The official thread for any and all discussion related to Apple Inc.

[goobimama]

To those who haven't read it. Aayush, you stay out of it.

Mac clone maker vows to fight Apple's EULA in Court

The Miami-based Mac clone vendor Psystar says that Apple's restrictive licensing terms violate US antitrust laws and wants to fight the Cupertino-based company in xourt. Psystar's cheap Mac alternative, which hit the Web on Monday and brought down the company's Website, costs about $399, but when run with Mac OS X Leopard represents a direct violation of Apple's end-user license agreement, which forbids third-party installations of Leopard, according to InformationWeek. A Psystar employee told the publication that they believe Apple's terms violate U.S. monopoly laws. "What if Microsoft said you could only install Windows on Dell computers?" the employee said. He also claimed that the company would continue sell the OpenMac system, despite the apparent violation of Apple's EULA.

The employee emphasized that "Apple grossly overcharges for the hardware on which its operating systems, including Leopard, come preinstalled, claiming that Apple charges an 80 percent markup on hardware. He also argued that Apple's prohibition against third-party installations may not hold up in court: "What if Honda said that, after you buy their car, you could only drive it on the roads they said you could?" the employee, who only identified himself as "Robert", said in a brief phone interview.

The $400 Mac clone, based around a 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with integrated Intel GMA 950 graphics, will be compatible with Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5). The company says it will pre-install the OS and include a special restoration disc, alongside the genuine installation disc.

 

[ray|raven]

^Hmm, Read abt this on engadget,

First thoughts were that I'd read abt Apple suing them, guess these guys are taking that step before apple does

And how can they actually install it from the original Leopard disk?,thought that wasnt possible.

 

[iMav]

i remmber some 1 once said that apple does not follow a restrictive trade policy

 

[DigitalDude]

[...] And how can they actually install it from the original Leopard disk?,thought that wasnt possible.

actually they are not installing I guess.... they just give away a copy of OS X along with the system and some instructions... but not sure

lemme read the engadget article again


_

 

[aryayush]

It's not possible with the official disk, of course, which is why they throw in the patched restore disk as well. They're going to get the crap sued out of them. Just you wait.

 

[yash]

I think I read they've disappeared already.

 

[goobimama]

The site had gone down, but it's back up again. They seem to be serious.

 

[goobimama]

Does iTunes suck at video encoding or what?! I just converted a 25 minute TV show for iPhone with VisualHub in 6 minutes flat! And the resulting file size is 132MB. iTunes used to take like...a much longer time.... and the file size was 230MB for the same sized episode.

 

[aryayush]

I think VisualHub has also cropped the video to be no larger than 480x320. iTunes does not do that, so you can have one copy for both the iPhone and your Mac.

In other news, I just bought (actually bought) Acquisition Pro for about Rs. 1,500. I hate LimeWire and Java and just couldn't take it any more.

 

[jamesbond007]

@goobi
I thought QT Pro has an iPhone profile. I 've converted some 700mb movies of the famous ripper for my friends iPod Nano 3G with 'Movie to iPod' profile, although the conversion took 1 and half hour and little more than 1gb output size but the quality was flawless.

 

[aryayush]

But it resizes your videos and makes them smaller. iTunes doesn't. That's why I prefer it.

Milind, please check it out and let me know whether VisualHub converted files are shrunk (dimension wise) or not.

 

[goobimama]

Nope. Both the iTunes version and the Visualhub version have the same dimensions. I'm not sure about quality difference (I think it is slightly less than the iTunes version), but since the file size is much smaller than the iTunes version, I can deal with that. You know, I don't have these huge 16GB iPhones lying around. Besides, once it's on the iPhone, both the versions looks crystal clear.

Will convert a movie today and see how the quality/size thing goes.

I should note that Visualhub doesn't do H264 encoding which is why it must be much faster. There is a tickbox which says "h264 encoding" and I haven't tried that yet to see any difference.

Okay VisualHub is the app of the month. It's funnier than it is efficient. Seriously! While encoding it said 16 minutes remaining. When the 16 minutes got up, the message down there was "...looks like I lied. File 1 is going to take it's own time...". Jokes like this all over the place!

Anyway. Encoding time for 700MB avi to iPhone (high quality setting). 16 minutes.
File size: 687MB (yeah!).
Quality: Almost no difference in quality.
End result: Milind jumping around and accidentally stepping on the tail of the great one.

 

[dinesh72]

I also used this iSquint 1.5.2 to convert movies to my ipod. first movie of 698mb got converted to 295mb in 25 minutes 640*272 to 320*144. It does make new copy so one good for playing on mac and other for ipod/iphone. For second movie I chose h264 encoder and it reported approx 30 min to finish and at the end said "looks I lied ----- movie will take its own time"!!!!!! It never finished it. End result was (when I cancelled) full video was present but audio was missing for most end part of it, also audio was out of sync by nearly 9 sec. I tried without h264 encoder but same result.
MPEG streamclip plays full movie for conversion!!
Any program for mac to correct audio out of sync (xvid / mp4).

 

[goobimama]

Congrats on the 5000+ posts! We did it boys!

 

[aryayush]

YAY! Here's to 5000 more posts full of idle gossip and hardly anything of any real world value.

Thanks for pointing out VisualHub, in that case. Bye, bye, iTunes; hello, VisualHub!

 

[goobimama]

Did anyone check out the Engadget Awards 2007? Apple has raked in a lot of them (obviously!).

 

[cooldudie3]

i have a question about Safari and tabs
can I make safari show the tab bar? I tried in preferences and couldn't
Is there a new tab button?
Also can you make links open in tabs rather than windows?

I like safari except the tabs problems

 

[goobimama]

If there is no tab open, then it won't show the tab bar. You are talking about the windows version here right?

Once you have a tab open (Ctrl+T) or File > New Tab, you can double click the tab bar to create new tabs.

You can right click a link and hit "Open in New Tab".
You can drag a link to the tab bar to open it in a new tab.

 

[drgrudge]

cooldudie3 -
1. Make links open in Tab instead of Windows:
Open Terminal and enter this:

defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool true

2. Tab Button
Just double click in the empty space in tab bar or use cmd-t

 

[jamesbond007]

Oh man I've wasted so many hours for converting movies into iPod, Visual Hub looks promising. I will try it and report back.

Congrats to everyone for 5000 posts. my prediction we will make 15000 posts by 2009.