Beta Beat: Drive-in

I like it. The organization is good. All my DVD library on an external drive....that works for me. BTW, Telestream is NOT a Microsoft owned company. It actually feels good to do something legally.

1. This isn't like handbrake, it doesn't rip your DVD, and it doesn't
break the encryption.
2. It's NOT illegal to do it this way, because
it's not breaking the encryption
3. All it does it copy the whole DVD
to your drive
4. If you actually READ the product page, you'd figure
out all this and this page would be filled with useless questions.
The page basically states that it copies the whole dvd to your hard
drive, and that you can play the videos with Apple's DVD player and
Front Row (more proof that it's not breaking the encryption, so you
can't watch them with say, the QT player, or load them on your
iPod.So why would you want this instead of handbrake? Well, if you
like to stay completely legal, this is the only way to do it. It's
not against the law to copy the DVD if you're not breaking the
encrytion.

That about covers it.

Dolby Digital works just fine in handbrake. Just rip to avi with ac3 for the sound. I have all of my movies ripped to xvid/ac3 and I play them back in xbmc and the dolby digital comes right through my receiver in 5.1 glory.

One thing I've been waiting for with Mac the ripper and Handbrake is Dolby Digital encoding. Thats a BIG plus in my book. I can't find anywhere that says that this program can do that, but I'm pretty sure that it can, being that its just an exact copy of the disc. Man Apple should SERIOUSLY consider putting something like this into iTunes. It would be the final step in their domination. Apparently its legal enough according to this program.
Great idea Flip4mac. I don't like that they DRM it, but at least its something.

i think this is cool because it is technically legal to do it this way... isnt it? lol. it doesnt break the CSS protection.... and that means it will work with every dvd i imagine. i have problems with several dvds with handbrake and mactheripper. also, i like how it changes the images icon to the cover of the dvd and has the info for it. its clever... maybe other programs might take note from some of these features.

Wait... isn't this company owned by Microsoft, and isn't ripping DVDs illegal? How is this possible? I understand that there are other programs out there that rip DVDs, but one made by a company owned by Microsoft just seems a bit weird to me. What am I missing here?

How is this different from Handbrake? Or from Popcorn? I personally like the way Popcorn does it.

So let me get this straight - it adds additional DRM to DVD's, doesn't compress the video - why the hell would I use this?

Can't you just drag the VIDEO_TS folder onto your hard disk and avoid the need to pay for equivalent functionality? Apple's DVD Player.app has a perfectly functional "Open VIDEO_TS Folder" menu item, I mean, it's always worked for me with my PowerBook. So the only benefit of this program is, er... the organization? Which Spotlight would do for you anyway? Or am I missing something?

Mac The Ripper and Handbrake are *free* and work just fine. There's just no need for this product IMHO.