Mac Hacks

Chapter 10. Multimedia Hacks

There’s a story, perhaps apocryphal, that upon being offered the design for the Apple I, an executive at Hewlett-Packard mused that he couldn’t see a use for a home computer except to store recipes. That comment is both insightful and shortsighted all at once. Recipe storage is a great use of a computer, but what the executive missed (because of his lack of imagination) was the progression of things. Macs can still hold recipes but they can also hold music, TV shows, and movies. With drives always increasing in size, your Mac can process and play multimedia files. The future wasn’t just recipes—the future meant that computers could store and play anything that could be digitized. This chapter explains some ways to make your multimedia experience even better.

Hack 43. Turn Your Mac into a DVR

Just about every program that shows up on your TV screen is hiding somewhere on the Internet, but finding them can be tricky. Let your Mac do the hard work of finding the shows you want to see.

One of the ads currently being shown on cable TV tells of the woes of a family where more than one person wants to record a show to a DVR. Apparently the yearnings of various family members to record their own shows for later viewing is a major source of domestic frustration.

It doesn’t have to be this way. You can bag all the shows you want to see on your Mac and let the other members of your household war over whose shows are going to be recorded on the cable box. All you need ...