Why not walk out to your car, put the phone in your pocket or wife's purse, and then walk back, telling the doorman that you left it in your car? What are they going to do, search you? If the answer at that point was "yes", then by all means I'd leave and not watch their movie. But otherwise, tell a harmless lie.
>Wouldn't giving everyone access to an excellent education give us the best work force?
In the United States, everyone gets that for their first 12 years of school. After that, if you want it, you have to go out and get it yourself. And if you have the drive, talent, and determination, you can get it. Where's the problem?
>What if educational opportunities were allocated strictly on performance and willingness to work hard?
Except for rare extremes (OK, not everybody gets to go to Harvard), they already are. For most people, it's not/where/ you go to school that matters, it's the fact that you/went/ to school. Three years in the workforce and people really don't care where you went to school anymore they want to know what you have done in the workforce.
I suppose for the few people who attend the very premium schools there is an "in" factor that puts you up higher on the hog starting out of school. But you know what? The rich are/always/ going to have that advantage, no matter/how/ equal you try and make all the educational opportunities. The rich will simply invent some other new exclusive educational club to belong to.
>What if we spent the money being poured down the drain in Iraq on educating our kids instead of getting them blown up by IEDs set up by >the people they're supposed to be protecting?
Unrelated to the topic at hand, but I'll bite. What if those kids stopped/volunteering/ to go get blown up and instead worked harder in school so that the military wasn't so attractive an option when they graduated high school?
The simple fact is, education is a service you buy. You pay somebody to teach you stuff. The more valuable the skill you want somebody to teach you, the more logical it is that they can demand a premium for teaching you that skill. If I'm a teacher or an institution I'm going to demand the highest fees I can charge for my services. And if my services for teaching engineering skills will fetch a higher fee than teaching basket weaving, then I should be able to charge more money.
I see it as an overall positive. It makes engineering a more valuable skill set. This will make it more attractive a skill set to acquire, which hopefully will encourage more people to pursue it.
>Of course, this discussion missed the whole point, that now it will be even harder for someone >who is poor to get a degree in Engineering or Business. Of course, that's the whole point, right? >Keep the good stuff for the rich and make sure the poor stay in their place.
Anyone can go to college in the United States. Anyone. Period. All it takes is hard work and dedication. Intelligence helps, too, but you can make up for lack of it with more hard work and dedication.
It took me 17 years to finish my B.S. in Computer Science. I did it while working full time and taking classes. My classes were largely paid for by taking advantage of my employers' tuition reimbursement programs. Even Walmart has a tuition reimbursement program.
All this hand-wringing that people can't afford to go be engineers now is a bunch of bullshit, pure and simple. You want it, go and do it. Find a way. Get scholarships. Work for someone that has a tuition-reimbursement program. It can be done. I did it.
>It's what they came up with that was buildable in the time allotted. Sure, NASA was working on single stage >to orbit designs, but they knew SSTO wouldn't be doable until the 90's, and the challange was to get there >before 1970. It was a pure case of 'throw enough money at the problem and you'll get results'.
I recently toured the Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville. Here is how the progression of our space program appears from that visit:
V2: Badass Mercury: More Badass Gemini: More Badass Apollo: More Badass Space Shuttle: Cost Effective
We aren't good enough at space travel yet to be focusing on Cost Effective. We need more "Badass" in our space program.
Yes, but it sounds like you are talking about what to do on the client side. That's the easy part. The hard part is how do you get a remote system somewhere on the Internet that you can establish a tunnel to, like the GP did?
I hate subscription pricing. I hate to sit down to an "entertainment activity" with this little nag in the back of my mind going:
"tick tock tick tock money is flying out of your wallet tick tock tick tock"
It's much more relaxing and enjoyable to just buy it and then play it any time I want without the nag of knowing it's costing me money.
And to me, $50 games are a bargain. I've only played two games now for the last couple of years - Call of Duty and Silent Hunter III.
I'm really not motivated to buy more games yet because both of these games have provided hundreds of hours of entertainment and I'm still not bored of them yet.
When my wife and I can spend $50 for 2 hours of entertainment at the movies, $50 for hundreds of hours of entertainment is a BARGAIN.
I have often wondered about doing just this sort of thing.
For example, I rent web hosting space from a web host provider. I often wondered why I couldn't install some kind of program on my rented web server that basically I routed all my communications through, encrypted.
It still wouldn't stop people from sniffing/snooping in between my rented server and the world, but at least it would put a layer of abstraction between ME and the world.
So how do you do what you did? How do you set up a remote "box" like you did?
>if that's your issue, then create a daemon that renices the priorities of pre-set programs to >some given level - better yet tweak the module that starts programs to nice them as they start. Works >better than blocking the background tasks by bumping everything that's happening under a users uid, while >still providing the lower latency issue.
Here is what they average computer user will think of your solution:
1) What's a daemon? 2) What does "renices" mean? 3) What are priorities? 4) What is a pre-set program? 5) What is a module? 6) What does it mean to block a task? 7) What is a background task? 8) What is a UID? 9) What is latency?
>The simple answer is that TV and Radio stations are the domain of FCC regulation while websites are not. >The FCC will say that they're trying to keep the public broadcast spectrum 'decent' and what goes on on the Internet >is not their concern, which is true.
Yes, it is true. But my point is that what they are attempting to do, even in the domain that they control, is/futile/. We are rapidly approaching the point, if we are not there already, where the Internet will have far greater reach, especially to people under 18 (presumably the people they are trying to protect), than television and radio have.
So my point is that compared to the VOLUMES of indecent material instantly available to anyone on the Internet, regulating the occasional "shit" over the airwaves is asinine. You could have a radio announcer do nothing but repeat the word "fuck" over and over 24/7 and you could not even begin to compare to the "indecent" material available on the internet in 30 seconds.
>The internet is pull technology. You request a document, it shows up at your computer. >TV is push technology. You select a channel and you get everything they give you. Can you really not see the difference here?
The difference you note is only technical in nature. In practice, there is no functional difference to the viewer. In both cases, the viewer chooses the content they want to view from all available content stream choices. In terms of functional usage, a web page is no different to the viewer than a TV channel. They choose the "channel" (or web page), they see the content.
What gets said on TV and Radio is now so irrelevant compared to what is on the Internet that one wonders why they bother trying to regulate TV and Radio at all.
All any of these congress people need to do is get on Google and search for "sex" and you will find so much pr0n that you could have a TV channel that played the word "FUCK" over and over 24/7 for a year and it could never match the "indecency" that you can find on the internet in 30 seconds.
These guys really are re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
>If you don't want to run it, no-ones going to make you. You get the choice, see ?
Yes, but we aren't talking about the choice between whether or not to run it, we're talking about once you've chosen to run Linux, how do you make the choice which flavor to run?
>I guess that would be why you ran Windows ?
No, like I said, I run Windows for games.
>Well, not a million. Just a handful, like Windows 95/98/NT/ME/2000/2000 Server/Xp Home/XP Pro
First, we aren't talking about legacy products. I'm sure in a hundred years there will be a hundred past versions of Windows. We're talking about the current offering. And for most home users there is really only ever one current Windows product being marketed. Today that is Vista home edition. Until recently, it was Windows XP home edition.
From the above image, there are currently over 100 different flavors of Linux to choose from. I don't know how many of these are legacy and how many are current, but there are at least 12 flavors that have been created in the last year or so. Ok, it's not a million, but it is far more than a handful, and far more difficult a choice than running down to Best Buy and picking up the latest version of Windows.
Just a couple of days ago I saw on Digg a family tree of all the Linux variations. It is mind boggling. I know that one of the neat things about Open Source software is that people can take the code and go make derivative products. But the problem then becomes that you end up with a million slightly different flavors of the product.
I'm coming up due for another bi-annual wipe of my home PC, and I've been toying with the idea of switching to Linux, with dual-boot to Windows so I can play my games (though that Cedega stuff sounds neat, too). But one of the reasons I've been putting it off is I don't know which Linux to install, and I haven't had time to research all the different choices (and I dread doing the research). I'm leaning towards Ubuntu, because everyone talks about it, but is that really a good reason to pick an OS?
I think part of the problem with getting buy-in to Open Source is it just feels so, I don't know,/vague/. Maybe once you get down to the application level it's a bit more solid (I don't know how many flavors of Open Office there are, for example), but it's hard to get past the OS if you want to do it in Linux, for me.
>For example, while the Fortune 250 firm I work for is shedding programmers and analysts like mad for outsourced options, >it is also hiring project managers, auditors, information security analysts...
Precisely so. It is a mistake to go into Comp Sci anymore. That is the outsource mecca. Don't be a doer - be a manager. Go IT.
The way I see it, and I say this as a holder of a BS in CS myself, Computer Science is the "nerd" avenue, and IT is the new "salesman" avenue.
The CompSci guys are the software nerds. Unfortunately, there are good software nerds in other countries with far cheaper labor rates. The outlook for being a software nerd seems bleak.
The IT guys have become salesmen with "good interpersonal skills" (i.e. smooth talking salesmen) with a bit of tech savvy. They are they guys with a enough tech savvy to forge the big business deals that leverage the el-cheapo commodity CompSci labor from India and turn it into a product that can be sold. The outlook for these guys seems pretty bright to me.
In short, the CompSci guys are the high-tech ditch diggers, and the IT guys use them to forge business deals and make money.
I'm not saying you can't make money as a CompSci guy, but it seems to me there is a lot less room for "average" CompSci guys anymore in the US. You've got to be absolutely top-notch caliber because all the average and below work is going overseas. I think it would be safer to be an IT "big picture" guy.
What if neighborhoods collected all their grass clippings every weekend and took them to the local neighborhood processing plant, which entitled you to X gallons of ethanol every week?
>I think you could have been a little more clear in your original comment in this thread.
Yes, you're right. Originally, when I set out to try and back up my DVDs, I thought about copying them to blank DVDs. This is what prompted my responding in this thread - my experience started with that approach.
But soon I discovered that I was having trouble getting my burned DVDs to play in the DVD players in my house. After poking around on the 'net and various forums I came to the conclusion that there seems to be a lot of trial and error involved in finding all the "just the right settings" to get a burn that works reliably. For example, it was frequently suggested not to burn at the highest speed of your drive, among many other things.
So I gave up trying to burn the rip to a DVD, and instead, wanted to convert the rip into something I could watch. I dabbled around with the P2P stuff and found lots of "DVDs" that had been "ripped" (or I guess more properly, ripped and then encoded) into.AVI and.MPG files, and they were usually around 700MB or so, as I recall. The quality seemed decent most of the time. But, I was limited to watching the movies on my PC.
Then I got a DLink MediaLounge for Christmas. It supports MPEG1/2/4, AVI, or Xvid, so these are the formats I have been experimenting with.
I didn't mention all this originally because TFA was about the decline in burning DVDs, and I was only sharing my frustration with the beginning of my journey.
Thank you so much for all the suggestions. I had already downloaded AutoGK but I cannot remember if I started playing with it before I gave up. I got as far as using RipIt4me to generate.VOBs, but never got any satisfactory results re-encoding into a.AVI with the various tools I tried.
I'll give it another shot.
On an aside, how are these cease and desist letters working? Why doesn't the author simply release the code into the wild, and let the rest of the world, in countries outside the jurisdiction, keep up the work?
I don't really want to actually burn it, though, I'd rather it stay as a file that my Media Player hooked up to my TV can play. This is why I was trying to get it into.AVI or.MPEG format, or at least one giant.VOB so I didn't have to hit "play next" in between each.VOB file. But the size of the AVI and MPEG are appealing, too.
I'll have to try Shrink again, I guess, but when I last played with it, the quality of the resulting output was not good.
My problem is I've got this MediaPlayer device (Can't remember the name of it right now), that plugs into my network and my TV, and let's me play video files from my computer on the network onto my TV. But I don't think it supports VIDEO_TS. I'll have to try it and see. But that is why I was looking to get it into.mpeg or.avi format. That and size.
I tried both of those, and the front-end for them called, I believe, RipIt4me, which is supposed to handle newer copy protection (something about garbage chapters or something) that the old DVD decrypter/Shrink couldn't handle.
Anyway, I could never get it to work well. I think I got them ripped OK, but then you just end up with a bunch of VOB files. I think it was the encoding into a usable format I could never get to work right. I wanted a mpg or avi or something around 500MB or so. Everything I tried resulted in poor quality. I don't know how the "pirates" do it - all the 350-500MB stuff I've downloaded looks great.
You know, I just ran across those Slysoft guys a few weeks ago. I made a mental note to check them out next time I get into trying this DVD ripping thing again. I had pretty much decided, as you seem to have, that the free stuff just wasn't working.
It was a disappointing realization. I've had a fair amount of faith in the free software movement that by now the hackers out there would have made a free set of easy-to-use ripping software, but after trying 5-6 different things and spending a fair amount of time Googling for "DVD ripping", I had already decided to bite the bullet and lay down $100 if it would do the trick.
Thanks for the endorsement of the Slysoft stuff, I'll definitely try that now.
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Why not walk out to your car, put the phone in your pocket or wife's purse, and then walk back, telling the doorman that you left it in your car? What are they going to do, search you? If the answer at that point was "yes", then by all means I'd leave and not watch their movie. But otherwise, tell a harmless lie.
I'm sure the telcos will try and use the courts to stop or cripple this service.
>Wouldn't giving everyone access to an excellent education give us the best work force?
/where/ you go to school that matters, it's the fact that you /went/ to school. Three years in the workforce and people really don't care where you went to school anymore they want to know what you have done in the workforce.
/always/ going to have that advantage, no matter /how/ equal you try and make all the educational opportunities. The rich will simply invent some other new exclusive educational club to belong to.
/volunteering/ to go get blown up and instead worked harder in school so that the military wasn't so attractive an option when they graduated high school?
In the United States, everyone gets that for their first 12 years of school. After that, if you want it, you have to go out and get it yourself. And if you have the drive, talent, and determination, you can get it. Where's the problem?
>What if educational opportunities were allocated strictly on performance and willingness to work hard?
Except for rare extremes (OK, not everybody gets to go to Harvard), they already are. For most people, it's not
I suppose for the few people who attend the very premium schools there is an "in" factor that puts you up higher on the hog starting out of school. But you know what? The rich are
>What if we spent the money being poured down the drain in Iraq on educating our kids instead of getting them blown up by IEDs set up by
>the people they're supposed to be protecting?
Unrelated to the topic at hand, but I'll bite. What if those kids stopped
The simple fact is, education is a service you buy. You pay somebody to teach you stuff. The more valuable the skill you want somebody to teach you, the more logical it is that they can demand a premium for teaching you that skill. If I'm a teacher or an institution I'm going to demand the highest fees I can charge for my services. And if my services for teaching engineering skills will fetch a higher fee than teaching basket weaving, then I should be able to charge more money.
I see it as an overall positive. It makes engineering a more valuable skill set. This will make it more attractive a skill set to acquire, which hopefully will encourage more people to pursue it.
>Of course, this discussion missed the whole point, that now it will be even harder for someone
>who is poor to get a degree in Engineering or Business. Of course, that's the whole point, right?
>Keep the good stuff for the rich and make sure the poor stay in their place.
Anyone can go to college in the United States. Anyone. Period. All it takes is hard work and dedication. Intelligence helps, too, but you can make up for lack of it with more hard work and dedication.
It took me 17 years to finish my B.S. in Computer Science. I did it while working full time and taking classes. My classes were largely paid for by taking advantage of my employers' tuition reimbursement programs. Even Walmart has a tuition reimbursement program.
All this hand-wringing that people can't afford to go be engineers now is a bunch of bullshit, pure and simple. You want it, go and do it. Find a way. Get scholarships. Work for someone that has a tuition-reimbursement program. It can be done. I did it.
>It's what they came up with that was buildable in the time allotted. Sure, NASA was working on single stage
>to orbit designs, but they knew SSTO wouldn't be doable until the 90's, and the challange was to get there
>before 1970. It was a pure case of 'throw enough money at the problem and you'll get results'.
I recently toured the Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville. Here is how the progression of our space program appears from that visit:
V2: Badass
Mercury: More Badass
Gemini: More Badass
Apollo: More Badass
Space Shuttle: Cost Effective
We aren't good enough at space travel yet to be focusing on Cost Effective. We need more "Badass" in our space program.
Yes, but it sounds like you are talking about what to do on the client side. That's the easy part. The hard part is how do you get a remote system somewhere on the Internet that you can establish a tunnel to, like the GP did?
I hate subscription pricing. I hate to sit down to an "entertainment activity" with this little nag in the back of my mind going:
"tick tock tick tock money is flying out of your wallet tick tock tick tock"
It's much more relaxing and enjoyable to just buy it and then play it any time I want without the nag of knowing it's costing me money.
And to me, $50 games are a bargain. I've only played two games now for the last couple of years - Call of Duty and Silent Hunter III.
I'm really not motivated to buy more games yet because both of these games have provided hundreds of hours of entertainment and I'm still not bored of them yet.
When my wife and I can spend $50 for 2 hours of entertainment at the movies, $50 for hundreds of hours of entertainment is a BARGAIN.
I have often wondered about doing just this sort of thing.
For example, I rent web hosting space from a web host provider. I often wondered why I couldn't install some kind of program on my rented web server that basically I routed all my communications through, encrypted.
It still wouldn't stop people from sniffing/snooping in between my rented server and the world, but at least it would put a layer of abstraction between ME and the world.
So how do you do what you did? How do you set up a remote "box" like you did?
>if that's your issue, then create a daemon that renices the priorities of pre-set programs to
>some given level - better yet tweak the module that starts programs to nice them as they start. Works
>better than blocking the background tasks by bumping everything that's happening under a users uid, while
>still providing the lower latency issue.
Here is what they average computer user will think of your solution:
1) What's a daemon?
2) What does "renices" mean?
3) What are priorities?
4) What is a pre-set program?
5) What is a module?
6) What does it mean to block a task?
7) What is a background task?
8) What is a UID?
9) What is latency?
>The simple answer is that TV and Radio stations are the domain of FCC regulation while websites are not.
/futile/. We are rapidly approaching the point, if we are not there already, where the Internet will have far greater reach, especially to people under 18 (presumably the people they are trying to protect), than television and radio have.
>The FCC will say that they're trying to keep the public broadcast spectrum 'decent' and what goes on on the Internet
>is not their concern, which is true.
Yes, it is true. But my point is that what they are attempting to do, even in the domain that they control, is
So my point is that compared to the VOLUMES of indecent material instantly available to anyone on the Internet, regulating the occasional "shit" over the airwaves is asinine. You could have a radio announcer do nothing but repeat the word "fuck" over and over 24/7 and you could not even begin to compare to the "indecent" material available on the internet in 30 seconds.
>The internet is pull technology. You request a document, it shows up at your computer.
>TV is push technology. You select a channel and you get everything they give you. Can you really not see the difference here?
The difference you note is only technical in nature. In practice, there is no functional difference to the viewer. In both cases, the viewer chooses the content they want to view from all available content stream choices. In terms of functional usage, a web page is no different to the viewer than a TV channel. They choose the "channel" (or web page), they see the content.
>wake the fuck up, the internet... IS NEXT. I really don't see how this will ever be possible, for a variety of reasons.
What gets said on TV and Radio is now so irrelevant compared to what is on the Internet that one wonders why they bother trying to regulate TV and Radio at all.
All any of these congress people need to do is get on Google and search for "sex" and you will find so much pr0n that you could have a TV channel that played the word "FUCK" over and over 24/7 for a year and it could never match the "indecency" that you can find on the internet in 30 seconds.
These guys really are re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
How can a EULA be scary? I never read them.
Basically, all EULAs are are non-binary DRM - a text file that tries to tell you what you can and can't do with the software.
I ignore them. It's in my possession, I'll do whatever I want with it, thank you very much.
>If you don't want to run it, no-ones going to make you. You get the choice, see ?
r otimeline75cr6.png
Yes, but we aren't talking about the choice between whether or not to run it, we're talking about once you've chosen to run Linux, how do you make the choice which flavor to run?
>I guess that would be why you ran Windows ?
No, like I said, I run Windows for games.
>Well, not a million. Just a handful, like Windows 95/98/NT/ME/2000/2000 Server/Xp Home/XP Pro
First, we aren't talking about legacy products. I'm sure in a hundred years there will be a hundred past versions of Windows. We're talking about the current offering. And for most home users there is really only ever one current Windows product being marketed. Today that is Vista home edition. Until recently, it was Windows XP home edition.
But all this is beside the point.
http://img142.imageshack.us/img142/5090/linuxdist
From the above image, there are currently over 100 different flavors of Linux to choose from. I don't know how many of these are legacy and how many are current, but there are at least 12 flavors that have been created in the last year or so. Ok, it's not a million, but it is far more than a handful, and far more difficult a choice than running down to Best Buy and picking up the latest version of Windows.
Just a couple of days ago I saw on Digg a family tree of all the Linux variations. It is mind boggling. I know that one of the neat things about Open Source software is that people can take the code and go make derivative products. But the problem then becomes that you end up with a million slightly different flavors of the product.
/vague/. Maybe once you get down to the application level it's a bit more solid (I don't know how many flavors of Open Office there are, for example), but it's hard to get past the OS if you want to do it in Linux, for me.
I'm coming up due for another bi-annual wipe of my home PC, and I've been toying with the idea of switching to Linux, with dual-boot to Windows so I can play my games (though that Cedega stuff sounds neat, too). But one of the reasons I've been putting it off is I don't know which Linux to install, and I haven't had time to research all the different choices (and I dread doing the research). I'm leaning towards Ubuntu, because everyone talks about it, but is that really a good reason to pick an OS?
I think part of the problem with getting buy-in to Open Source is it just feels so, I don't know,
>For example, while the Fortune 250 firm I work for is shedding programmers and analysts like mad for outsourced options,
>it is also hiring project managers, auditors, information security analysts...
Precisely so. It is a mistake to go into Comp Sci anymore. That is the outsource mecca. Don't be a doer - be a manager. Go IT.
The way I see it, and I say this as a holder of a BS in CS myself, Computer Science is the "nerd" avenue, and IT is the new "salesman" avenue.
The CompSci guys are the software nerds. Unfortunately, there are good software nerds in other countries with far cheaper labor rates. The outlook for being a software nerd seems bleak.
The IT guys have become salesmen with "good interpersonal skills" (i.e. smooth talking salesmen) with a bit of tech savvy. They are they guys with a enough tech savvy to forge the big business deals that leverage the el-cheapo commodity CompSci labor from India and turn it into a product that can be sold. The outlook for these guys seems pretty bright to me.
In short, the CompSci guys are the high-tech ditch diggers, and the IT guys use them to forge business deals and make money.
I'm not saying you can't make money as a CompSci guy, but it seems to me there is a lot less room for "average" CompSci guys anymore in the US. You've got to be absolutely top-notch caliber because all the average and below work is going overseas. I think it would be safer to be an IT "big picture" guy.
What if neighborhoods collected all their grass clippings every weekend and took them to the local neighborhood processing plant, which entitled you to X gallons of ethanol every week?
>I think you could have been a little more clear in your original comment in this thread.
.AVI and .MPG files, and they were usually around 700MB or so, as I recall. The quality seemed decent most of the time. But, I was limited to watching the movies on my PC.
.VOBs, but never got any satisfactory results re-encoding into a .AVI with the various tools I tried.
Yes, you're right. Originally, when I set out to try and back up my DVDs, I thought about copying them to blank DVDs. This is what prompted my responding in this thread - my experience started with that approach.
But soon I discovered that I was having trouble getting my burned DVDs to play in the DVD players in my house. After poking around on the 'net and various forums I came to the conclusion that there seems to be a lot of trial and error involved in finding all the "just the right settings" to get a burn that works reliably. For example, it was frequently suggested not to burn at the highest speed of your drive, among many other things.
So I gave up trying to burn the rip to a DVD, and instead, wanted to convert the rip into something I could watch. I dabbled around with the P2P stuff and found lots of "DVDs" that had been "ripped" (or I guess more properly, ripped and then encoded) into
Then I got a DLink MediaLounge for Christmas. It supports MPEG1/2/4, AVI, or Xvid, so these are the formats I have been experimenting with.
I didn't mention all this originally because TFA was about the decline in burning DVDs, and I was only sharing my frustration with the beginning of my journey.
Thank you so much for all the suggestions. I had already downloaded AutoGK but I cannot remember if I started playing with it before I gave up. I got as far as using RipIt4me to generate
I'll give it another shot.
On an aside, how are these cease and desist letters working? Why doesn't the author simply release the code into the wild, and let the rest of the world, in countries outside the jurisdiction, keep up the work?
My dogs get uncomfortable when you watch them poopie. Maybe there is something biological about the need for privacy.
I don't really want to actually burn it, though, I'd rather it stay as a file that my Media Player hooked up to my TV can play. This is why I was trying to get it into .AVI or .MPEG format, or at least one giant .VOB so I didn't have to hit "play next" in between each .VOB file. But the size of the AVI and MPEG are appealing, too.
I'll have to try Shrink again, I guess, but when I last played with it, the quality of the resulting output was not good.
My problem is I've got this MediaPlayer device (Can't remember the name of it right now), that plugs into my network and my TV, and let's me play video files from my computer on the network onto my TV. But I don't think it supports VIDEO_TS. I'll have to try it and see. But that is why I was looking to get it into .mpeg or .avi format. That and size.
I tried both of those, and the front-end for them called, I believe, RipIt4me, which is supposed to handle newer copy protection (something about garbage chapters or something) that the old DVD decrypter/Shrink couldn't handle.
Anyway, I could never get it to work well. I think I got them ripped OK, but then you just end up with a bunch of VOB files. I think it was the encoding into a usable format I could never get to work right. I wanted a mpg or avi or something around 500MB or so. Everything I tried resulted in poor quality. I don't know how the "pirates" do it - all the 350-500MB stuff I've downloaded looks great.
You know, I just ran across those Slysoft guys a few weeks ago. I made a mental note to check them out next time I get into trying this DVD ripping thing again. I had pretty much decided, as you seem to have, that the free stuff just wasn't working.
It was a disappointing realization. I've had a fair amount of faith in the free software movement that by now the hackers out there would have made a free set of easy-to-use ripping software, but after trying 5-6 different things and spending a fair amount of time Googling for "DVD ripping", I had already decided to bite the bullet and lay down $100 if it would do the trick.
Thanks for the endorsement of the Slysoft stuff, I'll definitely try that now.