Well, I’m at it again, after developing the ISOx360 and Wii Tools, I thought about what else might be a useful tool for all of the fellow Mac OS X users out there. One thing that came to mind was that most of the HD content that can be found on the internet is usually in MKV format.

I wont cover the MKV format in-depth, just know that it is a container and not a codec, similar to how an AVI can be encoded as a divx or an xvid, an MKV file can use many different codecs. Most commonly MKV files contain the H.264 / X.264 codec for Video and the DTS / AC3 codec for audio.

The other thing you need to know about MKV files and HD content is that a typical 720P MKV file using an H.264 codec has a max bit-rate of about 9000, currently the AppleTV can only support 720P content with a Video bit-rate of up to 5000. If this limitation didn’t exist we could easily transcode the file to an MP4 / M4V container, but because of the Video limitation, we need to re-encode the file at a lower bit-rate. Don’t worry about quality, I haven’t seen any noticeable decrease in quality when re-encoding.

So, enough with the tech talk, you’re probably wondering, the title of the post is Convert MKV to MP4 on a Mac, so I’ll get on with it. The application that I’ve developed makes this an easy 1 step process. You load the MKV file, choose a save location for the new MP4 file, pick a few options and click convert. When its done, you can copy the MP4 file to your AppleTV / iTunes and enjoy great quality HD content.

Note: My application will also remove subtitles and convert any DTS audio track to AC3 so that you can keep all the surround sound. The thing is, to enjoy the surround sound, you’ll have to use the optical output on your AppleTV and have a receiver that can correctly decode the audio, along with a nice set of surround sound speakers.

You can download a trial of the application below, it will work exactly 10 times before it is rendered useless at which point you will have to purchase it, but don’t worry I kept the price cheap, only $14.95.

Download :

  Click to Download the MKV2AppleTV Trial (9.4 MiB, 95 hits)

Purchase:
Click to Purchase an MKV2AppleTV License

I recently acquired a white G3 eMac with a 17 inch screen and thought it would be perfect to put into my daughters room. Unfortunately the eMacs didn’t come with built in airports, so no wireless. I looked around online for wireless cards that would work with a Mac and found that they are quite expensive.

Instead of purchasing a wireless adapter online, I went to Wal-Mart and bought a Belkin Wireless USB adapter. After getting home and opening the box, I noticed that there are no Mac drivers on the included CD, furthermore after searching Belkin’s website returned no results for any available Mac drivers for this particular adapter.

After some more searching on google, I found a few sites with drivers for this card for a Mac, but only to find out that there are multiple versions of this particular card. You can use the version matrix below to determine your version.

Version 1 – FCC ID = K7SF5D7050
Version 2 – FCC ID = K7SF5D7050A
Version 3 – FCC ID = K7SF5D7050B
Version 4 – FCC ID = RAXWN4501H
Version 5 – FCC ID = K7SF5D7050E

This article will cover installing Version 4 of the F5D7050 adapter. Although, I will also be listing available drivers for Versions 1, 2, and 3. The Version 4 driver may also work for the Version 5 adapter, although this has not been tested, and if anyone tries and succeeds, I would appreciate a comment to let everyone know.

F5D7050 Version 1 & 2 Mac Driver
F5D7050 Version 3 Mac Driver
F5D7050 Version 4 Mac Driver

Each of these drivers is installed in much the same way, there is an install file that you run and then restart the Mac when the install has completed. After the Mac restarts you have to click on System Preferences and click on Network. You’ll receive a pop-up dialog alerting you that a new network device has been detected. Apply the change and then start the wireless utility if it hasn’t been started already. Scan for wireless networks, when your network has been found, connect to it.

That’s all there is to it. The install is very simple and straight forward. If anyone has any input / advice, feel free to post for others to read.

This was giving me a problem some days ago so I thought I’d write up a quick tutorial on how to shrink dmg files on a mac. Why would you want to do this ? Well lets say you are creating an application and you want to package it in a DMG so you open up Disk Utility and create a blank image. Well you can only choose certain sizes. Most of us would choose a 40MB image so we have plenty of initial space to work with.

As far as I know there are 2 methods for shrinking the dmg down to the size of its contents, they are listed below.

Method – 1:

• Right Click on the DMG
• Click Compress

This will generate a zip file down to the actual size of the content of the DMG since free space has 100% compression ratio.

Method – 2:

This method involves the use of the Terminal App which can be found under Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal

• Launch Terminal
• Type the following hdiutil resize -size 10M /Path/To/DMG/DMG_Name.dmg

Code Breakdown:

• hdiutil – A utility that comes preinstalled with Mac OS X, that manipulates disk images, etc…
• -size – An argument passed to hdiutil, indicating that you want to change the size of an image.
• 10M – means I am changing the dmg size to 10 Megabytes, insert your own value here.
• The rest should be self explanitory

So there you have it, 2 methods to resize your dmg in Mac OS X. Thanks for reading.

If anyone would benefit from having a little GUI App that resizes DMG’s let me know, if I receive enough requests, I might make one and post it here.