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Comment by jroes | Hacker News Reader

But why? Handbrake can convert most video formats to something Apple TV-compatible and play them on the Apple TV through iTunes.

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The XBMC library mode is much better than iTunes. XBMC is living-room ready, wife-approved media player (one of the best on the market, in fact).

As a bonus, you don't have to convert anything.

> As a bonus, you don't have to convert anything.

And that's the biggest bonus imho. Most people will watch pirated content on XBMC (torrented TV shows etc) and transcoding everything is pretty annoying.

Bought content is usually an even bigger pain in the arse to transcode. I am currently trying to rip some DVDs of mine and it is an incredibly frustrating experience.e

Here's a solution:

http://lifehacker.com/355281/dvd-rip-automates-one+click-dvd...

Aside: although Lifehacker's day to day quality seems to have declined, I've found searching their archives for common tech problems like this to be extremely good at returning results. How To Geek (frequently linked from LH) also has a lot of similar solutions. Any other recommendations?

Here's one possible solution (appropriately enough from LH itself):

http://lifehacker.com/344188/get-only-the-posts-you-want-fro...

I would suggest subscribing to the type of posts you like the most by tag.

My recommendations for tags would be:

#hivefive/ #hivefivefollowup

#feature

#downloads (you can specify which OS, see link above)

#featuredworkspace (I like them, you may not)

#featureddesktop (again, I like them)

#howto

#diy

There are more I can't think of right now. I definitely agree that the overall quality of LH has declined, however HN and LH are still my number one and number two sources of tech information on the web and I typically check both multiple times a day. Some of the best tips and software I use comes from LH - Dropbox tweaks, XBMC, CCleaner, BitTorrent tips, Launchy and many, many more. Check out their recommended bundles of apps also available for Windows, Mac and Linux, e.g:

http://lifehacker.com/5562864/lifehacker-pack-for-mac-our-es...

http://lifehacker.com/5713510/most-popular-free-mac-download...

Thanks but I am actually on Linux and I don't believe an automated tool could prepare the result as I like it.

Not to mention it's 100% free, highly customisable and it looks damn fine.

Converting: BLECH.

Converting a two hour HD movie sucks for both time and storage. XBMC can play back pretty much any format natively.

Huge time savings for people with a large video library.

Ok, I read elsewhere in this thread that apparently you can stream directly from a NAS, which is definitely an awesome use case. XBMC wins!

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