I have a whole bunch of photography tutorials I converted from Flash video format (.flv) to .mp4 so I can watch them on my iPad. Since those tutorials are broken down into a myriad of .mp4 episodes it makes it much harder to watch them in the right order. I needed to find a way to merge several episodes into large movies. This is where Squared 5′s MPEG StreamClip for Mac comes in handy. While this free video conversion tool allows you to convert alls sorts of video formats to .mp4, it also allows you to merge multiple .mp4 videos. Here’s how to do it. Read more »

I have a bunch of photography tutorials in the Flash video .flv format which I want to watch on my iPad. As you may be aware, everything with the name Flash in it doesn’t play too well on Apple’s iOS devices. VLC Media Player for iOS is able to play the .flv format but Apple doesn’t allow 3rd party software devs to use the built-in H.264 hardware acceleration for video playback. As as result, .flv videos usually don’t play very well on iOS devices. Besides, I prefer to manage my video collection in iTunes instead of dragging every clip onto an app icon.

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Some smart folks over at macprime.ch found out that the Swiss iTunes store is being populated with movie titles for the first time. I fired up my Apple TV 2 to see if it sees the movies in the Swiss iTunes store as well but as of now, they don’t show up yet (see screenshot below). In iTunes, the non-HD rentals have a price tag of CHF 3.50 and HD-rentals will be streamed to you for CHF 4.50. TV shows don’t seem to be available at all. Read more »

Lately, I always get an error message when I try to sync my iPhone in iTunes. The message simply says “The iPhone cannot by synced. The required file cannot be found.”

Unfortunately, iTunes doesn’t say exactly what file is missing. While playing with the sync options in iTunes I found out, that the problem is related to Apple Aperture 3 in my case. If you’re using iPhoto instead of Apple Aperture, you may find a solution in this Apple support note. If you’re getting this error message in iTunes and you’re syncing your Aperture 3 library (or parts of it) to your iPhone, I may have a solution for you. Read more »

Today, my Mac crashed with a kernel panic. After rebooting I tried to start iTunes but it just showed this error message:
iTunes application could not be opened. An unknown error occurred (13010).

I remembered that I was in the process of updating the iTunes Genius database when the kernel panic occurred. I was able to start iTunes again after deleting the iTunes Library Genius.itdb file. You’ll find the Genius database file in the direcory $HOME/Music/iTunes.