Day: January 2, 2006

DVD Playback weirdness on the Mac

lpaulriddle

Well, I burned my second DVD today. I used the same parameters as my first disc, and the burn process was smooth (one thing I forgot.. in iMovie, when you go to auto-create an iDVD project, there’s no way to export only a subset of the actual content in iMovie. You have to physically delete the stuff you don’t want, then export. Bit of a pain, but shouldn’t be an issue for me any more beyond these first two discs — I’ll just do one iMovie per disc from now on).

After the burn, I popped the disc in the Mac and played some of it back. In one spot, it locked up. The app locked up and the drive seemed to be stuck seeking back and forth. I ended up powering down and rebooting. Tried again, froze up in the same spot. Bad media, maybe? Then, I took the disc home and tried it in my standalone DVD player. The same passage that froze the Mac, played fine in the standalone player. I haven’t viewed the rest of the disc yet, but I’ll do that tonight and see how it fares.

Seems a little odd that the Mac SuperDrive would have problems playing back media burned on the same drive.. Will have to check this out further.

Update 1/5/06: The entire disc played fine on my standalone Sony DVD Player. Not quite sure why the SuperDrive is having problems with it.

Followup: I just burned the exact same movie to another DVD. Playing it back in the Mac now. So far, no lockups (in particular, it did not lock up at the same spot it did with the other disc). I guess the SuperDrive must just not like the other disc. Odd, because the discs are the same brand (Fujifilm) and came from the same pack-of-50. Who knows?

I did learn something about iDVD today… when you go to burn a project for a second time, it re-encodes the menus and audio, but reuses the encoded video from the first run. This is nice, because it makes subsequent burns go much faster. I was wondering about this at first, because after the initial encoding it leaves the encoded MPEGs (4+ gigs worth) in the project directory. When I initially went to re-burn, and it started re-encoding the menus, I was wondering if it was going to go through the whole 2+ hour encoding process again, and if so, why did it bother saving all that encoded data from the previous run? Well, now I understand.

This also means that if I want to re-burn the discs at a later date, I should be able to safely delete the (huge) captured video data and just save the iDVD project.

Sync stuff working great

lpaulriddle

Today I gave the Mark/Space iCal sync conduit a really good workout, and it came through it without missing a beat. First off, I added the LOCATION field to the Oracle Calendar download. I’m not sure why I wasn’t pulling it down originally, I guess it was just an oversight. As a result, I now have location data for my meetings, and a lot of existing entries now have the additional field.

Next, I created a new calendar that has a bunch of repeating events (various birthdays and anniversary dates). Then I deleted all of the birthdays and anniversarys that I had stored in Oracle Calendar. Finally, I added a couple new events via the Palm.

In short: Add a new iCalendar field to several dozen existing events, add a new calendar consisting of repeating events, delete a dozen or so existing events, and copy a couple events from the Palm to the Mac, all in one sync. The Mark/Space conduit handled everything without a hitch. The deletions propagated, the new fields were added, and the new calendar was added with the proper recurrence rules.

This is really the way things are supposed to work when you pay for software: It should work, work well, and work reliably, and if it doesn’t, the company should stand behind the product and either make it work, or refund your money. So far, it looks like the $40 for Missing Sync was money well spent.

This also makes me curious about event recurrences. The iCalendar spec allows for some pretty fancy recurrence rules. I’m not sure if the Palm Date Book allows that much flexibility. If I were to define a really fancy recurrence (say, an event that happens the second tuesday of every month except March, or whatever) I wonder how that would propagate to the Palm. One of these days I’ll have to try it.

Incidentally, I created my birthday/anniversary calendar from scratch with a text editor. Then I copied it to my web server and subscribed to it with iCal. It worked fine, and seems to be a good way to handle relatively static calendars like this. The only requirement is that each event needs to have a unique UID. I used UIDs of the form:

YYYYMMDDTHHMMSSZ-#@concerto.ucs.umbc.edu

Where # is an ascending number. For the date stamp, I used the approximate time that I created the file.