One path Toast is taking is to focus on its core strengths and make use of its encoding and decoding expertise by becoming a media conversion utility. The second direction appears to be more of a business partnership move, through the creation of a software bundle with other vendors whose programs complement Toast.

Toast as a Media Converter

Out of the box, Toast is a decent media conversion tool. I compared it to two other media conversion tools that I use regularly, the well-established Handbrake, and the lesser-known Pavtube, to see just how good it is. As you can see from the chart above, it lags behind Handbrake and Pavtube in terms of its ability to take content directly from disc-based sources and create different files using those sources. It also lacks a lot of fine-tuning options and the ability to queue conversions. Still, with a little more work, it could become a very competitive conversion tool thanks to its extensive output format support.

Toast as a Complementary Utility

By placing more of an emphasis on conversion than burning, Toast has entered into the media conversion market with a decent offering. On its own, Toast isn’t exactly a powerhouse of creativity. Sure you can create a DVD menu system, but for the most part, the creativity happens outside of Toast itself. To that end, Toast Titanium Pro has partnered with some other software developers to create a bundle of utilities that complement the creativity process of established media creation powerhouses.

Roxio has been very careful to choose what software to bundle in with Toast Pro.  They didn’t directly challenge iMovie, Premier or Final Cut by resurrecting some of Avid’s now retired consumer-based products for Mac.  Instead, Roxio made the smart move with Toast to focus on complementary tools that fill the creativity void it has in this space.  Boinx Software’s FotoMagico is a great choice to author clips that will be added to a movie.  BIAS SoundSoap helps remove unwanted background noise from videos.  SmartSound SonicFire adds the ability to create great soundtracks if you are not a musician.  Combine that with Toast’s existing burn and conversion capabilities, and you have a powerful set of media creation utilities.

Looking the core value of Toast in a disc-challenged world, if Roxio sees fit to expand Toast’s conversion features to handle a little more control on some of the low-level settings like de-interlacing and noise reduction, as well as add in the ability to process a batch of media files in series or in parallel, it has the opportunity of being the best media conversion utility on the market. Unfortunately, Toast’s current strengths lie in its Pro version and its strategic business partnerships. I would definitely recommend purchasing the Pro version of Toast over upgrading to the latest version of iLife or investing in Adobe Premier, but if you want conversion tools, look elsewhere for now.

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Surprisingly, I’ve found DVDs the most challenging of all disc formats to preserve and back up. The variety of software available for the task is overwhelming, and the success rate of said solutions is far from 100 percent. Sometimes you have to try different software, or tweak certain in order to get the desired outcome. Here’s a guide to using some of the best current Mac software available for DVD archiving.

Keeping Your Discs Clean

For whatever reason, DVDs tend to be the most fragile of the optical disc formats that I’ve had to deal with. Beyond keeping a soft cloth nearby to wipe down each disc before decrypting and decoding, I’ve found that more serious means of cleaning discs are often times necessary.  Generally speaking, Aleratec’s DVD/CD Disc Repair Kit for about $40 on Amazon gets the job done. You’d be amazed at how many failed rips can be resolved just by cleaning your disc.

Decrypt and Copy to Hard Drive

Once you have a clean disc, the next step is to get its contents onto your hard drive. On the Mac, there are only a few good options to consider for doing this. Longtime favorite MacTheRipper has all but disappeared, as has the open-source Fairmount.  That leaves Pavtube and The Little App Factory’s RipIt.  Since I already covered Pavtube when working with Blu-ray on the Mac, this time I’ll focus using RipIt.

1. Download, install and launch RipIt.
2. In the Preferences (Ripit > Preferences in the Menu Bar), under General, set the destination for the extracted files.
3. Also in General Preferences, make sure that “Use .dvdmedia Extension” is not selected. This will make sure your movies are saved as a standard VIDEO_TS folder, which can be read by many applications.
4. Insert a DVD and click Rip.

It’s that easy. And once you set the location where you want to store the decrypted movie files to, you don’t have to change your preferences unless you want to select a new destination. Just insert the DVD and click Rip.

Encode for Apple TV

While both Pavtube and RipIt offer the ability to compress the DVD’s content into various other formats directly while ripping, I prefer to use HandBrake on the Mac and its built-in preset list of supported device targets. Encoding from a DVD that has been copied to the hard drive is also much faster than encoding from the original disc.  To encode your video files with HandBrake, all you need to do is:

1. Download, install and launch HandBrake.
2. Click on the Source icon in HandBrake’s toolbar and navigate to the location where you ripped your DVD’s VIDEO_TS folder to using RipIt (which you set in step 2, above).
3. In the drop-down menu labeled Title, select the title you wish to encode.  HandBrake usually does a pretty good job at automatically selecting the actual movie title, as it is typically the longest running video on the DVD.
4. Toggle the presets and select Apple TV as the destination device.
5. Select a destination and file name.
6. Click on the green Start button.

Encode for Everything Else

Unfortunately there is not one best encoding format for all devices.  If you encode to the lowest common denominator (likely an older iPod), you’ll notice serious quality problems on larger HDTVs.  You can certainly follow the exact same steps above in HandBrake and select different destination devices each time, but there are two other more convenient options available to you:

iTunes Conversion. In Advanced menu in iTunes, you will notice two options: ”Create iPod or iPhone Version,” and “Create iPad or Apple TV Version.”  This works great for turning files in your library that you’ve created using HandBrake for Apple TV into ones that work with your iPhone or iPod.  This process tends to take a very long time to complete.

iSquint Conversion. Like MacTheRipper, iSquint has fallen from grace and is no longer supported.  That doesn’t mean it doesn’t still work.  Once you’ve created a version of the movie file created via HandBrake, all you need to do is drag and drop your media files onto iSquint’s single screen. iSquint is great when creating versions of movie files for older video iPods and iPod Classics.

Unfortunately, from time to time you’ll encounter a DVD that just wont rip using either iRip or Pavtube.  In these cases, if you have access to a Windows machine (virtual, Boot Camp, or physical) either AnyDVD or DVDFab should help you resolve the problem. Converting your DVD movies to Apple device-friendly formats may not be easy, but once it’s done, you can sit back and enjoy your film collection however you choose, which feels pretty good.

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Mac OS X is a wonder. When it comes to personal information management, entertainment and the Internet, it’s got all the basics covered. Beyond that, there are a handful of “essential” apps most Mac owners install on a new machine within minutes of booting it up for the first time. Handbrake is undoubtedly one of those essentials. And it just got a serious new upgrade.

Handbrake is a very handy (pun intended) DVD-ripping utility that converts DVDs to self-contained video files that can be played back on a computer or mobile device. (Contrary to the outright lies of major motion picture studios, there’s nothing wrong with having digital backups of movies you already own). In addition, DVDs can be converted into a number of formats, resolutions and aspect ratios. For many years, it has served as the single easiest way to get my movies off-of DVD discs and onto my iPods, iPhones and even my PSP.

The latest release, Handbrake 0.9.4, includes support for Snow Leopard, and is also available in 64-bit editions for both Leopard and Snow Leopard. It also adds the ability to include multiple subtitle tracks to exported video and a new “live preview” for viewing the likely outcome of an export before committing to a lengthy rip.

According to the release notes on the Handbrake website, the latest version includes new features like “macroblock tree rate control” and “weighted P-Frame prediction.” I’ve absolutely no idea what any of that means, and although they do provide links to explanatory articles, it made my head swim. I’ll just assume it’s all very swish and futuristic and good for my rips.

The introduction of a 64-bit version is good news for those of us using true 64-bit multi-core processors, though the performance increase is a fairly modest 10 percent. The software also supports non-DVD encoding, which is great news for those of us who do a lot of video editing. (I prefer to use Final Cut but often have to import raw data into iMovie only to export it out to a format Final Cut will accept. Handbrake won’t cut out this extra conversion step, but it performs far faster than the monolith that is iMovie and provides more flexibility in export formats.)

It’s not all about video, either. Handbrake offers great audio encoding options, including the newly-added ability to encode AAC using OS X’s Core Audio (which means far higher quality than was possible previously).

Of course, there are a lot of other software titles that offer similar functionality (Aimersoft’s popular DVD Ripper, for instance) but Handbrake is free. Although this means it has no official support, it does enjoy an active and enthusiastic user community so if you get stuck you won’t have far to go to find answers and help.

If you are using a 64 bit machine and want to get the full 64-bit goodness from Handbrake, you’ll need the 64-bit version of VLC Player, the latest nightly builds of which can be found here. (Please note that VLC Player 64-bit is beta software and as such offers no end-user support.) Handbrake 0.9.4 is available from the Handbrake website now.

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Leading up to Apple’s music event last week, rumor sites had been circling about a new format from Apple that would provide additional content, like lyrics, liner notes, video interviews and more. The rumors came true as Apple announced yet one more way to spend more money inside iTunes: iTunes LPs for music and iTunes Extras for video. Here’s what they look like up close.

Deconstructing the LP

When you purchase an iTunes LP (for this example, I’m using Tyrese Gibson’s MAYHEM!), you actually end up downloading the songs included and the animated content in a new format, called .itlp. This new format is (in this example) a very big file, a little over 400MB. Not only does it take a while to download that content, but if you start to fill your library with several of these, you’ll run out of room very quickly.

For diehard fans, iTunes LPs are simply amazing. In MAYHEM!, the additional content is an animated comic book that comes to life with spoken dialog. As more and more artists sign onto creating iTunes LPs, these will become big time components of true music enthusiasts. Let’s just hope new iTunes LPs are released more frequently than the GarageBand Artist Lessons.

And Now for Video

Apple also announced iTunes Extras for video content, allowing quick scene selection and other animated “behind the scenes” content available in these exclusive packages. For many, this could be the real deciding factor between opting to purchase a new movie on DVD or Blu-ray versus purchasing it within iTunes. The end result, while perhaps not equal in terms of additional content, is a complete movie experience, with a substantial amount of supplemental content. Unfortunately, iTunes Extras are only available when purchasing content from iTunes; they are not available with movie rentals.

If you purchase content from iTunes on your iPhone and that content supports iTunes LP or iTunes Extra, the base content (songs or movie) will download immediately to your device. The LP and Extras content will download to your computer the next time you sync your iPhone or iPod touch. Upon doing so, be sure to go to “Store” and click “Check For Available Downloads” to download the additional content.

A Good Start

The iTunes Store currently has 12 iTunes LPs available (and even some of those are pre-orders) and 15 movies featuring iTunes Extras. Though Steve likes to attribute Apple’s new iTunes LP concept to a desire to pay homage to classic LPs that included bonus content, one can’t help but think that these extra features are offered to persuade users to purchase complete albums instead of a la carte downloads. The concept is very trendy and will definitely turn heads, but will the majority of our music collection feature iTunes LPs? Probably not. Will we have them for some of the big time major artists? Maybe.

What about iTunes Extras for movies? Will this stop some people from ripping their own DVDs and purchasing the content from iTunes? Perhaps. It’s unlikely that anybody (or perhaps this is a challenge to the Handbrake team) will be able to reverse engineer the .itlp format to allow users to have their own ripped DVDs with all special features play natively within iTunes.

At the moment, iTunes LPs and iTunes Extras are only playable within, you guessed it, iTunes 9. Others have already noticed, however, that the interface for these could definitely support interaction through touch, so perhaps eventually we’ll see the ability to sync these content types with our iPhones, iPod touches or even Apple TVs.

Now the question is passed to you. What do you think? Is it worth it? Have you pre-ordered Pearl Jam or downloaded The Doors yet?

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With Apple’s music oriented media event right around the corner, everyone is abuzz with thoughts about new iPods, Apple TV updates, tablet rumors and more. The one thing we can all but guarantee besides new iPods is an update to iTunes. But what will this version bring? Social aspects have been rumored, but there is still room for improvement. So, here’s my Top 10 wish list for iTunes 9.

1. More Stable & Efficient On Windows

This particular point doesn’t apply to me, as I am a Mac user, but I do know that the Windows version of iTunes has suffered in comparison to its Mac brethren. Though some of the programming technologies in the Windows world are not as robust as their Mac equivalents, I do hope Apple will continue to optimize iTunes as it adds new features. Currently, it’s just a resource hog.

2. Better Audiobook Support

iTunes is a great application to manage your audiobooks and Apple’s partnership with Audible makes it even easier to buy them. What really strikes me as problematic though is how cumbersome it is to sync specific audiobooks to your iPod or iPhone. At the moment, it’s either “all” or “none.” When you consider that some audiobooks have multiple files and some users have insanely huge collections of audiobooks, it really seems like an issue Apple would have refined already. Due to their length, most users listen to one or two audiobooks at a time and don’t need to bring their entire collection with them. The only solution to this dilemma is creating playlists for specific audiobooks and that’s more time consuming than it should be.

3. Better File Organization for Large Libraries

As our libraries of media content grow and grow, Apple is focused on being center stage in helping us organize it all. iTunes is a powerful application and supports a wide gamut of different file types (music, movies, TV shows, audiobooks, podcasts, etc.). It would be ideal for Apple to allow users to manage those specific areas on different hard drives since some of us have iTunes libraries that are growing too fast to store on just one drive. We can work around this at the moment by turning off the “Keep iTunes organized” feature when adding new content, but a more elegant solution would be welcome.

4. Ability to Import Unencrypted DVD & Blu-ray Content

We all know there are licensing issues to work out, but since Apple feels its the company’s lot in life to manage all of my digital content, why not figure out a way to manage all of the physical content I have laying around too? If I can “find a way to decrypt my DVD” (hello VLC), then iTunes can make a copy of it. This has actually been rumored and I would love to see it come to fruition.

5. Support for HD content on iPhone & iPods

While at first this really doesn’t seem like an iTunes feature, I personally hate having to maintain two copies of content with compatible versions for my Apple TV and Mac (HD content) and my iPods and iPhone (SD content). For some cases this isn’t a problem, but I find myself watching a lot of HD podcasts and they simply will not sync. If Apple could resolve this issue, users wouldn’t have to download iTunes Store content like TV shows twice (one in HD and one in SD). They could just download the HD file and be ready to rock.

6. More Robust Tagging

There are lots of apps available (like MetaX) that give users the ability to tag their content with more useful information than what iTunes allows them to do on their own. Content from the iTunes Store features some of this useful information (like movie director, actors, etc.). Why can’t I edit this for my own content directly within iTunes? Why can’t I tag my own music as clean or explicit from within iTunes?

7. Lyric & Metadata Lookups

iTunes has the ability to lookup artwork for our own music that may be missing covers, but now that iPhones and iPods support lyrics, wouldn’t it be great if iTunes could search, download and tag your files with the appropriate lyrics? Better yet, it would be even better if iTunes could fill in missing metadata information like some third-party apps do.

8. More Robust Sharing Support

iTunes 4 brought about the ability to stream playlists to other iTunes users on a local network. This feature was hacked to allow users to stream across the Internet and Apple quickly released a patch to fix this. Since then, several vendors, first and foremost being SimplifyMedia, have risen up to provide this service again. While SimplifyMedia is great, a more ideal solution would show you your entire iTunes library, with podcasts, audiobooks, TV shows, and the like. To be honest, if Apple even rolled this out as a feature exclusive to Mobile Me users, and allowed the ability to view this content streamed via me.com, that would be enough to justify a membership to me.

9. Music Videos

Probably the smallest of all the content types in my library, music videos are just lumped together in my main library. How come there isn’t a separate section for music videos?

10. Easier Syncing Between Multiple Macs

At the moment, I sync my iPhone on my iMac, where the bulk of my media is stored (simply because it has the biggest hard drive). It would be great if I could sync my iPhone or iPods there for some content, but sync it to my laptop for contacts, calendars and iPhone apps as that content changes more frequently.

In short order, we’ll actually see what Apple announces at its media event. In the meantime, what features would you like to see added to iTunes 9?

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With the latest version of Final Cut Studio hot off the shelves, many are scratching their heads over what Apple’s take on the future of DVDs actually may be. DVD Studio Pro hasn’t received a major update since the 4.0 release at NAB 2005, and iDVD hasn’t been updated since 2007, so is the DVD dead?

Well, that conversation has come up plenty of times before, and it always seems like the pundits are waiting for the next version of Final Cut Studio or iLife before voicing their thoughts on whether DVD production is seeing its curtain call.

Many insist that optical discs are dying on the Mac. The supporting arguments are there. The Apple TV features no optical drive, and neither does the MacBook Air. Apple has referred to Blu-ray as “a bag of hurt” and hasn’t made any obvious plans to endorse the standard any further. The only mention of “next generation” technologies is some support for HD-DVDs in DVD Studio Pro (been there for ages) and limited Blu-ray support in the latest version of Compressor.

What a lot of people fail to realize when considering why Apple hasn’t made a huge foray into the Blu-ray world, is just how different Blu-rays are from DVDs (in terms of functionality). DVD Studio Pro aims to allow professionals to create DVDs with all the great features that DVDs offer (menus, subtitles, multiple angles, multiple audio tracks, etc.). When you consider the advantages that Blu-ray brings to the table, such as support for Internet-enabled content, seamless branching, access to local storage, and so on, it’s clear that a minor update to a software title isn’t really going to break new ground in this area. Designing a tool to author these takes time. The current competition, Adobe Encore, is a great tool, but still can’t take advantage of some of the more advanced Java-related Blu-ray features. Apple needs to at least meet the current feature set of Encore to stay competitive. The company has already invested a lot of time, energy and money into the video industry with its growth of Final Cut Studio.

To say Apple is forgoing on optical media altogether would be to say it’s slowly, but surely, bowing out of the video market altogether — and nobody in their right mind would believe that is the case.

Regarding hardware, Apple realizes that most people already have some type of optical disc player in their living room, so why should an Apple TV include one? They serve different functions, just like an Apple TV isn’t going to replace your cable box or satellite receiver. (DVR on the other hand? Well, not yet anyway.) Sure, it would be nice for an Apple TV to include a Blu-ray drive, but if Apple had already included it when it first started shipping these a few years ago, it would be facing an even larger uphill battle for adoption (a la Sony and its Playstation 3).

And the MacBook Air? I’m seriously amazed at those who see a lack of optical drive in these portables as an indication that Apple is ditching the format altogether. Apple wanted to make a statement with the slimness of the portable, and it felt users of this product did not use optical discs on a regular basis. It was a smart trade-off, but hardly an indication that optical drives will start disappearing from other Macs.

If we’ve learned anything, it’s to not listen to Apple when it “writes off” technologies in its shareholder meetings. Though the company has referred to Blu-ray as a “bag of hurt” in the past, it sits on the Board of Directors of the Blu-ray Disc Association. Apple is a huge proponent of high definition (who wouldn’t be at this point?) and, as such, it realizes that more and more people are shooting in HD and need a way to present that. We’ve discussed before the limitations of the iPod and iPhone platforms as they do not support HD content, and even the Apple TV is limited in this regard. What other solution is there? YouTube? While that’s a great start, Apple is totally aware that people still prefer to have something a bit more portable and higher quality than YouTube.

My personal opinion is that Apple is working on developing Blu-ray authoring solutions (as well as inclusion of Blu-ray drives as the price continues to come down). We’ve seen a small taste of this support in the latest version of Compressor; hints of Blu-ray support in the latest version of iTunes; and I think as time goes on, we will see more support in other apps as well. In the meantime, DVD Studio Pro and iDVD will likely stay right where they are at. It’s easy to develop new themes for these apps, but why split your resources if you’re focusing on some whizz-bang, new app for Blu-ray authoring? In their current states, these applications are quite maxed out for now.

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VLC media player, an open-source application from the VideoLAN project, finally reached version 1.0 today. The software had its original start back in 1996 as a school project from engineering students at the Ecole Centrale Paris (though it wasn’t released as an open source project until 2001).

Through many point releases before today, VLC has continued to expand its capabilities, offering support for HD codecs, a diverse set of file formats, live recording, AirTunes streaming and more.

Crazy Formats, Got Ya Covered!

VLC is based on FFmpeg, which means it supports a wider variety of codecs and file formats than your typical QuickTime or Windows Media Player can handle, such as MKV, Og, or FLAC. (There are, of course, alternatives, such as Perian and other plugins to add additional support to QuickTime, but VLC has some more tricks up its sleeve.)

Since it’s a packet-based player, VLC supports playing content that could be partially corrupted or is incomplete. This reason alone makes VLC a popular media player for torrent lovers. VLC is a great addition to your system and is a recommended download for switchers who are used to viewing AVI files on the PC, since the AVI container supports a myriad of codecs that are not all supported natively on the Mac platform.

The 1.0 release of VLC, codename Goldeneye, is available for both Intel and PowerPC platforms (though it does require Mac OS X 10.5 or 10.6) and can be downloaded here. If you’re using Mac OS X 10.4.x or earlier, you can download the previous build of VLC, version 0.9.9a, from here.

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Have you ever wanted to copy or convert your personal collection of DVDs for backup or easy viewing on your Apple TV, only to be thwarted by CSS encryption? I feel your pain, and so do the good folks at Metakine. Lucky for us, Fairmount is here to help, and it’s free!

CSS, or Content Scramble System, is an approach used by most DVD manufacturers as a way to prevent unauthorized copies and unlicensed playback of DVD content. Unfortunately for consumers, this kind of digital rights management can be cumbersome for those who want to take advantage of their fair use rights. Fairmount makes setting aside this type of DRM extremely easy.

Fairmount works together with the VLC Media Player to decrypt your mounted DVD and replace it with a unencrypted disk image. It’s really simple to do. With a DVD mounted, just launch the Fairmount application and it will automatically and transparently hand off the decryption to VLC and then begin mounting a new decrypted image of the disk.

Once the DVD is decrypted, and the new disk image is mounted, you can then save the video files on to your network, convert them for playback on other devices, or burn the image back to a disk. The decryption is very fast and the exchange with VLC happens completely in the background. You even get a nice animation as the mounted DVD is smeared over with cream cheese, “Bagels are good!”

If you’re planning on burning the image to DVD, the Fairmount download comes bundled with another application from Metakine called DVDRemaster which will let you do just that. If you’re just interested in converting files for viewing on your Apple TV, iPhone, or iPod, I’d like to take this opportunity to recommend an excellent and free application called HandBrake.

Fairmount, VLC, and HandBrake are all free applications released under a General Public License. DVDRemaster is available in both standard and pro versions for $39.99 and $49.99, respectively.

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If you’re in the market for a DVD/CD burning solution for your Mac, you may be interested to hear that Freeridecoding has released an update to BurnAgain FS.

The app is a CD/DVD multisession burning utility for Mac OS X, making it possible to repeatedly change the content of a data CD or DVD directly in the Finder. You can re-mount a CD or DVD as you would a USB drive to add, change or remove files. Disks burned with BurnAgain FS are readable without additional software on all platforms. As BurnAgain FS doesn’t erase the disk each time, changing the content of the media is much faster than burning a new disk.

It provides a great way to make CD burning a whole lot more useful, rather than treating disks as a use-once throwaway commodity.

The update to 1.2 brings several important improvements to the application including interface enhancements that make BurnAgain FS even easier to use, improved handling of file permissions, improved reliability when renaming or moving large number of files, overall improved performance and the option to disable the creation of AppleDouble files.

A few of the highlights cited by the developer include:

• Burn multiple sessions without creating multiple volumes
• Change the content of a CD/DVD like on a hardisk
• Change disk title at each burn
• Preserve Mac file attributes
• Platform independent format

The software doesn’t erase the disk during the burn, it just adds new or changed content and overwrites the removed items to make them inaccessible. While using a little more space, it makes the process of editing and updating files much more efficient. This explains why the app is also able to support CD-R disks as well as CD-RW.

Requirements and Pricing

BurnAgain FS requires OS X Tiger or later, and an Apple supported CD/DVD Writer (it doesn’t necessarily need to be a SuperDrive). It comes in both English and German, priced at $22 for a home license and $48 for a family license (up to 5 installations). Business and educational discounts are also available.

To make sure you find the software useful, the trial download will allow you to test it out with 20 trial burns before requiring you make a purchase. Full details and the download can be found at the app’s website.

I’m interested to hear your thoughts on how useful software such as this is. Does a demand exist for using CD/DVD’s in such a way with inexpensive USB keys now on the market? I wish I’d come across BurnAgain a few years ago before removable storage was so widely available!

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The video encoding and transcoding tool, Handbrake has been updated to 0.9.3. This latest release brings a number of substantial changes to this excellent video utility.

The two most fundamental changes make Handbrake more flexible and also more limited. First flexibility — Handbrake will now accept many different video sources and does far more than just DVDs. The second change is that DVD decrypting has been completely decoupled from Handbrake and you’ll need another app to do perform that step in the conversion process. This version has a number of other improvements for Mac, Apple TV, and iPod users. Read the release notes to get a full list of changes.

Video Cornucopia

Just in time to help us deal with our grief at the passing of Techspansion and its seminal video converter, Visual Hub, Handbrake now has the ability to convert all sorts of different source material to H.264 or MPEG4 video. This potentially allows Handbrake to transcode AVI video from digital cameras and other such files. This new flexibility comes as a benefit of incorporating the libavcodec and libavformat libraries from the FFmpeg project. Unfortunately, the AVI file from a Canon P&S camera I used to test this on resulted in great looking video with a bunch of static in the audio track.

DVD Decryption Decoupled

For reasons that perhaps only the developers fully understand, Handbrake no longer includes the libraries required to decrypt commercial DVD’s. We Mac users are fortunate in that Handbrake will dynamically use VLC to decrypt a DVD if the app is present in your Applications folder. Just install VLC as you would normally and then anything that can be played with VLC can be read by Handbrake. If you want, you can also use something like RipIt, DVD2OneX, or Mac The Ripper 3 to decrypt DVD’s and place a copy on your hard drive. Personally, I’ve found RipIt.app does exactly what I want (makes a copy of the full DVD to the hard drive) and is dead simple to use. It costs $19, but it is simpler than the convoluted MTR donationware process (join the forums at ripdifferent.com to get the details), and cheaper than D2OX.

Other Benefits for Apple Fans

Besides the built-in VLC integration (a Mac exclusive), Apple users also get a number of improvements to the Mac GUI like better organization of presets, a better queue (that is saved between sessions or in case of a crash), reading from ZFS volumes, and more. Many of the presets have been redone as well to take advantage of the updates to the underlying encoding libraries. The new Apple TV preset is great at constant quality and supports Dobly Digital for Apple TV files directly (that still work with Apple TV 2.3). If you are really interested in tweaking the Apple TV preset to get transparent standard definition DVD, you’ll want to hang out in this thread at the Handbrake forums. The iPod and Universal presets have been updated as well. Be sure to “Update Built-in Presets” from the Presets menu when running the app to make sure you have latest settings.

Summary

I have been using the development snapshots for a while now and the improvements in video quality are great. I am really glad to see the changes move into the standard release. Taking out DVD decryption is not a huge deal because there are other alternatives for the Mac. And adding the ability to work with a wider variety of video formats is particularly welcome now that Visual Hub is no longer being developed. I will post follow-up comments if I figure out what caused my issues with my AVI video file. Let us know about your experiences with Handbrake 0.9.3.

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Program features include:

• ability to change the content like on a hard-drive
• ability to change disk title at each burn
• preservation of all OS X resource forks
• burns in a completely platform independent format
• fully usable with CD, CD-R, CD-RW, DVD+RW, DVD-RW

From my very limited testing with a DVD+RW I can say that the product behaves as advertised. I’ll run it through some more paces with some CD-R/RW media will report any quirks. You get 20 free burns and then need to pay $23 USD for a single user license if you want to keep using the product. Users of BurnAgain DVD (since January 1^st, 2008) receive a discount if they choose to upgrade.

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With DVDs, you can easily select options to watch a movie with a particular set of criteria, including different audio tracks, subtitles and even alternate endings (or “middles”). There are very straightforward ways to code that into the options on the discs and users know how to cue up what combination they want to view. The best that iTunes could do – given the current distribution model and viewing options – would be to present a small clip as an additional download that contains deleted or extra scenes. There are no user expectations in the current UI – either in iTunes, Front Row or the Apple TV – that indicate one could or should be able to gain access to such content/options.

Your personal feelings on movie integrity aside (some folks despise alternate endings or “director’s cuts”), the lack of a standard in this area will mean that streamers and downloaders are relegated to second-class citizen status when it comes to video content in the same way that we were relegated to low bit-rate MP3′s in the early days of music downloads, which is a completely unacceptable situation.

Apple has an opportunity to take the lead and define how extra content will be bundled and viewed as the industry [quickly] moves to widespread digital distribution. We consumers also need to also step up and demand access to the same or even better content and not settle in and just take what we’re given. In the meantime, it looks like I’ll still be relying on DVDs – old school or (hopefully soon) Blu-Ray – for longer than I had anticipated (if you’ve ever tried to keep a DVD collection pristine with three kids in the house, you know what a losing battle that is).

Give the media bots that sweep the interwebs something to take notice of and drop a note in the comments with your take on the state of digital video content distribution. The more we raise issues, the better chance our voices will be heard.

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I looked through the files on the CD, and discovered this drive would work in either of my computers. Having opened my Powerbook case before, I knew I wouldn’t be doing that again anytime soon. So I looked through the CD for the instructions on how to replace my iMac’s drive. Hmm, odd, no instructions. I went to the FastMac web site, and couldn’t find any instructions there either. In fact, I kept going in circles through their site navigation. Intuitive it wasn’t.

So I submitted a tech support email. Three hours later I received a message back saying that they needed to know the size of my screen and speed of the processor so they could help me. I sent them that information, and 15 minutes later was told to download the documentation from Apple.com. It seems quite strange to refer customers to the manufacturer’s web site for instructions, but ok. The Apple manual was very detailed, and having opened up my iMac before to upgrade the RAM and to install an Airport card, I was sure this would be an easy upgrade.

Yeah, and I won’t get any junk mail from any politicians before November’s elections.

I Need a What?

I did a backup of my data, just in case. I then used Disk Utility to create an empty DVD disk image. I burned that disk image to a DVD, and 53 minutes later, it was finished. I unplugged everything from the iMac, gave it a few minutes to cool down, then lay it face down on the carpet, opened the case, unscrewed the brass screws (and only the brass screws) and removed my DVD drive from the iMac. That’s when I noticed the FastMac drive didn’t have the connector on it. The connector plugs the back of the drive into the iMac motherboard. No problem, I’ll just unscrew it from the old drive and put it on the new drive. Look closely at the connector in this photo:

It takes a tiny Torx screwdriver. Ugh! Who has those lying around? I email technical support again asking where to get a tool for that. They write back quickly to suggest an electronic or computer store. Gee, thanks. I put the iMac back together. The next day I go to the local hardware store, and buy the smallest set of Torx bits I can find. I take the iMac apart again, remove the drive, and yell. The bits are too large. I put everything back together again. The next week I visit a computer store and buy a Torx bit set, with sizes T3 through T10.

I get home, dismember my iMac again, and discover that the iMac G5 uses a T6 Torx screwdriver. I take the connector off of the iMac drive, and connect it to the FastMac drive. Whew, almost done! Of course then I notice that the iMac drive is wider than the new drive. Of course, I also have to remove the mounting bracket from the iMac drive, and add that to the FastMac drive. Again, you need the T6 Torx bit, and be careful not to mess up the rubber along the bottom edges of the mounting bracket. You need to slide the drive out of the bracket by pushing fairly hard on the drive. Do not squeeze the drive while handling it, you can mess up the alignment of the laser. Fifteen minutes later I mount the new drive onto the iMac. Everything goes back together, plug all the cables back in, and voila! The iMac starts right up.

I check System Profiler and it does see the new drive:

I then burn the empty DVD image. It’s finished in 24 minutes. I get another disk, and burn a backup of some of my Music folder. 14 minutes, all done, works great.

One thing that is different is the original drive had a covering over the slot, so when you insert a disc it slides more smoothly. The FastMac drive has a larger opening, so it feels like the disc is not actually being inserted, but then the drive will pull the disc in. It’s just different, and I think I’ll get used to it.

Bottom line

FastMac Tech support is ok, although their web site could very easily be improved by adding in a few web pages pointing people to the Apple upgrade documentation, and FastMac should tell people about needing to move the connector and mounting bracket from the old drive to the new drive. I’m wondering if FastMac is expecting to only sell these upgrades to consultants and other geeks, rather than the general home user. Apple’s instructions assume you are replacing the drive with an Apple-supplied part. The drive so far has worked just fine. The actual drive swap was fairly straightforward, although if you’ve never done a hardware upgrade before, it will be scary. If you have an older Mac, a drive upgrade will help you keep some life in the machine. Another school of thought is to not upgrade older computers, and instead put that money into your computer replacement budget.

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• Copy DVDs (non-encrypted)
• DVD-Video Compression
• TiVoToGo (which only works with a TiVo Series 2)
• Convert video for lots of devices: iPod, iPhone, PS3, PSP, XBox 360
• Supports Turbo.264
• Disc labels
• Create DVD menus
• Create compilation DVDs with 4 hours of video
• Batch “Fit-to-DVD” “lets you que multiple DVD-Video folders for DVD-9 to DVD-5 conversion

I tested Popcorn 3 on a MacBook Pro Core Duo 2.0GHz with 2GB of RAM (a dinosaur in the portable Macs, I know). I do not have a Series 2 TiVo, so I could not test out the TiVo ToGo feature.

Installation

After seeing the feature list, I thought Popcorn would be a suite of applications. When you install Popcorn, you get two applications. Disc Cover RE and Popcorn. Starting Popcorn for the first time, you are welcomed by a Setup Assistant with a EULA. After putting in the product key, Popcorn asks you if you want to install “Mount It,” which allows “you to use Popcorn disc image mounting directly from the Finder.” You then have the option to install TiVo ToGo, which requires a Series 2 TiVo and does not support DirecTV DVRs with TiVo Service. It will be availble via the “Extras” menu. The last step is to decide whether to register the software with Roxio.

DVD Video Creation

I’ve got a couple of video files that I want to share. What a great excuse to create a DVD. There are three menu styles to choose from: Corporate, Snapshot, and TiVo central (or you can go menu-less). Simply drag and drop movies into the right pane of the Popcorn Window. I added a bunch of video files to the right pane. There are not a lot of options of how customize the DVD Menu apart from the title and style. I popped in a DVD-R because that seemed to be the next logical step and then hit the big red button to burn the DVD. The Popcorn window turned into a large status bar, I then viewed the Mac’s spinning beachball for a minute before the Popcorn window was responsive. It was stuck at 0% for a couple of minutes. However, there is an animation of a the Popcorn icon in the background of the status bar which suggests something is happening. It took over seven hours to encode and burn a DVD with three hours of best quality video.

Every DVD I burned was PAL formatted. This causes a problem because in United States we use the NTSC standard — PAL is the European standard. During my second and third tests, I kept on eye on the temporary files that Roxio creates. A “Roxio Converted Items” folder is created in the Documents folder and can easily become a space hog. PAL formatted files were created again, so I cancelled the creation of these discs. I tried a fourth test using video podcasts, Tekzilla and Diggnation, with approximately an hour and a half worth of video. The temporary files revealed no PAL fomatting. It took 2 hours and 44 minutes to create the DVD. Once again, the DVD was PAL formatted.

The DVDs burned using Popcorn 3 did not work on my PS3 because it does not support PAL. The discs worked on every computer I had access to (my own MacBook Pro, a MacBook and a Lenovo ThinkPad Z61t). My Oppo DVD player was able to play the disc, but then again, the Oppo can play almost anything (including PAL). I could not find a setting or preference to change Popcorn’s output format. There is even a thread on Roxio’s Support forums about this PAL/NTSC problem. As to the actual DVDs that were created, the DVD video quality obviously depended on the source files and the DVD menus worked fine with players that supported the PAL standard. Video looked as good as the source.

Video Conversion

The video conversion process is rather painless. Just drag and drop a video file in the right pane and then choose your settings. There are lots of options for your final video format. You can see a preview of the converted video which takes about a minute. Popcorn3 converted a DIVX formatted episode of the IT Crowd (approximately 24 minutes of video) to PSP formatted video in 11 minutes. The conversion process is relatively quick.

Popcorn also converts VIDEO_TS folder contents. I ripped one of my DVDs to my hard drive and ran a couple of tests. I converted a VIDEO_TS of Superman (1978 version) to the Apple TV format under automatic quality. The movie is 2 hours 22 minutes in length. It took 3 hours 51 minutes for the conversion to complete. Popcorn can take advantage of Elgato’s Turbo.264 (a hardware video encoder) for encoding. I happen to own an Elgato Turbo.264 and the conversion using it took 2 hours and 25 minutes to encode. As you can see, the Elgato provided a significant boost in encoding speed. Popcorn only crashed once during my tests and that test included the Elgato. Popcorn also has the ability to make DVDs of image file — but only image files of DVDs. I did not test this particular function.

The program refuses to rip copy protected DVDs, so I started ripping a DVD that Popcorn had created. The DVD had approximately 3 hours of video and took about 5 hours to be ripped. This process can also be enhanced using Elgato Turbo.264. Ripping the same DVD with the Turbo.264 took 3 hours 23 minutes and also resulted in smaller file sizes. The disc held 6 episodes of a television program and Popcorn created 6 movie files. The files were on average 282 MB smaller using the Turbo.264.

Disc Cover Assistant

The Disc Cover Assistant is a stripped down version with many features unavailable in this bundled edition. More advanced features (such as creating a track listing using iTunes) are disabled. You can choose to make a label for a disc, a front cd insert, a rear CD insert, and another label that may be a label template for the spine of a CD cover. There are over 40 pre-made disc cover designs available. Since I did not have a full version of the program, it’s hard to tell its full capabilities. If you just need to make a label with text and the clip art provided, Disc Cover Assistant can do that easily.

Bottom Line

Popcorn’s interface is intuitive and simple. Everything is laid out rather clearly and all the features are easily accessible. Considering how feature rich the application is, the interface makes finding any feature a snap. It would be handy to have a “Clear Roxio Converted Items” button or option to free up hard drive space. The video conversion of files seemed relatively speedy. However, anything involving DVDs took an incredibly long time. This would be the kind of thing you would set your Mac to do, then go do something else like go see a movie or go to sleep for the night. The Elgato Turbo.264 made the experience better, but it still takes a long time to burn or rip a DVD. Perhaps the experience would be different with updated hardware.

I am rather annoyed that I could not create an NTSC DVD. I could not find a setting anywhere for this nor could I find any information online about this problem. I hope this is resolved via a software update. Additionally, Roxio phone support is not free (it costs a whopping $1.89 per minute); I’d rather keep my money than pay for phone support. I also find it odd that the file sizes were smaller using the Elgato Turbo.264. I would think with the extra time it took to encode the video sans Turbo.264, that the same kind of encoding occurred. The video quality of both versions of the file looked similar but the savings on hard drive space was substantial using the hardware encoder.

Overall, Popcorn is easy to use and does pretty much everything Roxio claims. The PAL DVD fiasco was the biggest issue I faced. If you overlook that rather large problem, Popcorn is a very competent program. The application seemed very stable, and only crashed once in my testing. I am sure there are other programs that could be used instead of Popcorn to do the same functions. However, Popcorn 3 is an all-in-one solution for video conversion. Also, the added Disc Cover Assistant was underpowered, but worked for simple labeling needs. If you don’t want to track down different pieces of software, Popcorn is the way to go. If you’re an impatient person, remember Popcorn works much faster with Elgato’s Turbo.264.

You can purchase Popcorn 3 for $49.99 via download or CD-ROM.

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