Federico Pistono

Tip: you might be interested in my DVD ripping guide ^_^

Upgrading to Leopard has not been an audacious move to me. I'm typically a little bit skeptical of new OSs, the best thing to do is usually to wait until it's been properly tested, check that all your components are supported, that all the major issues are solved and then proceed with the so long desired upgrade.

With Leopard my choice was very different though. I just upgraded. Unlike many others I did not encounter major problems, on the contrary, I've solved most of the issues I had with Tiger, so overall I consider the move quite beneficial. There is, however, one big problem that most of Leopard users seem to have stumbled upon. Apparently any external hard drive or device connected through firewire stopped working after a Leopard installation. To be precise, the drives still work with other machines, but they have a big issue with Leopard.

Tip: you might be interested in my DVD ripping guide ^_^

OS X gives you a pretty wide choice of video players and enconders, most of which are base on the ffmpeg project. Quicktime sucks. The last version improved a lot in terms of usability, exporting videos and other features, but it's all Apple centric. You can't play 90% of the video formats unless you install external plugins that integrate the ffmpeg library into it.

Now, let's focus on the real video players, those that support a LOT of formats. The most popular is by far VLC. It's easy to use, it has many features integrated and it's basically ubiquitous, though it's not the best one. The best choice is undoubtedly MPlayer. I won't even spend my time debating on how MPlayer is better, it' just better.

DVDripTools

• Download project
• Page on Sourceforge.
• SVN checkout:
  svn co https://dvdriptools.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/dvdriptools dvdriptools

Hi, this short tutorial aims to be a guide for those who would like to back up a DVD using Linux. If you like nice and clear GUIs I suggest you to use the excellent Handbrake, but if you are interested in understanding what really happens when ripping a DVD and have complete control over the operation you will find this guide quite useful.

At first I will start with a general overview to clarify the situation about DVDs, then I'll switch to a description of the script I made, along with its usage. Remember that this does not pretend to be an exhaustive study about DVD encoding, it is a simple introduction to this beautiful World, for further information I suggest you to follow these links: