Episode 22 - DVD Ripping Tools, HD Antenna, MP3 Players, Wondercon!

[samureye]

Rip any DVD with AnyDVD, MP3 Player Reccos, Game Developers Conference, HD picture frame antenna, Spoof a MAC address, get kicked out of school. Wondercon!

Watch Episode (http://revision3.com/tekzilla/stuffage/)

[computoman]

I really enjoyed seeing vista mess up . That was the highlight of the episode. I do not watch movies anymore, but it was neat to see the tools available for extracting media. I wonder if you build your own hd antenna,.

[arcticfox]

Another great show, Garnett is a great co-host i love the 1upyours audio podcast.

[pacific707]

Great Show really enjoyed it. Just so happens I am working on backing up my DVD collection and the tips were great!

[arcticfox]

Another good encoder is MeGUI, it uses x264 encoder which is a really high quality encoder compared to FFMPEG that most video conversion suites use.

[ryudo]

Great episode and just a trivial question but was the Vizio monitor giving out in the background or is that wallpaper supposed to look that faded and washed out?

[neutrino15]

I have never had handbrake fail me either, i use it all the time and it is amazing. (well, torrents do it one better :rolleyes:)

As for your question about MP3 players, i think a big aspect that Patrick forgot to mention was how software plays a CRITICAL role in sound quality. Most players have hardware decoders for certain formats, however some formats are decoded through the main CPU via software. What most people never even think about is that the decoder software is just as important as the encoder! More importantly, the EQ on most players is set to "flat" (or equal) out of the factory. Please adjust this!


Here are 2 things to try:

•Take 10 minutes out of your life to adjust the Equalizer to your liking.
•If your player's software is disappointingly limited, try RockBox. (http://www.rockbox.org/) It sports great decoders as well as tons (and i mean TONS) of options. You can spend DAYS adjusting the gains/tones/what have you inside of rockbox. Definately give it a try. As an added bonus, you can play Doom!

[blackfeathers]

during this episode they said they will discuss what happens when a pc is running upside-down. this peaked my interest.

but, when they covered the segment, they were discussing placement on its side.

while this was a minor mistake, it got me curious...
what if you had a desktop pc -components and all upside down? any adverse effects with certain cases and airflows? optical drives reading dvds? will it affect hard drive lifespan with respect to heat, gravity, and other factors related to this placement? any effects on lcds upside down? all this is in light of running multimedia intensive processes.

great episode! keep up the good job.

j.

[jaywilliams]

As a big fan of both Tekzilla and the TV show Doctor Who, I must admit I really enjoyed seeing both "The Doctor" and a "Dalek". It made my day!

Keep up the great work!

[mrpysnik]

Another great tool for "backing up" DVDs is DVDshrink (http://www.dvdshrink.org/). The best part is its free and easy and and I have been using it for years in conjunction with one of the show's sponsors.

[anime018]

dvd 43 is a free program that does what slysofts anydvd does but for free. give it a look. and Check out vcdhelp.com (http://www.videohelp.com/) has a huge help with encoding anything you want and great forums.

[cazzie98]

I use OneClick DVD and DVD43. You have to buy Oneclick bit it is just that Oneclick to make a complete copy of any DVD. DVD43 is free and has always worked for me. I highly recoomend both of these.

[brundlefly]

I was just going to chime in and say that DVDShrink was my tool of choice back in my Windows days, but someone already mentioned it. However, since converting to a dedicated Linux box two years ago (Kubuntu Gutsy, currently), I've had to find alternate apps because of the way that 'nix OSes handle codecs. For anybody who has large collections of music files or hundreds of compact discs backed up on their hard drive, I cannot stress the wonders of the Amarok media player. Not only does it have a great GUI interface that, IMHO, far surpasses anything ITunes could ever hope to achieve, but the bells and whistles that come with it by default are a lifesaver. I'm talking the ability to hit one button and have a digital fingerprint of a song generated and compared to an online database which automatically fills in and corrects all missing or incorrect metadata. I'm talking about hitting one other button that will automatically rename files (either solo or as a batch) based on the metadata, in a format that you choose. I'm talking about (again) hitting one button and having an entire music collection organized into a folder hierarchy based on artist name and album title. What used to take days of sitting and manually editing now takes no more than 5 minutes for a collection of well over 15,000 digital song files.

On the video side, there's an application called K3b with Linux that outperforms Windows apps I've seen selling retail for upwards of $70 and shows them the door. Not only does it copy DVDs flawlessly and convert them into ISO files (among others), but it also burns DVDs, VCDs, etc with equal precision. And if you're worried about copy protection, don't. K3b walks around Macrovision copy protection and everything else like it wasn't there. It's a great tool for backing up your PC games, DVD's, and compact discs for personal use, of course. I would NOT advocate anything illegal.

If you're into digital file manipulation for personal use and you've never considered it, think about setting up a dual-boot machine and adding your Linux flavor of choice. Linux isn't known for great third-party media hardware support, and as much as I love Linux, I'll be the first to admit that, compared to the ease of use with Windows as far as products like Zune, Ipods, Creative Labs players, and Rio products, Linux is a disappointment. However, by having a dual boot machine and having a shared media partition, you have the full range of free, powerful digital manipulation applications AND the seamless connectivity of products under Windows.

Of course, the Linux apps I mentioned here are just the bare basics that are included "out of the box" with most popular Linux distributions. I'm sure there are countless other apps that do amazing things beyond what I've mentioned here.

[tnvwboy]

I have to disagree with Pat on the Zune. I love my Zune, but the audio out is not so great. I've never been happy with the results playing in my car (though a mini-jack input, not the tape-deck adapter). If I play the same song on the CD player and then the Zune, the difference is huge and not so pleasant.

Hopefully Microsoft will give us an EQ, we need it bad!

[md2389]

Funny, the audio out of my Zune 80 sounds on par with what I get out of my PC (which runs via fiberoptic to my surround sound system). Then again, I do encode to atleast 320kbps VBR. Though I do agree that the Zune definitely needs an equalizer since we all have different tastes on what sounds good. Adjusting it would be rather easy given the touchpad control.

[Fawkes]

I've always thought the sound output from the zune was terrific (I use apple's earbuds from a dead shuffle), but an EQ sure would be nice addition.

[tnvwboy]

To be clear I rip at 192-256 VBR MP3s. Not awesome quality but not so bad that I should have the issues I do. I guess it's just me. Oh and I have a Zune 80 also.

[cedon]

Love the show, had a problem with this one though.
I get the large feed through itunes, it plays fine up to about 1/4 - 1/2 way through the program, right after the wondercon coverage starts, the image freezes, while the audio plays on. I'v tried playing it in itunes, quicktime, and VCL and it stops the vidio at the same spot. anyone else getting this?
However i can play it on the website with no trouble.

[hsia12210]

Nice sharing!
I was looking for this software has been a very long time, tried a lot of software,
AnyDVD, DVDFab, Pavtube, DVDshrink, Handbrake etc.
All of these software, I think the best freeware is Handbrake, I have been using it!
easy to use and fast speed! so cool

[nav13eh]

Why bring back such an old post?