Apple The Mac Guides Thread

The aim of this thread is to create a library of guides for Mac users.

Burning a DVD Video with Toast Titanium

So, You've got a bunch of your DVD's ripped to your hard drive as DivX. Or you've made some cracking video's of Christmas day, And you want to share it with the rest of your family.

Easy.

First off, The programs you need:

- Toast Titanium (7.0.1 if you're using Tiger)


Open Toast Titanium



Select Video from the main screen. If you dont have the side bar open, click the little triangle next to "Mac and PC" in the above picture.

Set Toast Titanium up just as its shown on the following Picture.



From here, you have three options depending on what you're burning.

1. Single DivX Film or a single Video you've made.
2. DivX Film split into seperate parts
3. Series of TV Shows or a bunch of Video's you've made, and you want them to be accessable via a menu.

Option 1

Drag and drop the .avi file into the main window of Toast. Make sure that the bar to the left is setup exactly as shown.

In the bottom left hand corner, there is a meter which shows you how much space on the DVD this movie will use. If its Orange or Red, You need to turn the quality of the DVD Down. If you need to do this, then go to option 3, where this will be explained.

Now, you should have something like this:



That's ready to re-encode and burn. Just hit the red ball in the bottom right of the application, and it'll start re-encoding the .avi and eventually burn it to a dvd.

Before you hit the red ball, press Option R to bring up your DVD burner preferences. In my opinion, its best to burn the DVD at 2x, to make sure you get a good burn, and maximise compatability with DVD players.



It should look something like that.

Once that's all set up, hit the red ball and wait for the movie to be re-encoded and burnt.

Option 2

So you've got your DivX film split into two parts. Usually 700mb per part, as you ripped the DVD so you could burn it to two CD's.

Well, this isn't much different from Option 1.

Drag and drop the first part of the film into toast, and then the second part afterwards.



Then, make sure everything is set up, open the recorder preferences by pressing Option followed by R, and set the burn speed to DVD 2x



In the bottom left hand corner, there is a meter which shows you how much space on the DVD this movie will use. If its Orange or Red, You need to turn the quality of the DVD Down. If you need to do this, then go to option 3, where this will be explained.

If the meter is green, Hit the red ball and wait for the movie to be re-encoded and burnt.

Option 3

If you have a TV series you can burn the whole series to one DVD, but this will decrease the quality. Although you can spread it out over two DVD's, which I recommend.

I Just spent all night ripping Extra's from the DVD. Theres 6 episodes in the first series, and I want all 6 episodes on one dvd.

Now, Seeing as this is a TV Series, I want to set up a menu so I can flip to each episode without havig to fast forward the DVD.



Thats each episode dragged and dropped into Toast in the correct order.

Now, I want to make a menu. On the left, there is a menu option called "Menu Style:" I've selected Corporate here, because I like it. You however, can select any one you want.



Click "More".



Set this part up just as you see it there. If you don't want the DVD to start playing the first video as soon as you insert it, uncheck the 'Auto-Play disc on insert'.

Obviously change the Disc Name and Menu Title to suit your needs.

Go back to the main toast window, and click "Edit" on each video. Make sure they have the correct names.



You'll need to do that on each part.

Once you've done that, You'll notice that the meter in the bottom corner is orange/red. This tells you that the series won't fit on one dvd with the current encoding setup. So we'll need to change this.

This is easy.

Click the "More" button on the left pane, then click the "Enocding" tab at the top.

Select custom, and set it up how you see below.



You can play with the quality settings to make the entire series fit on one dvd, you'll have to keep clicking "Ok" to go back to the main screen to see if it will actually fit on the DVD with the quality settings you've set.

Now, the quality won't be too good, but it'll be bearable. If the quality is set at its lowest, and the meter still isn't in the green, then delete half the series, set the quality back to automatic, and put the rest of the series on another dvd.

If you're lucky enough to be able to afford Dual Layer discs, you can select DL DVD.

By the red ball, there's a drop down menu which lets you select the media on which you will be burning this DVD to. You can select DVD DL.



Once thats selected, you can change the quality settings back to Automatic.



And the entire series will fit on one DVD DL disk.

With standard DVD disks, you'll want to burn it at 2x. This can be done by pressing Option R and selecting DVD 2X from the list.



If using DL DVD's you should select the minimum speed to maximise compatability with DVD Players.

Now, hit the red ball, and wait for it to re-encode and burn your movies

 

How to disable the Dashbard

Open up terminal by clicking the finder icon in your dock, then clicking on your hard drive and going to 'Applications' > 'Utillities'. Once in there, scroll to the bottom and double clock on 'Terminal'

Once in terminal, type in:

Code:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES

And hit enter.

Make sure you type that correctly, including capitols where needed.

Then, we need to make mac os x re-read its configuration:

Code:

killall Dock

And hit enter.

The dock will dissappear for a few seconds and pop up again. Afterwards, the dashboard will no longer operate and you will have a lot of free memory

To enable dashboard:

Code:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean NO

then

Code:

killall Dock

 

Using Spring Loaded Folders

Until a while ago, I didn't even know what spring loaded folders were, but now I use this feature every day.

Say, you've got a file on your desktop, and you want to move it to /Applications/Utillities.

You click on the file to 'pick it up', drag it over the hard drive on your desktop (Usually Macintosh HD, but some people rename it) and hover over it for around a second. The icon will flash twice, then open a finder window with the contents of the drive.

Now, while still holding down the mouse button so you've 'picked up' your file, hover over the Applications folder, wait a second, it'll flash, and you'll be dumped into the Applications folder, same again with the Utillities folder.

Simple

 

Editing your hosts file


Open up terminal by clicking the finder icon in your dock, then clicking on your hard drive and going to 'Applications' > 'Utillities'. Once in there, scroll to the bottom and double clock on 'Terminal'

Type in:

Code:

sudo pico /etc/hosts

And hit enter.

You'll have to type in YOUR password for it to let you do it. (sudo is a commad which lets an administrator run tasks as root)

Once you've made the changes you needed to make, press "CTRL + X" and then press Y to save changes and exit pico/nano.

Edit:

Forgot you had to use sudo

 

Thanks for the guides, they're awsome. Any more on the way? That spring-loaded folder thing is really useful! I never knew about that. Don't you just love OS X?

Why would I want to edit my hosts file?

One thing though - try to avoid saying "do this as in the picture", because I hate it when I find tuts like that and the picture links are dead. It enevitably happens, so it's useful if you can still use the guide sans pics

 

Yeah, I know exactly what you mean with the pictures. They're hosted on my photobucket account at the moment, but I'll be moving them onto another server soon where I've got unmetered bandwidth and stuff.

If they get deleted from there, I've always got a copy of them on my local machine.

Also, ANYONE can contribute to this, not just me, so get writing! Anythings helpful to people that don't know about some of the things that are obvious to us mac people, but not so obvious to the new ones.

I might also add stuff that's found in other threads too, like software to convert video into ipod format and so fourth.

Glad you like the guides anyway, I'll be writing more as I think of them

 

There's a great guide to some of the lesser-known keyboard shortcuts in OS X over at TUAW - link here. Aside from that though I'm a relative Mac noob so there's probably not much I can tell you that you won't know.

 

samor mate, this is brilliant just the kind of thread we needed in the apple forum, a mod should sticky it. Just one question is there anyway of doing wat you did with toast titanium but instead usuing iDVD?? (im to cheap to go and buy toast titanium)

Cheers
ben

 

Already in the process of writing

 

VNC

How to set up VNC to control your PC from your Mac

Ok, so I thought I would write a guide for doing this. I guess it could go in networking, but I am going to concentrate on the mac for this. Firstly, VNC comes in two parts, a client and a server. You need to install the server app on the computer you want to control (In this case a PC), and the install the client on the computer you want to use to control the other (in this case an Apple Mac Powerbook G4). I'm running Windows XP and Mac OS X 10.4.3. Anyone running older versions of Windows/Mac OS X will have to work some bits for themselves, but it shouldn't be too difficult.

So, the server application for PCs is called RealVNC. You can download version 4.1 from HERE (You don't need to enter any of the details if you don't want to). Ok, so download the executable to somewhere on your PC and then open it. Click next, accept the license agreement and say where you want to install it. The next page will give you the option to choose either the server or the client, or both.

Now, all we need for this is the SERVER, so make sure that is installed. You don't have to install the client app, but it won't do any harm, so tick both boxes

Click "next", and "again", and on the screen that follows, make sure the bottom two boxes are check, like so:

Click next again, and then finally "install". When the server properties box pops up, you can leave everything as it is and just press OK. Don't change anything unless you know what you are doing. Then click next and finish to exit the installer.

Now there should be an icon in your system tray like so:

If you don't know the IP address of your PC, make a note of it now (In my case 192.168.0.2). Hover the mouse over the system tray icon to get it.

OK, now we are done for the PC side of things. That little program (WinVNC4.exe) should run at startup and be running all the time, unless you exit it. You can start it again via the start menu > RealVNC > VNC Server 4 (Service Mode) > Start VNC Server. It's only a small program (3MB) so I just leave it running all the time for convenience.

OK, now switch over to your Mac. Good to be back, eh?
Ok, now head over to HERE and choose a mirror. Click the download link. If you're on Safari, this will save a file on the desktop. Drag the icon into your Applications folder, as you would for any program. Now open the program by clicking its icon in Applications.

You should be confronted with this login screen.

Enter the IP address of your PC that you noted down before - In my case "192.168.0.2". Leave the other settings as they are, unless you changed anything in the earlier steps when I told you not to... Click connect. If everything goes to plan, you should now see your PC's desktop. Here's a screenshot of the screen on my Mac:

Now when you move your mouse on the mac, it should move on the PC, you should be able to click around and have full control. Depending on the speed of your LAN, VNC is not particularly fast. It's fine for most things, though. Just don't try and watch a video or something

So that's that! Any questions?

 

How to control your Mac from your PC
This is basically the same as the above guide, but the other way around. I'm not going to spend as long on this. It also assumes that you have read the above guide.

Download OSXvnc onto your Mac from HERE. Copy to your apps folder and run it. This should start the server already, and "Start Server" should be greyed out. If it isn't, click it.

Make a note of the IP address.

Go onto your PC, and run Start > Programs > RealVNC > VNC Viewer 4 > Run VNC viewer. Enter the IP address of your Mac (192.168.0.6 for me) and press OK. You should be able to see your Mac's desktop in a window on your PC. Job's a good'un.

If you want the server to run at startup on your Mac, there is an option for that in the OSXvnc window - startup tab. Self explanatory