Thoughts and Ramblings

General things I find of interest.

Java in Xcode

Well, I have had reason with my research to do some Java development. No biggie, Xcode supports Java too, right? Wrong! well mostly. This all came to a head when I downloaded the latest beta of Xcode (which I am only using because these fix a serious performance issue with the non-beta releases). After the last download, I found 4 distinct bugs in 2 hours, and I’m still finding them. Two of these are Java related, so I gave up, and looked for alternatives.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Saturday, April 26, 2008

Limited Real AC3 Passthrough

Well, I got to fiddling around with the existing passthrough on the AppleTV. I found where it works, and where it doesn’t. AC3 passthrough does work in .mov files with 48KHz files, of any bit rate. I did this with importing a .ac3 file into .mov, and adding a video track (ATV doesn’t like playing audio only files). I still need to test 44.1KHz, and 32KHz, but they are a bit harder to find.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Wednesday, April 23, 2008

The Correct Way to Enable AC3 Passthrough with Quicktime

I have seen a few people post methods about enabling AC3 passthrough, and many of them are overly complicated or in some cases even wrong. This also serves as the first place to describe how to enable DTS passthrough. Since I designed the code that actually does this, I’ll list the steps here: Note: This does not work with all receivers. If these instructions fail for you, most likely your receiver will not work with this.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Saturday, February 9, 2008

Perian 1.1 Released

For those who don’t know yet, Perian version 1.1 has been released. This one was a long time coming, including large sections of code which were written for 1.1 before 1.0 was even released. Now it is time to sit back, relax, and get some sleep before the bug reports start piling in.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Thursday, February 7, 2008

The Road to Perian 1.1

Well, it started before 1.0 was even released. We started looking at methods to optimize the routines within Perian to run even faster. The road has been a bit of a long one. Now, we are in a private beta. The beta has been opened to those who have donated to the project as well as personal friends of developers. We often get the question as to why we limited the beta to donators.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Thursday, January 31, 2008