Came across this open source free-ware media player that is out there for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. It can be skinned, plays just about anything and its called UMPlayer.

UMPlayer comes packed with dozens of advanced features, such as skinnable interface, built-in subtitles search, audio / subtitles sync, enhanced filter rendering and YouTube™ player / recorder, yet has a simple and intuitive user interface that was designed for ease of use.

With over 270 built-in Audio and Video codecs UMPlayer can handle nearly all media formats, including AAC, AC3, ASF, AVI, DIVX, FLV, H.263, Matroska, MOV, MP3, MP4, MPEG, OGG, QT, RealMedia, VOB, Vorbis, WAV, WMA, WMV, XVID and many more.

The age old argument that has been going around since the dawn of time, which is best – the apple or the PC and in this sense we mean either a computer running Windows or it could be Linux of course. For the Tech savvy end user, building your own machine can be cheaper, much more powerful and more upgradable than the Mac range of computers. On the other hand we have a beautiful all-in-one that is the iMac and nothing can beat the one plug professional looking box which also happens to have the 27″ screen of course. I wanted to use this post not to go through the age old arguments but to ask the question of “why should I spend all that money and buy an iMac”

The iMac is very expensive

If you take a look at the 27″ iMac on the apple store, the price is mind blowing, if you were to take that same money that it costs to buy just the i5 model for example – you could build or buy one hell of a windows box out of that money that would have the Core i7, more storage, much better graphics card and so forth. What most people do not take into account though is the 27″ screen and if we wanted the same screen for the Windows box, we need to spend at least £650 on the Dell Model.

Now that have removed £650 from the £1400 price tag – we only have left £750 to play with, maybe not such a mega amazing machine now right? The whole point of the iMac anyhow is that it is a machine that has everything ‘most’ people need with one plug, boots very fast indeed and very easy to add and remove software and generally does not slow down as fast as say Windows does.

Resell value

Like a good car, you can sell the thing and get a good price back, if you were to take let us say a Acer Desktop, you will be lucky if you get that much at all for 2009 model of the computer. I want to add that you can buy for example Apple Care at any point in your first year, right up to the point of the last day and get the extended cover, normally you only get sold the cover when you are buying something in the store and most of the time the cover they sell if not of any use.

Anything Apple can do, windows can do just as well

I have been through most windows operating systems, from DOS to Windows 3.11 and all the way up to Windows 7. I have used and worked with most Linux installs in my time and I have only ever worked on Mac OS X but not the versions before it. I can tell you that any of the operating systems out today can do whatever it is you ask of it, the only difference is how easy, how much and how much effort you are going to put in to find the required software.

If we were to talk about Video editing (for the normal people that is), iMovie is very easy to produce a good looking video, very easy to get the exact bit you needed on the time line and it seems fast enough to output the end video. Movie Maker on the PC is not as good and missing a lot (in my eyes) and if you step up to Sony Vegas, not only does it cost a lot of money but the interface is not as easy to work with but you can do a lot more than say iMovie – it’s all relative.

Boot times

My job is to do IT Support and I have seen a lot of windows boxes that take so long to boot and be ready that you can go and make a coffee while it starts. Even a Core i7 with 9 GIG ram can still take some time to boot and even though the desktop comes up, it is still not useable at that point in time. Mac OSX (even on a hackintosh) is very fast to boot which means I can power the computer on, check my various things and power down.

Multiple screens and other goodies

In OSX we had spaces which is now called Mission Control and this lets you quickly jump from space to space. Linux has had this for areas also with the cube and such and also why I like using Linux sometimes. I can set my programs to start on whatever screen and when the computer starts up, I have all the programs to hand without my screen been cluttered with programs.

Bottom Line

I am not here to convince you all that you should hit the apple store and get buying a new computer but you do good a decent machine for the price especially as I did and buy a decent refurbished machine. If you are a hardcore gamer then whilst most games run fine, it will never compete with the latest and the greatest of the pc world. Maybe give a virtual mac a try or hackinitosh your current machine to see if OSX offers anything you may like.

I had a spare USB Drive made by iOmega and is a 500GIG Dive and if I remember correctly it is a IDE type drive inside not SATA.  The goal was to have this drive plugged into the imac and use it as a time machine backup drive. I started time machine running but after a few minutes the drive went from the desktop and time machine complained it had no drive to back up to. The only way to get the drive back was to power it off and on. This left me puzzled, so I turned to the PC next to my iMac to do some serious testing.

Will the drive fail on Windows?

It crossed my mind that the drive was getting hot after constant use and failed, to make sure this was the case I plugged it into a computer running Windows 7 and the goal her was to torture test the drive and see if it either kept working or indeed failed.

I formatted the Drive and made sure it was a full not a quick format – this took a long while (as you would expect) and at no point during this test did the drive stop working. I then moved onto copying as close to 500GIG and once again this took a long while but passed with flying colours. It was obvious from these test so far then that the drive was as much working as humanly possible right.

Testing once again on OSX Lion

Now that we know it is working, let us move it back to the iMac, started copying some files and after 10 minutes (it’s a random time) the light goes out, the drive is no longer there and I did try all the USB Ports on the back of the computer.

I shall do more testing with other drives (I have a 320GIG handy) to see if this a LION issue.

Of all the companies that are out there, the one that I thought could get it right with a major operating system rollout would be apple. They stated that if you bought a computer from apple from the 25th June onwards, you are entitled to OSX Lion when it came out free of charge. The problem is, the servers that handle verifying if your are entitled to acode or not is having trouble matching serial numbers against inventory. When I headed to the page I entered my infomation in there only for it to tell me:

Sorry, we can’t find the serial number you provided. Please recheck your serial number and enter it again.

Apple Support – second to none

I Always assumed that apple support were great, I called them up and then went through the issue, tried it and explained to me that in fact the servers were overloaded and I was to try again either later on that day or in fact the next day. As this was the first time I had called and could beileve maybe that was the case, I ended the call but not before the guy was trying to sell me Apple care of course.

I searched around the web and spotted something, every time they have a major upgrade such as Leopard, Snow Leopard and iLife, people struggle to get verified on the apple site.  I left this until the next morning, surely this would be fixed by then right?

The day after the day before

I tried at 8am UK time, still the same, I called Apple support and got the same old story, servers are too busy. I took his name this time, he was called Kiren. He told me to try later, it should work by then – I hung up. I tried many times whilst at work and finally when I got home, I had one last go before calling Apple. No Surprise then that the page did not work and I called once again apple support, this took 10 minutes to get a person so they must be getting a lot of issues same as mine.

We went through the normal blurb and he tried to get his supervisor to maybe get an answer but he failed at that and asked if I wanted to wait for this guy or just leave it until one day it might work? The other suggestion he gave me was why do I not just go out and buy it if I wanted it that badly, after all it was only £22 or something.

I have a better idea on how to get Lion and no need for serial numbers – you failed Apple.

Until recently, I had not really looked into buying any sort of apple computer mainly because my current system does everything I want and I do have the ability to run OSX on either a hackintosh if needed or a Virtual machine. I had passed a 21.5″ iMac in the local ‘Comet’ Store and it looked very clear and glossy and it got me thinking. I looked on Apple refurbished site and saw various models of the 27″ with £200 to £400 off. At this point we start to drop into the world of which version is worth the money, if any.

The various years and models.

While they all feature the amazing 27″ Screen, it seems that there is a few different configurations to choose from depending on what year it was made. We start with the CPU, we have the Core 2 Duo and we can agree I want to write these off as no use to me, this is old technology. We have the Core i3, Core i5 and Core i7 and apple mix it up somewhat with Dual Core Core i5 and Quad Core i5.

Graphics cards seems to be ATI 4670 (which I currently use in my Dell machine), ATI 4850, the ATI 5670 and 5770 I think. Of course the latest and greatest is always better of which your not going to get with the iMac but the 5770 I am sure beats my 4670 for example and even the 4850 is a good card.

Why the iMac?

Looking at the Mac Range, I have no interest in spending £600+ on a very underpowered mac mini (in my own view anyhow) and I have no need for a Laptop, this leave either the iMac or the Mac pro. While the Mac Pro is very powerful, it would be a waste of power with the 8 core model and I know that the 12 Core is just too much for me to spend on a computer. The iMac by chance though comes with a very nice 27″ Screen, I love real estate and this can deliver. My thought was simple enough, the Core i7 can provide enough power – if I can find a cheap one of them, that would be the model of choice.

What about the i3 or the i5 ?

The Core i3 is a dual core CPU (direct replacement for the Core 2 Duo) that has hyper threading to simulate 4 cores. The Core i5 is a Quad core unit, no hyper threading to my knowledge (I could be wrong) and finally the Core i7 has 4 real and 4 virtual core plus can over clock on the fly.  

The Future of the iMac

I read that the iMac is due a refresh, I do not want to buy a 2009 model only to find a month later they bring out the Sandy Bridge version for the same price with thunderbolt and a better graphics card. For now, I shall leave well alone, I have no great need for a mac as of now, it would just be nice to get rid of all my surplus computer and monitors and be left with the Dell XPS 435, Work Laptop and a 27″ iMac.

It is quite hard to turn your average PC into something that runs Mac OS X and normally requires you have the right motherboard and other parts to make it even get to the install stage. What if you could make a USB stick that boots a safe version of OS X (no graphic or sound drivers) and generally works without wiping your present drives – great right? I shall document what I have done so far and what the outcome was in regards this amazing program – iPortable.

What is it?

The first thing you need to do is get your hands on it – if you search for iPortable, you should find a torrent – now you need a few things to get this to even work. The first thing you need is at least an 8 GIG memory stick, I have also used in the past a USB External Hard drive but that will be slower (and its not that quick as it is). The other requirement is some sort of working Mac, be it a real one, a Hackintosh or a Virtual machine. As it happens I had my Athlon machine running 10.5.8 with the slight annoyance that you must have the USB already plugged in for the machine to even see it.

Making the Bootable Stick

The guide (included) explains how you mount the file on the mac, format the memory stick and then use included CloneTools to write the image onto the memory stick. I had to use the boot fixer before my computer would allow this device to boot. Once this process is over, you now have a memory stick that as long as your computer can handle booting from USB sticks (Mine showed up as blank in the list which fooled me for a while) – you can boot into Mac OS X 10.6.2.

A Working Mac – just slowly

It takes a LONG time for the USB to boot and eventually get into OS X, just be patient at this part. Of course you do not want to be booking and running from USB for a main OS, this is now the process to get a harddrive ready for the same image. I used the same process as making the USB but instead picked the 250GIG harddrive I had as slave, this meant that when I started the computer I either had Windows 7 or if I pressed F8 and choose the secondary drive – OS X 10.6

Getting the parts working

As with any Hackintosh, getting the right files to make the things work is a fine art, I had a Creative Labs sound card fitted and a ATI 3650 Graphics card. The sound worked fine, I searched the forums and found the correct driver, ran it and rebooted and we had sound. Graphics was a different story though, I picked I think the wrong one and while the machine was working, I was stuck with a blue screen (the mouse moved though).

Worse then any of the above though, evn though the Hard drive was 250GIG, as far as the OS was concerned, it only had 64meg free. It was at this stage I had to so some googling to get the answer I needed. When I was booting from the memory stick, it picked the first Mac OS it had found and in this case was on the HD. I had to tell it at the boot prompt rd=disk2s1 and now we were from the memory stick. The reason for this – to run the hard drive repair tools on a drive that is not in use.

In Diskwarrior (Supplied) so far it has found 1929 Overlapping files and is still going. I am hoping by the end of this process I have the full free disk space otherwise its pointless.

Is it worth the effort?

I do this as something to do, If I wanted a mac that badly I would just go and buy one. It is good to see people faces when I boot a work computer with Mac OS X even if it is slow from USB. It is safe as you can try it out and it gives you a bootable OS for another Hackintosh should you need to sort it out.

It’s officially official: Valve will bring its Steam online distribution service and titles from its massive library of hit games to the Mac this April, the company confirmed Monday.

The successful content-delivery service will bring Valve titles like Left 4 Dead and the upcoming Portal 2, as well as games from other publishers, to Apple computers for the first time.

The move was telegraphed last week in a series of teaser posters that mashed characters from Valve games into retro Apple ads. Dan Connors, CEO of Telltale Games, called Apple and Steam a natural fit.

“If there’s anything like iTunes on the PC right now for games, it’s Steam,” Connors said. “So you’ve got two great leaders in digital distribution coming together.”

Steam is the pre-eminent digital distribution platform for PCs. With more than 1,000 games and 25 million user accounts, Steam is by one estimate responsible for more than 70 percent of digital game purchases. Bringing the service to Macs means wider selection, quicker updates and more episodic content for Apple’s traditionally game-deprived computers.

Valve wants to position its games not as static products but as part of an ongoing, constantly updated, ubiquitous service, company co-founder Gabe Newell told Wired.com in advance of Monday’s announcement.

“The traditional model has always been that you have these really extended development times … where you do nothing for customers for several years and then you try to drive everybody into the theaters or into the stores on a given date,” Newell said. “It makes it hard to steer your decisions based on customer feedback, and customers don’t particularly like that. They would like to have the experience of being part of an entertainment community where they’re getting something on a daily or more frequent basis.

“The Mac represents a great opportunity to deliver these things.”

Bringing Steam to Mac will give gamers several cross-platform benefits, Newell said.

• If players already own the PC versions of Valve games, they’ll get Mac versions at no extra charge through a feature called Steam Play.
• By using the Steam Cloud feature that the company introduced in 2008, players can save in-progress games online, then call up those saved games no matter which version they’re playing. If you’re playing Half-Life 2 on your home PC but then head out on the road with your MacBook, you can continue your game-in-progress.

“We looked at a variety of methods to get our games onto the Mac and in the end decided to go with native versions rather than emulation,” said John Cook, director of Steam development, in Monday’s press release.

“We are treating the Mac as a tier-1 platform so all of our future games will release simultaneously on Windows, Mac and the Xbox 360,” Cook said. “Updates for the Mac will be available simultaneously with the Windows updates. Furthermore, Mac and Windows players will be part of the same multiplayer universe, sharing servers, lobbies and so forth. We fully support a heterogeneous mix of servers and clients. The first Mac Steam client will be the new generation currently in beta testing on Windows.”

Portal 2 will be Valve’s first simultaneous release for Mac and Windows, the company said.

“Checking in code produces a PC build and Mac build at the same time, automatically, so the two platforms are perfectly in lock-step,” said Josh Weier, said Portal 2 project lead in the press release. “We’re always playing a native version on the Mac right alongside the PC. This makes it very easy for us and for anyone using Source to do game development for the Mac.”

Bringing Valve’s gaming engine Source, and the company’s Steamworks development and publishing suite, to the Mac will make it easier for developers to bring games to OS X.

“Steamworks for the Mac supports all of the Steamworks APIs,” said Jason Holtman, Valve’s director of business development, in the press release. “We expect most developers and publishers to take advantage of Steam Play.”

Easy updates

Steam lets the company take full advantage of the freedom that the PC and Mac platforms give it to constantly update and tweak its games. For instance, the developer has updated its 2007 game Team Fortress 2 more than 100 times, Newell said.

This wouldn’t be possible on a closed system like Microsoft’s Xbox Live, he said: “Microsoft’s QA fees … would be several hundred thousand dollars to do the updates that we did to Team Fortress 2. And that ignores the fact that the cycle on these closed platforms would have taken years to get all these updates through.”

Most recently, Valve leveraged its ability to push updates through Steam and engage its fan base by dropping hints into its 2007 cult hit Portal about the game’s upcoming sequel, letting the fans be an active part of the game’s announcement.

“We want to bring content creators and consumers closer together to minimize the latency between what somebody on the team does versus a fan’s ability to participate in that experience, not put more barriers between them,” Newell said.

Valve isn’t the only PC developer with a strong, engaged fan base looking to Mac. Telltale Games, creator of the episodic Sam and Max games, announced last month that it would be moving to Mac, even inviting fans to vote on which of its games should be ported over first.

While Telltale has not confirmed any of its games will be on the Mac version of Steam, Connors called getting his companies titles on Valve’s digital-distribution platform “a no-brainer.”

“We have games that run on the Mac and we have games that run on Steam, so our goal is to be there,” Connors said. “We think they’re going to do a great job with getting the Steam client over there and we want to continue to be a part of it.”

Asked to name other developers that we’d see on Steam, Valve’s Newell demurred. But Steam’s popularity means that as Valve goes, so go other gamemakers. Steam on Mac means many more games on Mac.

“(Mac) has all of the right pieces, and we know other developers see that as well,” Newell said.

So you have a nice shiny new Mac and you want to take Audio from various sources to be mixed for let us say a live stream. Maybe you need a Skype conversation broadcast (both sides), play some music from iTunes and even get some video from youtube with the Audio coming through as well? You may notice a sheer lack of “StereoMix” on OS X but never fear, there is a solution for you.

SoundFlower

The good news is there is a FREE program which gives you a dual channel and a 16 channel virtual audio device for OSX, this goes by the name of SoundFlower, once installed, you now have two extra devices on both output and input by the name of SoundFlower (2ch) and SoundFlower (16ch) – for most people the SoundFlower (2ch) should be fine.

Line-in

Rouge Amoeba give out a free Utility by the name of LineIn, this basically allows you take one input (say a microphone) and pipe it out to another output (say Soundflower).

 To use this for say Skype:

Audio Output – SoundFlower (2ch)

Audio Input – SoundFlower (2ch)

On Line in – select as my picture above or simple Microphone your using to SoundFlower (2ch) and now on the stream select SoundFlower (2ch) as the Input, the people will hear both side of Skype due to the fact the Mac alloows most programs to choose input and outputs. You need SoundFlowerBed (comes with SoundFlower) to pass SoundFlower (2ch) output to Speakers so you can hear the Skype caller.

Audio Hijack

This is not a Free Program but its by the same people who make LineIn – Rogue Amoeba and this gives you the extra controls over what is been diverted to SoundFlower.

Here is the screen were we can select a Microphone and piping it through to SoundFlower, once you click Hijack – all sound coming through the Mic will be diverted to SoundFlower, just like Line-in (same as).

If you notice, on the left is a list of programs, this grows as you have various programs open – anything that can generate Audio will be listed. In this example we shall choose iTunes but any work. Select the Effects Tab (far right) and right click on one of the empty Effect Tabs (Click here to insert effect).

  You need to pick 4FX Effect and branch out to pick Auxiliary Device output. What this does is bring up a box while looks a little like LineIn, you can pick the output device here.

Your good to go.

Once you have set up the Aux device as above, this is a one time operation and your good to go each time you start the program. If you capture Skype, you do not need to capture the Microphone as both side will be broadcast. You can Mute or un-hijack to stop the program from going out on the stream.   

Remember how you watched, fascinated, when King Kong climb the Empire State building? When Luke Skywalker rode the ice beasts? When Wallace and Gromit hunted down the Were-Rabbit? For centuries now, stop motion animation has made the fantasies of film makers come true.

It’s simple to use, it’s deceptively powerful, and it’s tremendous fun. It brings purpose to the digital lifestyle, making it more than a marketing phrase for Apple.

Kirk Hiner

This application is for Mac OSX and allows you to record one frame at a time (12 frames = 1 Second of Animation) to make a movie such as Wallace and Gromit type – but remember that it will be very time consuming process to make a movie of any length.

I am running Mac OS X 10.5. 6 and through the long history of the updates from 10.5.0 till now there has been a problem with seeing Windows Shares on the Mac Finder. The way it should work is simple enough, you open a window showing your drives and listed right there would be all the shares it has found but the list remain empty meaning you have to do this the hard way.

If you use “connect to server” and put in there smb://<name of machine> then indeed it brings up that machine, the icon that comes up for the computer though is the lighter of the two – not the dark blue – a picture will explain better:

I noticed for example that Windows XP machines came up no problem most of the time, if I changed the Workgroup or computer name, the machine came up but after a few reboots – once again it was lost and had to be connected by hand. I tested across Windows and it could see all machines including the Linux Box and even the mac, the same can be said of Linux, it had no trouble. After talking to people and looking around, it was one of those classic mac issues were som said “never had that problem on mine ever” to others saying the same as me or results in-between.

I am sure 100% it is the SMB inside the OS X that is at fault – how can an update make it work 100% of the time and the next update comes along and it is broken again? I had many SMB type problems such as me fixing the IP on all the computers and the copy speed going down to the lowest number ever, resorting back to DHCP and the problem went away but been a Mac, you cannot delve deep into the inner workings.

If anybody has any views on this – feel free to comment – I am the only one with this issue?