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New iPod Owner Onslaught Overwhelms iTunes
Billosaur writes "In the post-Christmas rush to power up and use their new iPods, an onslaught of downloaders brought iTunes to its knees, according to CNN. Monday and Tuesday saw users posting message after message about slow downloads and the iTunes site denying them entry. The heavy traffic was apparently more than the system could bear, what with the large numbers of people receiving iPods and iTunes gift cards. Perhaps Apple was underestimating just how successful they were going to be?"
They have something called "Google" for those sorts of things. Googling on "usenet" and "september" would've gotten you a very quick answer.
Chris Mattern
Here's a hint: If you don't recognize the reference, you should probably just move on.
But I don't mind. Keep wasting your mod points. Please.
I am encoding many HDTV programs (mostly PBS stuff live NOVA, Frontline, American Experience, Nature, etc) As much as possible I use the iPod format (mpg4) I do it only if the original mpeg2 recording has a 4:3 or 16:9 format and no black bars. Unfortunately in many cases the recordings have horizontal or vertical bars I do not know how to remove (vertical bars are the most annoying). Whenever I have black bars I am forced to use the divx (or xvid) encoder which makes it possible to remove the black bars but the encoded files it do not play on a video iPod.
Question: How do I cut the black bars for iPod encoding?. I use EyeTv 2.32 on Mac OSX 10.4.8 for recording and transcoding+dixv 6.4 encoder. Whenever I have too many mpeg2 streams to transcode I also use transcode+dvdrip under linux (I only have one mac for transcoding but I have many linux PCs on which I can do transcoding. It may happen that over 200-300GB TV raw mpeg2 streams have accumulated and the only way to keep pace with recording is to use linux for transcoding, otherwise I would run out of space. Any Linux solutions for iTunes mpeg4 transcoding?