I have the ClickToFlash Safari plugin installed which helps prevent a lot of these issues, but obviously if you want to watch a YouTube view you have to succumb to the evil of Flash right? Wrong!

YouTube for a while have been encoding their videos in the MP4 format using the h.264 compression standard. What this means is you can watch a video that is not encoded in Flash. Great but how do I access it I hear you ask. Well if you have ClickToFlash you can set it to load this version of the video by default:

Take a look at the different in Activity monitor between Flash and MP4.

First Flash:

Next MP4 using h.264 compression:

There is a massive difference in CPU usage. No wonder my laptop was getting hot while watching Flash video.

Open Terminal.app and type:

mdutil -E /

It has been a while since I’ve splashed out on any new gadgets, so I convinced myself that what I needed was an AirPort Express to wirelessly stream music to some speakers I have in my living room. Sadly however it was not quite so simple.

First up I will give you a bit of background on me so you know where I am coming from. I am a computer science grad and work as a developer, as such I would class myself above the average user. I am not scared to get my hands dirty working out the odd computer problem. I also use a MacBook Pro as my primary home computer and have a Siemens Gigaset-SE587 router that my broadband provider (tiscali) supplied.

Picture from the apple website

The Airport Express (AE), a little white box of glory that according to apple will provide a utopian wireless paradise where you can stream audio from iTunes all over the place. The reality for me however is that all I seem to see is this: (picture taken from iTunes)

Great no? NO.

So what did I do to deserve this? Well, I plugged it in, followed the instruction in the box. Ran through the setup wizard and got a green light. Great. Went into iTunes and enabled airtunes and then the option for the AE popped up at the bottom of the iTunes window. Selected it and then tried to play a song. Then the error.

Looking on Google it seems that I am not the only one to have this error. Also there does not seem to be any real fix. The best I could find was to wait until the moon was in its 7th phase and then sacrifice a lamb. Sadly as I did not have a lamb to hand I had to try other options like fiddling with all the settings for the AE.

After no luck I decided that I wanted to know if iTunes could actually see the AE rather than just display its name, so I set a password on it for music. iTunes dutifully asked me for the password. I entered it, clicked a song and would you believe it, sound started emanating from the other side of the room. Fantastic. I took the password setting off an it still worked.

Now the really strange thing is that after I closed and reopened iTunes I got the error again. Setting the password did not fix it either. Taking the password off however did. Then the following morning I turned on my computer and decided to give airtunes another go and got the error again. This time messing with passwords made no difference. At this point I was about ready to take it back. I had spent about 6 hours and it still seemed unstable.

After a bit more reading on a forum about other people with similar problems I came across Airfoil by Rouge Amoeba. I installed the trial version and started playing a song in iTunes and used Airfoil to connect to the AE and it worked.

Now it is not all good news as I have had errors with Airfoil as well although it does provide more info on the error and has worked about 8 out of 10 times so far. iTunes has worked 1 time out of 10. From the error message airfoil provided it seems there is an issue with the server running on the AE or something like that.

So will I take the AE back to the shop…at the moment no. I will give it a couple of weeks to see if it is usable with airfoil and if so then great. I will say this though, I am a self confessed Apple fan and this was not a typical experience I would associate with the brand. I realise that for some it works right out of the box and there is no issue, for others though it is a total pain. I also realise that in the world of wireless networks there are so many hardware variables that it is impossible to guarantee a seamless experience. I am skeptical however that my problems would be solved even if I were using an airport extreme base station instead of the router my broadband provider supplied.

In OS X 1.5 all app help menus have a text box to type in the thing you want help about. You can also type something like “save” and it will search the menus of the application that is currently active.

If you are in Safari and type in “amazon” it will search your history for items matching it. This is great as it saves me trawling through the history menu.

This is probably already a well documented thing, but I have only just found it after having Leopard for about a year.

This is because the DRM they use is a Microsoft thing and so will not work on the OS X platform. I suppose this is not such a big deal because if you are running a modern Mac you may have a copy of windows installed and you can use that to run the iPlayer. The BBC have also made the programs available to stream online so that any flash enabled browser can show them.

So what’s the big issue, am I just a mac fanboy crying because they have ignored my beloved computer. No! I do however find it amusing that the BBC decided to rip of the ‘i’ naming convention for their player and then not fully support the mac platform.

A Solution?

In setting up this system the BBC required some way of delivering content to computer users and limiting the length of time that the file was available or usable. They chose the Microsoft DRM method like Channel 4 and its 4 on demand service (another non mac service). What I think might have been a better option was to use iTunes. This is an application that I would guess is on the majority of macs even if the owners don’t use it. It also has a built in content delivery system and pretty good DRM. Content can also be viewed on iPods, iPhones and Apple TV with no extra work. It also plays nicely with Windows.

Now this nearly came to fruition yesterday when BBC World programs became available for purchase on the iTunes music store. I say nearly because only a handful of shows are available and you have to pay for them.

Now I guess that it is not as strait forward as it sounds to get Apple to put a load of video content on iTunes and then give it away for free (even for a limited period of 7 days a program). Their will be costs and by implementing their own system the BBC can keep a tighter grip on things. I just feel that they missed a great opportunity.

Mac users are not alone in this either because the iPlayer does not work on Linux and surprisingly Vista (yes the Microsoft Windows one!). It is not all bad news however because the BBC has been ordered to make the iPlayer multi platform and that the flash streaming alternative that they currently offer is not good enough.

Should be interesting to see how they finally sort this out.

Update

An article on the Register here indicates that the BBC will soon make the iPlayer available on the iPhone and the iPod Touch. This means they will have to provide another method of serving the programs rather that streaming flash video because neither of these devices support flash.

The problem started because it was a huge update, my PowerBook G4 needed 346MBs! I am currently using a BTOpenzone connection which cuts out after a period of inactivity and is really slow. So the download cut out a number of times before it managed to get all of the update.

Eventually however the software update tool told me that it was finished downloading and did I want to instal it? I clicked yes and off it went.

Thats as far as it got. According to the update progress bar it was configuring the update for about 2.5 hours. I assume that the update package must have been corrupted from the download problems I had.

I went back into the Software update tool to repeat the download. The problem is though that there seems to de no way of telling the program to get rid of the old update file and download a new copy. I tried a number of things and a few googles for any tips, but no luck.

In the end I downloaded the package manually from the Apple updates page on their website and instal it that way. It worked fine that time.

Preparation for OS X 10.5.2 perhaps?

Dock unread count for all mailboxes

In Tiger only mail in the inbox caused the Mail icon to show the number of new messages. In Leopard you can now choose this or show new mail for all mailboxes. This is great because if you have mail rules set up to automatically move specific messages from the inbox to another mailbox the Tiger version would not indicate that a new message had arrived. With Leopard this is all fixed.

Set the default Open With program for file types

This was another bug bear in Tiger, basically if you wanted java files to be open in Textedit as opposed to Xcode you had a problem. The solution was to download a preferences plug-in and then wade through all the options and change the appropriate ones. This is not longer the case. Simply command click and select get info and in there you can now set the default program.

To very small changes that have made my upgrade, also they were not documented any ware.