Tech

January 4, 2012

Activating subtitles in Netflix on the Apple TV.

Most of our media consumption is streamed through our Apple TV. With almost all of it taking place after our 18 month-old daughter has gone to bed, we often have the volume turned down on our TV pretty far so as not to wake her up. I’ve long wished for subtitle support for those poorly audio-mixed films, and only recently discovered it.

I don’t know which apps this works with, but to activate subtitles in Netflix, all you need to do is hold down the Select/Play button while the movie is playing. This pops up a menu where you can choose for which language to activate subtitles. Handy!

I don’t know when this was added, and perhaps it’s always been there, but I’ve never noticed it until recently and have never come across any documentation of it.

November 27, 2011

I came across some of Netflix’s test movies.

Rachel and I were browsing Netflix last night, when I came across something funny in the “Recently Added” stream: test files. I’ve seen these pop up on “What’s New on Netflix” before, and as a video geek, they’ve always piqued my interest.

They’re little test movies (never intended for public access) that Netflix adds to its streaming service at various frame rates, which I assume are used for testing. Though I’ve managed to get the these movies’ pages on the Netflix website before, I’ve never successfully played them. The Apple TV client, however, is able to play them perfectly well.

It starts off with some simple exterior shots from the Netflix campus. After that, a guy—who I can only assume is the life of every Netflix staff party—appears, running around Netflix HQ with a DVD, doing cartwheels around trees, moonwalking with a laptop, juggling, and performing a monologue from Julius Caesar. There’s a few more simple shots, and then the eleven minute video ends with some screen calibration images. All the test videos are made up of the same footage compressed at the different frame rates.

Naturally, such an anomaly could not go undocumented, and since I don’t have a device capable of recording an HDMI stream, I popped my camera in front of my TV and hit record. The performance from Netflix’s resident thespian begins around the 3:45 mark.

August 8, 2011

Displaying Delicious bookmarks as a page in WordPress.

I’m no web developer, and this blog is anything but a resource for those looking to enhance their WordPress blogs, but I thought I’d share this regardless.

A few months back, I started sharing my Netflix Canada picks. I thought it’d be a good way to keep track of what I’ve seen and enjoyed on Netflix and share those films at the same time. I started doing so with my Delicious account, because I thought it’d be easy. It was. Then I thought I’d like to have the  picks displayed on their own page on my blog. I did a little hunting, and came up with this method.

  1. Install the RSS in Page WordPress plugin.
  2. Grab the Delicious feed you want to display. Mine is a feed specifically for bookmarks tagged with “Netflix” and “recommendation.”
  3. Format the feed with the plugin’s parameters and a little HTML magic. All this info is on the plugin’s website. It helps if you know your way around HTML a little bit.

That’s it. If you’re feeling really sassy, you can CSS your list up a bit too.

Now, when I want to add something to my Netflix picks page, all I do is find the film’s corresponding page on Netflix.ca, bookmark it with the Delicious Bookmarks Extension for Chrome, write a little bit on why I liked it, tag it with “Netflix” and “recommendation,” and it automatically pops up on my WordPress page. Couldn’t be easier.

Now, if we could only get Netflix to add a decent API and Instant Queue equivalent in Canada, we’d be all set.

May 25, 2011

Using the iPhone as a barcode scanner for Delicious Library 2.

A few years back, I picked up the Apple Design Award winning cataloging app Delicious Library for keeping track of my ever-expanding DVD collection. One of the (then) amazing features of the program was the ability to scan barcodes of DVDs, CDs, books, etc., with your Mac’s iSight camera, and download details about the object from Amazon.

The obvious caveat was the fact that you needed to have the stack of objects sitting beside the computer. Okay if you only have a few, but when you have a few hundred DVDs, books, and CDs to deal with, it could be a challenge.

After quite some time of not touching it, I went back last week to play with Delicious Library 2 again only to discover that I neglected to transfer it and it’s data whenever I moved to my current MacBook Pro last year. I thought it’d be fun to scan my DVD’s again, so I went on the hunt for an iPhone app that’d help with the task.

It turns out, surprisingly, that there is no official iOS app for Delicious Library. It has to do with limitations in the license of the Amazon API, so the hopes of seeing one anytime soon is nil.

I did, however, have barcode scanning app RedLaser installed on my phone. I’ve used RedLaser in the past for QR codes, but it also works quite well with standard barcodes, so I thought I’d try to figure out how I might be able to get my scans from it to Delicious Library. Turns out it’s quite simple.

The workflow:

  1. Clear your previous scans in RedLaser.
  2. Scan the items with RedLaser. Make sure that the “Multiple” toggle on the bottom of the screen is on.
  3. When you’re finished scanning, go back to the Scanned Items list.
  4. Hit the share icon in the lower left corner and select Email Product List. Email the list to yourself.
  5. Back on your computer, save the raw-barcodes.txt file attached to the email you just sent yourself.
  6. Rename this file “Scanned UPCs Log.txt”
  7. Drag this file into the left-hand sidebar of Delicious Library 2. Voilà.

There’s a couple of downsides to this method. For starters, it’s not as fast as a dedicated barcode scanner, but if you’re just doing it for kicks like I was, you probably don’t care. Secondly, if one of the UPCs you’ve scanned is not in the Amazon database, you won’t know until you go to import the entire batch. It lets you know it can’t find the items with those barcodes, but unless you’re a Raymond Babbitt-esque savant, you’ll have to match up your Delicious Library with your physical one to see which items are missing.

Then again, if you are Rain Man, you likely don’t need software to help you keep track of your media.

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