Archive for September, 2008

Watching and listening to avi movies in Quicktime on the Intel Mac

September 26, 2008 at 10:04 am · Filed under Apple, Mac ·Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

I friend on mine gave me a avi rip of the “Ashes and Snow” DVD. I liked it so much I’m going to buy the DVD for its photographic scenes and music – looks great on a flat panel screen with surround sound!

I ran into a common problems that people have whereby the playback in Quick Time doesn’t always provide the sound due to a missing codec. In this case I was missing the AC3 codec sometimes called the A52 codec. Open source products such as VLC play it correctly however I wanted it to work in QT!

After spending almost a day trying different alternatives I came across an open source version that… you guessed it … “Just works”!

Many thanks to François Planque

When I want to convert a downloaded avi file to divx I use my divx pro converter. Makes it easy.

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Easily synchronize your Google and iCal calendar

September 23, 2008 at 2:58 pm · Filed under Apple, Mac ·Tagged , , ,

I had been looking forward to using the calendaring and contact functionality provided on my new Apple iPhone 3G but found out that sync’ing was not really possible. I’ve been sing Google’s fantastic online calendaring product rather than Apple’s iCal for some time but occasionally I find that when I am not connected to the Internet I off course have no calendaring available. Exactly the same issue with contact information stored in Google contacts and Apple’s Address book.

Buying the iPhone gave me the incentive to work 3 ways – iPhone, Online with Google and Offline with Apple’s apps iCal and Address Book.

I have been using a really neat and simple software product from a company called Spanning Sync to synchronize both ways my Google calendar with my Mac iCalendar application. It doesn’t cost a lot and whilst Google don’t have a solution it is a “Must Have”.

How I have 3 way access exactly as I want it.

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