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A New Media Center
I’ve decided that I do not want anything to do with Windows for the most of it. I plan on keeping Windows Vista installed on my MacBook via Boot Camp so that I can do my school work and other paper in Office 2007 but that’s it. I actually like Vista, I think it’s come quite some ways since Windows XP and the initial Longhorn beta but that’s another post for another time.

99.999% of my movies are encoded in the DiVX or XViD format which does not work natively in QuickTime/iTunes. I was aware of the DiVX and XViD codecs for QuickTime but I heard those would only work for QuickTime and you still couldn’t import the movies into iTunes.

Do note that I have no clue about video codecs or encoding video or anything like that, I just know which ones I need to get to view my movies!

My first thought was, “Oh great, I guess I will be spending the rest of my life re-encoding videos so they work with iTunes. I spent some time researching what the best way to do this would be, and I ended up getting an application called ffmpegX which I had used before when I was re-encoding some video for my iPod and Sony PSP.

My buddy Morgan suggested downloading Perian which did XViD and DiVX. I did and it worked in QuickTime but I couldn’t import my movies into iTunes. No good!

So I gave up and thought about re-encoding with ffmpegX, which is what I thought I wouldn’t have to do, but now had to since Perian didn’t work.

I first tried using the mencoder h.264 encoding method and it sort of worked. It worked in QuickTime and VLC but I could not import the movies into iTunes so it wasn’t good enough for me…Mind you I left this encoding overnight.

Then I tried the h.264 x264 encoding method and left it running all day while I was at work. I attempted to import it into iTunes and it worked! But this was taking hours and hours.

I talked to Morgan again and he suggested opening the movie with QuickTime and then saving it a “self-contained movie”. So after waiting all day to get back home I tried this out. It took about 45 seconds and it works. I do still use Perian since it’s an XViD/DiVX in a MOV wrapper, but it works!!

I am going to write a brief entry on what I learned about codecs and wrapping and video files if I can find some time.

Now I need to get Front Row working on the machine!