Feb
8
2010
Since the german iTunes store started to also offer movies to rent I began to use this new feature more often. But then having downloaded a new rented movie on my Mac Mini (running Snow Leopard) I remembered that there was a problem that I already had with some purchased movies from the iTunes store: although having different audio tracks (in different languages) with selectable stereo or surround sound, it was not possible to use the surround sound option with the optical connection to my receiver. You could just here some digital signals as noise, no matter what I tried (especially all combinations in the audio/midi setup tool).
I looked up for that problem on the net and found out that many people said that it’s not possible, and that it just works on an Apple TV device. Bad news, really bad news. At least someone mentioned that it works with the Quicktime player and indeed, that worked with purchased movies. But! not with the rented ones, because they can only be played back in iTunes itself.
But then yesterday I was lucky. I didn’t give up and started again to dig around for some solutions and then found these instructions: http://www.cod3r.com/2008/02/the-correct-way-to-enable-ac3-passthrough-with-quicktime/
And there it was: you have to put the volume to 100%. I didn’t have to do anything else (lucky for me, because I could read a lot of posts from people that still have problems…) and it worked!
Now there’s just one thing left that still bothers me: sometimes the video from the iTunes Store has different language tracks and sometimes not, but there’s no way to know that in advance (and I really prefer to have the original english soundtracks than only the german dubbing…).
Feb
7
2010
So, now I finally started to address my old outdated homepage and decided to move a) to another server and b) to a blog instead of just static content.
Maybe this way I will keep it more up to date. Well, we will see…
It’s currently all still a work in progress, but it’s a start!
I hope you enjoy the new design and the content. Oh yes, and it’s still almost everything in english, because I know some friends that understand english better than german, and some things I write here should also be understandable by an international audience.