Chatter Of The Squirrel

Amen

June 15, 2008 on 4:24 pm | In Comics | No Comments

The following is a webcomic from http://xkcd.com.

In the author’s own words, “A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language.”

The art is just stick figures. But the content is funny. In a math-geek sort of way sometimes.

It may not be for everyone. But I enjoy it a lot.

Backing Up Your DVDs

June 15, 2008 on 3:44 pm | In Me! | No Comments

Had an interesting challenge recently.

There was a rather expensive DVD that I needed to back-up. But it was Dual Layered.

I could buy a dual layered DVD-R and do it, but read that DVD-DL formats aren’t the most reliable. I have my doubts with single layered DVDs as it is already. Using one laser to burn two layers of chemicals in the same spot? Sounds rather dodgy to me too. And each DVD-R is RM10-18 each. And I’m making several copies.

Rip the DVD and re-encode it into Divx. Can’t. Because there are many distinct chapters, arranged in menus and submenus, and 9 camera angles per chapter. Can’t rip this without losing the camera angle functionality. Unless someone just wants to view thru the whole thing, one cam angle after another, in one contiguous video.

No.

I needed to keep all the menus intact. And just re-encode every cam angle to a slightly lower resolution, so that the final product can fit into a single layer DVD-R.

Amazingly, these tools do exist! And they’re free! These are some of the best of breed DVD making tools I’ve used.

Begin with DVD Decrypter. This will rip the contents of the DVD into your harddisk. And also does the necessary if it encounters encryption. It’s simple to use, and it never hurts to be sure in case the DVD you want to back up is encrypted. Which mine was.

Then the magic happens with DVD Shrink. It’ll automatically read the files you just ripped, and rebuild it into an image that will fit just nice into a single layer DVD-R. It’s also versatile enough for you to do many other things. Yet at the same time dummy-proof enough for beginners to do exactly what they want it to do.

There’s no discernible loss of quality, and all the functionalities and camera angles are there.

And finally, Imgburn is extremely useful. It’ll burn the ripped folder / disc image into a DVD-R, or create a disc image from folders / files etc. I find that I like this better than Nero. For some reason, Nero sometimes can’t fill the buffer as fast as the buffer is written to disc. Which is weird, even when I’ve got 2GB of RAM and nothing else running.

With three simple to use, and free software, I have my backups.