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A Basket Full of Apple News
active8or writes "During hit keynote at MacWorld San Fransico, Steve Jobs introduced the new tools from Apple. One, iDVD was a very powerful tool for making DVDs at home, and iTunes a powerfull MP3 and music ripping, writing, playing environment....for free. This seems to follow their new "killer apps" strategy. In addition, a 733 MHz G4 was introduced, and the entire line got a update. ". The new powerbook looks awesome (if only it had 3 mouse buttons).
Not to mention that one new option for the G4 Desktop (and standard on high-end prebuilts) is the "SuperDrive"... a single-tray, multiple-laser drive that basicly combines CDRW and DVD-R. Yes kids, real DVD-R, play it in your consumer $150 DVD deck. Apple sells DVD-R blanks for $10 at store.apple.com. Probably can find them cheaper elsewhere.
If only it had 3 mouse buttons.
You got both hands on the frickin' keyboard anyhow.
Karma karma karma karma karmeleon: it comes and goes, it comes and goes.
Sorry, this is wrong on multiple counts. First, Aqua or any other GUI takes essentially zero CPU time if you're not actively using it. For example, the iMac behind me is running Mac OS X Beta with a (transparent) terminal window running top. dnetc is using 98% of the CPU, Window Manager is using 0.6%. Second, Aqua is not mandatory. You can drop to a text console and do everything from there, or telnet or ssh in.
Apple should be spending time making an OS X server that actually lets you remotely administrate the server, with an optional GUI in case you can't
Which is exactly what they did.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
Apple's Tech Info Library (http://til.info.apple.com/techinfo.nsf/artnum/n24 940) says,
"Note: In compliance with the MPAA, DVD-R discs with CSS-encrypted video data cannot be read."
A few interesting points:
Avi
I remember back when the original Mac "superdrive" was a 1.44 MB auto-inject/eject floppy drive that would read and write Mac and PC format HD floppies (it was "super" compared to the 400/800KB DD Mac-only drives that were its predecessors). Now we get 4.7GB per disc - super-schweet! You've come a long way, baby...
My only caveat - does the DVD authoring include CSS-free and region-free options? Can you rip & copy DVD's with it? I'd hate for something this cool to be locked into the MPAA's riduculous regime....
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
Here's my brief review of iTunes. I'm comparing it (indirectly) to other Mac MP3 players, such as SoundJam, Audion, and MACAST (formely MacAmp).
iTunes kicks ass.
Functionally, it has more cool features than most other MP3 players. The CD burning ability is really great and intuitive (just build a playlist, and hit the Burn CD button), but it unfortunately does not support my CD burner (Ricoh 7060A). The interface is very pretty, although some people may miss skin support. I haven't checked the quality of iTunes-encoded MP3s, but all the right options are there, and it of course automatically gets track info from CDDB when ripping songs from CDs.
Its "Browse" button organizes MP3s in a heirarchial fashion by Artist, Album, and Song, in a manner I haven't seen in other MP3 players.
What's missing? Support for my CD burner would be nice. It would also be good if ID3 tag info could be edited directly in the playlist window, instead of by opening a "Get Info" window for the song. Other than that, a great first version.
Mac OS 9.1 was also released, but it wasn't mentioned at the keynote. Got to Apple's Mac OS 9 page and see for yourselves!
Supreme Lord High Commander of the Interstellar Task Force for the Eradication of Stupidity
You can do a track by track clone of a DVD and get a perfect copy if you have a DVD player and burner in the same system.
well no, not exactly. by the looks of things, i'm not really sure there is a way to do a track-by-track copy of a DVD. as far as i know there's no "ripping" option to make an image of a DVD, and from what i've seen, there's no "burn from image" option on these new Macs.
while it would be possible to "rip" the video stream and re-encode it to a new DVD, you'd be without the DVD menu, or any of the extras that ship on DVDs these days. not to mention the fact that this would be an extremely long procedure, and not worth it to most people.
i imagine the real "danger" would be from people downloading DiV/Xs from the net, converting them to Quicktime, and then burning them to iDVD. still not ideal, as you only get the "bare movie," but probably good enough for most casual pirates.
still, unless i'm reading all of this wrong, there's no way to make bit-for-bit copies of DVDs using this drive. this could all change in the future however, as it seems that the only thing holding it back is the availability of proper software.
a couple of things: it should be noted that Apple will be selling blank DVD media (that will play in commercial players) for $10/each. that's amazing. secondly, i really hope it's possible to burn region-free DVDs. i don't want region coding infecting the movies i create.
- j
That'll only happen if Apple can get it through Joe Average's thick skull that actual performance is only partly a function of MHz. This might be a little easier than it would have been if Intel hadn't shot itself in the foot with the Pentium-4.
(No offence meant to anyone out there named Joe Average.)