Posted on Nov 22, 2007 under Apps |
Ever wanted to make a backup copy of your DVD’s? Here’s a couple of valuable apps to get you on your way.
“MacTheRipper is a free DVD ripper (extractor) for Mac OS X. It can extract commercial DVD movies to your hard drive, minus all the copy protections and region controls put in place by DVD publishers. You can then use various tools to burn the movie back to DVD-R for use in DVD players, or convert the movie to different formats for playback with a variety of devices. MacTheRipper is intended to backup DVDs you have legally purchased for personal use.”
Check it out at http://www.mactheripper.org/
“With DVD2one you can make a movie-only or full disk copy of your DVD for personal use on a single DVD-Recordable.” Key features include:
Unique video compression engine: combines blazing speed with the highest quality.
Multi-processor, multi-core and multi-computer (grid) compatible.
Process a movie to fit on a single recordable in a matter of 15 to 30 minutes (depending on the speed of your computer).
Make a movie-only copy of your DVD. Why waste space and image quality on unnecessary intros, menus and language tracks?
Make a full disk copy of your DVD. For those who want to keep those fancy menus and intros.
Powerful join mode. Useful for putting multiple episodes of a (tv) series or joining both sides of a flipper on 1 disk.
Batchprocessing: Program up to 15 disks to be processed one after another without user intervention.
Remaster your CDs on DVD in Super CD quality.
Builtin burnengine.
Written from scratch, not based on any old code, libraries or existing opensource projects.
Both PC Windows and Mac OS-X versions available.
http://www.dvd2one.com/
Posted on Nov 16, 2007 under Apps |
Occasionally I come across two avi files (divX / Xvid) that I’d like to join together. It’s annoying.
Lets say you have two movie files, part1, and part2 (or CD1 and CD2 as the case may be) and you like your home theatre mac to be well organised without “parts” to movies. You really want those two files to just be one file.
Join them together with this free app I found called D-Vision. D-Vision is actually “donationware” meaning if you like the app you can donate (if you feel like it). The web site is in french however the software is english, the download is easy to find, and if you prefer you could probably download it from another repository like macupdate or versiontracker.
D-Vision is primarily a GUI to encode Divx 3, Divx 4, Xvid and h264 with Mencoder however it does have various other useful tools such as joining video files together, segment files, repair files, convert audio, etc.
My experience with joining DivX files has been great. While not 100% perfect it does the job really well and doesn’t take very long to process the job (which you can queue in a job queue, which is cool). I really recommend this app. Some say they prefer it over the infamous “Handbrake” app.
Posted on Nov 16, 2007 under Apps |
I’ve been using MPEG Streamclip for some time now to convert video files to different formats. For example a .mov file to .mp4. It’s free to download and use, and it’s just plain great.
From the www.squared5.com site
“MPEG Streamclip is a powerful video converter, player, editor for Mac and Windows. It can play many movie files, not only MPEGs; it can convert MPEG files between muxed/demuxed formats for authoring; it can encode movies to many formats, including iPod; it can cut, trim and join movies.
MPEG Streamclip can also download videos from YouTube and Google by entering the page URL.”
Posted on Nov 14, 2007 under Apps |
with Handbrake!
Handbrake is just plain cool. You can pop in one of your DVD’s, choose from a pile of preset’s for your device (eg AppleTV) and hit GO. It rips the DVD and encodes it to MP4 suitable for playback on your AppleTV. There are presets for iPod, iPhone, PSP, and many many more! the nitty gritty…
HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 converter, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows.
Supported sources:
Any DVD-like source: VIDEO_TS folder, DVD image or real DVD (encrypted or unencrypted, but protection methods other than CSS are not supported and must be handled externally with third-party software), and some .VOB and .TS files
PAL or NTSC
AC-3, DTS, LPCM or MPEG audio tracks
Outputs:
File format: MP4, MKV, AVI or OGM
Video: MPEG-4 or H.264 (1 or 2 passes or constant quantizer/rate encoding)
Audio: AAC, MP3, Vorbis or AC-3 pass-through (supports encoding of several audio tracks)
Misc features:
Chapter selection
Basic subtitle support (burned into the picture)
Integrated bitrate calculator
Picture deinterlacing, cropping and scaling
Grayscale encoding
