where it is. Play/pause does it for me (it’s critical that you are on the main Apple TV menu, otherwise, it won’t work).
Moe is right, you have to be in the main menu in order to be able to press play/pause and put it in sleep mode.
So, PC users are evil now? I think Apple is turning into the devil with their childish TV ads.
i have apple tv and am using a pc windows xp- the problem i am having is that when i convert an AVI to MP4 using “videora apple tv converter” it strips the subtitles off the file which is a problem when watching foreign movies. i cant seem to find any controls that will allow me to keep the subtitles. i know they are on the AVI because i test watched to see that they were there. any suggestions or is there another application for this conversion. it seems handbrake is for dvd’s only….. hanks bob
Since the last update, I’ve had to go to the Settings menu and hit the sleep command. Holding down the Play/Pause button doesn’t seem to work anymore.