Monday, January 02, 2006

Copying DVDs: DVD2One

Shrek won't play on my aging iBook. It starts skipping about half-way through. Looks like my the original drive (read CD or DVD, burn nothing) has trouble with dual-layer DVDs. I also know it won't read a Tiger DVD (also dual-layer).

This is a problem when entertaining the kids on long flights.

I used Mac The Ripper (author site is gone, versiontracker still has it) to copy the DVD to my iMac drive, then tried DVD2one.com to create a compressed version that could be burned to a single layer DVD-R. It sort of worked; after burning the drive didn't show up in the Finder (10.4) and I had to eject using Disk Utility. I was able to insert and play however -- but it looks quite ugly. Too bad!

I'll have to decide whether to put a new drive in the G3 or (more sensibly) buy something newer. Alas the days of playing DVDs on a laptop may be numbered; the movie houses hate us doing that. I refuse to carry yet another device, so we may have to make do with old movie and I may need to learn more about the dark side.

No comments: