Craig's Musings

Wow - thanks for all the good wishes! I'm scrambling to prep for the WWDC - I only accepted the Mac BU role a few days ago, so it's a bit of a fire drill and I haven't kept up with the various comments. I'll try a bulk response here and see how it goes.

Kermit: I agree on the surface it could seems weird that I'm complaining about $2 a show given the money I spent to get set up. It's not $2, it's $30-$50 to buy a season, and that adds up, year after year, whereas the AppleTV's & Xbox 360's are a onetime investment. Also, I might want to watch back episodes of Seinfeld, but I don't want to watch them enough to spend $40 or whatever * 9 seasons. Same with Friends. Or Will and Grace - or pick your favorite sitcom. $40 per season * 40 or 50 or 60 seasons is a HUGE investment, and I'd never make it. I would, however, download ad supported versions and watch those (like In2TV from AOL) (hint, hint, iTunes guys ).

Kyle: DirectX for the Mac would be a heck of a project, but I think getting to work on applications for the Mac platform while inside Microsoft has got more than enough excitement for me.

Stephen: THANK YOU for the great Jericho news. It is unfortunate that CBS' response to folks in the internet and DVR age was not to figure out how to embrace the internet and DVR age, but was rather "PLEASE, would you watch it on our time schedule on your TV, just like the good old '70s".

VMarks: I have seen solutions that allow you to make h.264's out of MS-DVR files, but not that would add all the meta data to make it into a TV series. I would definitely use a product that seamlessly integrated my recorded TV into iTunes.

Spyros: Here's what I did (probably easier to script it as Kyle suggests, but if you only want to do a few items and don't know how to use the scripts, my manual way might work for you): Drag and drop the video file you want to change to a TV show into iTunes. Select "Get info" from the options menu. In the info tab, enter the name of the episode under Name, Artist and Album Artist are the name of the TV series (like "Battlestar Galactica"), the Track Number field gets the episode number (like 5 of 24, but the "of" number isn't needed, so you can just enter 5), the Album field is the name of the TV series plus the season info (like "Battlestar Galactica, Season 5"), and the Disc number field is filled out with 1 of 1. Next the Video tab: select Video Kind: "TV Show", under Show ender the name of the series (like "Battlestar Galactica"), Season Number and Episode Number are as you would expect, and for episode ID, what I have done is put 4 digit number: 2 digit season number followed by a 2 digit episode number like 0105 (season 1, episode 5).

Okay - gotta get back to getting for the WWDC. My first in-person Stevenote - I can't wait!