News for Friday, 1 June 2007

One day after the US, the Apple TV with the 160GB HD BTO is available on the European Apple Stores.
It will cost you 399€ (all taxes included), some of us might consider it a bit expensive when looking at the price of retailed 160GB HD.
If you already have an Apple TV with the small 40GB HD, you can upgrade your HD with the procedure we published previously, however, keep in mind that it breaks the warranty.

Following the introduction of the RoHS regulations, Apple removed the iSight from its catalog, and was not replace by any new product, leaving users of a Mac Pro in trouble when looking for a webcam, as the Apple cinema display do not include the embedded iSight found in iMac and MacBook, yet. Hereafter is a report from on of our reader Félix who provide interesting replacement solution for Mac Pro users desperately looking for a webcam:

While the iSight was removed from the Apple Store catalog, the use of {MaCam, iChatUSBCam} with Logitech webcams was stopped by the recent update of Mac OS X Tiger to 10.4.9. while browsing the web for finding an alternative, I found some US forum spreading the rumor that the Microsoft XBox 360 webcam was natively compatible with Mac OS X since the device is full Video Class compliant. I purchase one for 49 euros, and indeed it is natively recognized by iChat without the use of any patches or third-party drivers.
In addition, it seems that Webcam certified Vista compliant (featuring Vista logo on the retail box + no firmware or driver update required) should also be natively recognized by Mac OS X as they should be full USB Video Class compliant.
Warning: Some webcam manufacturers, among them Logitech and Creative, are currently offering products featuring the "USB Video Class" marketing tag, which are NOT compatible with Mac OS X. Additional information can be found : http://www.ecamm.com/mac/ichatusbcam/configs.htmlr

Several small application, mostly freeware or shareware, are available for the Intel-based notebook to control the rotation speed of the embedded fans; mostly to keep the computer cooler.
This feature can now be used on PowerBooks and iBooks thank to g4fancontrol.
In its last version 0.3, one can set the temperature limit from which the fan should start spinning with the following command:

sudo ./g4fancontrol set 30

The value "30" defines the temperature expressed in Celsius degree (International standard)

DivX for Mac is now available in version 6.7.
It includes:

DivX Player 2.0
DivX Community Codec 6.6
DivX Web Player 1.3.1
DivX Converter 1.2 (15-day trial)
DivX Pro Codec 6.6 (6-month trial)

Upgrading to the DivX Pro version will cost you US$19.99.
There is not much information regarding changes in this new version, it might fix the problem encountered following the last QuickTime update.
For addition information: http://www.divx.com/divx/mac/

IF one could have though that the Apple TV will need to adapt and becomes compatible with other video format, yesterday's announcement with YouTube illustrates Apple's power when dealing with online music and video download business. Indeed, the Apple TV will not be updated to support older video codec, as the entire YouTube video contents library will be encoded in H.264.
Of course it will take times, and mid-June when YouTube library will be directly accessible from Apple TV only a few hundreds of videos will be available in H.264 format. Nevertheless, H.264 video content will keep growing, and will for sure require time, computer and human resources to be completed. Maybe Apple has managed to sell hundreds of Xserves Xeon to Google to perform this re-encoding.
Another important news was also released yesterday, and will also involve the Apple TV. Google and EMI signed an agreement allowing users of the video-sharing community site YouTube to access music videos by EMI artists. According to the deal, YouTube users would be allowed not only to watch and play authorized videos from EMI artists but also to include elements of videos in their so called "user generated content". EMI is the last Music Major to sign a deal with YouTube, and is probably a way to add another copyright lawsuit to the long list filed by media companies against YouTube for allowing users to share pirated programs/series on the video sharing site.