HandBrake: DVD to MPEG-4 ripper

HandBrake homepage

I believe this is legal for DVDs you own for personal use only. It is perfectly legal for distributing video of the kids to Grandma.

HandBrake is a GPL'd multiplatform, multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 ripper/converter. HandBrake was originally available on the BeOS, but now has been ported over to MacOS X and to GNU/Linux.

* Supported sources:
o Any DVD-like source: VIDEO_TS folder, DVD image or real DVD (even encrypted)
o PAL or NTSC
o AC-3, LPCM or MPEG audio tracks
* Outputs:
o File format: MP4, AVI or OGM
o Video: MPEG-4 or H.264 (1 or 2 passes or constant quantizer encoding)
o Audio: AAC, MP3, Vorbis or AC-3 pass-through (supports encoding of several audio tracks)
* Misc features
o Chapter selection
o Basic subtitle support (burned into the picture)
o Integrated bitrate calculator
o Picture deinterlacing, cropping and scaling
o Grayscale encoding

Cute net address. I'm sure "m0k" means something ominous to some people.

Nice reference: Printer troubleshooting for AirPort Extreme and AirPort Express

Printer troubleshooting for AirPort Extreme and AirPort Express

Very practical techniques. It's common for printer utilities to only work via USB connection.

Matched DIMM for maximum G5 iMac performance

Apple iMac (G5-2.0GHz, 20-inch) upgrades from Crucial.com

Not cheap at $255!

A fix for the inane iPhoto 5 color profile bug?

Update 7/13: Alas, this was old news and was long ago shown not to work. It's unclear if it has any affect on anything, but the ColorSync bugs seems to be related more to QuickTime than to iPhoto.

Macintouch: iPhoto (Part 13)

Seth:

I found the following on the iPhoto color changes at the apple web site. I have not tried it yet but will when I get home.

Subject: RE: iPhoto changes color profile, what to do?

1. Close iPhoto, go to your library folder, scroll to the preferences folder.
2. Find the 'com.apple.iPhoto.plist'
3. Open it with textedit and look in the EmbedColorProfile. You will see that it is currently set to 'NO'. Change it to 'YES'.
4. Save the change when you close the window.

That should do the trick. You can also use the Color Sync Utility to designate what color profile is embedded to your photos at the time you import from your camera. Open Color Sync Utility and click on the Devices tab then on 'camera'. Your camera must be connected when you do this.

I use sRGB throughout my workflow. It's not ideal but in practice it's worked pretty well. That was suggested to me during correspondence with a ColorSync engineer.

iPhoto has really been a frustrating piece of software. Too good to discard, yet either the source code is a horrendous mess, or the project is immensely under-resourced, or there's a saboteur working in the project.

Macintouch Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger Incompatibilities and Workarounds

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger Incompatibilities and Workarounds

An impressively long list of all the things Tiger breaks. Microsoft has always envied Apple's ability to break sofware without being screamed at, but it probably doesn't help Apple's market share.

I will probably end up starting with 10.4.2 (should be out soon), but I won't do serious work on my new Tiger machine until 10.4.3. Until then I'll stick with my old G3 and 10.3.9.

Clear Unwanted Entries from Windows Explorer's New Menu

Annoyances.org - Clear Unwanted Entries from Explorer's New Menu

Wow. To remove those meaningless entries on the Explorer "new menu" you have to edit the registry! TweakUI does it too, I'll try that first. Great reference.

Update: TweakUI works quite well to solve this annoyance.

Printing to an Apple AirPort print server from an XP client: Bonjour for Windows

Gordon's Tech: Finding your computer's Bonjour name

This worked rather well! I installed Bonjour for Windows, attached my Canon PIXMA iP4000 to my Apple Airport Extreme (latest firmware, etc), and clicked on the Bonjour Printer Wizard. (NOTE: I'd previously installed the iP4000 on both the XP and OS X machines using a local USB port -- I think that's probably essential). The printer appeared immediately. It installed just as though it were on the local USB port. So far works perfectly.

The Port information is interesting: IP_1661well.local.9100 with a RAW data format. Reminds me of all my attempts to get various ink jet printers to work on the Hawking print server or the AirPort. I could always get something to work somewhere using a variant of the TCP/IP lp print protocols, but nothing ever worked well for the PC on an AirPort.

Interestingly the Pixma on the AirPort now works a bit better with my XP machine than with my iBook. Canon's OS X printer utility doesn't work with Rendezvous connections; it only supports USB connections. On the XP machine the printer utility works. I suspect XP does a better job than OS X 10.3 of abstracting the printer's connection.