What Apple Doesn't Want you to Know...

I spend a lot of time on the Apple support forums, mostly helping out with Apple TV and iPhone issues. I've been on the Apple forums for quite a while -- so long that I'm a "level 4" (awarded to only those who've been extremely helpful) which mostly stems from the days when iPods rarely worked right for those of us with PCs.

Anyway, as much as I enjoy helping out there it absolutely frustrates me no end that I can't post some of the most useful things to know, due to the forum policies (and Apple's own "We control your content" policy). So, regardless of the fact that no one will ever see them, at least I can write them down here for my own peace of mind, such as it is.

These are mostly for the iPhone, but owners of the Touch, Video iPods and Apple TV will find some useful information as well. Nothing top secret here -- you can find all of this yourself if you search the web and have a technical sort of mind, but for those without the inclinations it might help a lot.

1) Ripping DVDs. The number one thing most folks want to do on their iPhones/Touch is to watch movies. Why not, it's what the device is really designed to do, with its gorgeous screen and ability to send video output to your TV (more later on this). But short of buying content from the iTunes store, Apple doesn't want you to know that the best and easiest (and free) way of getting content is from the DVDs you own.

They take this position because the DRM folks have held it's illegal to use your DVDs in any other way than God (that is, the movie studios and MPAA) have intended; namely, to pop into a DVD player. You can't back them up, you can't convert them to a more convenient format (or any other format) -- in short, you don't really own them, you just rent them for viewing (in which case you probably ought to never buy any DVDs anyway and just use Netflix).

For those of you who disagree with this there is a program called Handbrake, for both the Macs and the PCs. It's free and it will rip your DVDs wonderfully although the PC version does not do it for copyprotected ones. Hey, you say, aren't all my store bought DVDs copy protected? Yes, and that's why you want to buy AnyDVD which will remove that pesky annoyance and allow you to back them up properly (and, more importantly, convert them to a format you can put on your iPhone/Touch).

2) Ringers. Apple won't allow you to put any ringers on their phone that you don't buy from the iTunes store. Not even from music you already own. So you buy it twice (because you can't just buy a ringer, you first have to buy the song and then you buy the ringer from that song!). This is, once again, because God (the ASCAP variety) says that just because you own a CD doesn't give you the right to use it for anything other than playing in a CD player (really! They don't even want you to record it to MP3s to use elsewhere, but they haven't figured out a way to stop that... yet). So the rights to a ringer are different than the rights to a CD than the rights to having the song on your iPhone etc. etc.

The first time the iPhone came out third party folks did not like this and wrote applications that got around this limitation. So Apple came out with a new update (1.1.1) that stopped this nasty stuff from happening. Anyone want to guess what happened next? That's right, boys and girls, someone wrote a way around that protection. And so it goes -- I always bet on the folks who can hack, because most of them do this stuff for fun and they are very very good at it, while the folks who do the protection stuff do it for a living (and thus don't have nearly the emotional investment in the process, and usually aren't as smart anyway).

For you Mac folks there is iToner, for us PC types there is iPhoneRingToneMaker (doesn't have quite the "ring" of iToner, does it?) and either one will allow you to use any of your own sound files as ringers, which has a lot of advantages over having to buy what is available at the iTunes store.

3) Sending Video to your TV. This isn't exactly something Apple doesn't want you to know per se, but they don't spell it out. You can't use anything other than the special video cables Apple sells for sending output to your component or composite TV. What's more, you will need both the cable as well as the universal output jack if you want the ability to remotely control the video (starting/stopping/RW/FF) and you will indeed want this. Total cost: $100 for both.

It's pricey but worth it. The picture, using a ripped DVD (with Handbrake using the iPhone defaults but bumped up in resolution to 640) is absolutely pristine on either composite or component (component will have a slight edge in sharpness and color clarity). It's as good as the original DVD to my discriminating eyes, although blacks do suffer from a little blochiness (you really only notice this on title pages, however). Slideshows will also output but nothing else (so the dreams you had of having Safari on your projection TV will have to die. Sorry).

I have more stuff I may post later if I feel like it (or not -- hey, no one will ever read this but me so I'll do what I want :>)