rip dvd, gdc, hd antenna — DVD Ripping Tools, HD Antenna, MP3 Players, Wondercon! — Tekzilla

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

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Friday, February 29th, 2008 - running time 00:43:56

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!

1UP.com's reviews editor Garnett Lee joins us as cohost today...

... and he's got the scoop from the Game Developers Conference '08 (The PC Gaming Alliance was big news, sort of... and where is Sony's Home for the Playstation??? )

Antennas Direct's hid its newest HDTV antenna inside a picture frame... Jim Louderback put the PF7 Picture Frame Antenna thru the paces and found it does a great job sucking down analog HDTV. It's cheap, too!

We love the comic books, so our producers Roger and Serafina took a trip to Wondercon, and came back with quite the collection of video.

Can't rip that DVD? You need some stronger tools.... AnyDVD is the bomb at gettting around copy protection on Windows.

On OS X, the folks at Handbrake have a step by step guide for dealing with disks that won't rip: you'll need Fairmount, DVD2OneX and this page!

Yahya wants a recco on a portable music player... that delivers excellent sound quality, and maybe that isn't an iPod. First off, make sure you've got quality audio files to listen to... and a decent set of headphones. (Garnett's convinced the player is the least of your worries.)

Patrick's spent a bunch of time with the Zune and it's quite good. We've also heard good things about Creative's Zen V Plus, the oh so stylish iRiver Clix Gen 2 is a great (if pricey) follow up to the most excellent iriver Clix. If you're looking for video playback, too, the editors at Cnet are big on the Archos 605.

Several folks want to buy Patrick's old Xbox 360 HD DVD drive.... can anybody beat $7.37?

Why does an HDTV cost more than the same sized LCD monitor? Good question, Christopher.

Free file o' the week:

Quick Media Converter lets you drag and drop video into 13 different formats, including PSP, iPod and web friendly formats!

Turning a vertical PC case on its side and running it that way hurt it? We wouldn't worry, Benedict. Patrick's run most of his PCs in horizontal mode with no ill effects. Just don't cover the vents. (They do take up more desktop space, that way, tho!)

Dave, Michael and "B" wrote in with ideas to help Jesse get his Xbox 360 connected to the his dorm's ResNet... and Eric sent a warning that spoofing a MAC address can get you kicked out of school. (It got him tossed!)

What's a good program to format you computer Naevek? Whatever comes with the OS, Windows or OS X will work fine for partitioning a drive.

If you want to do a 'non destructive' partition, ie, you want to change a partition without wiping all the data from inside it, Paragon's Parition Manager is the gold standard, tho GParted, the Gnome Partition Editor is an excellent Open Source alternative. (FYI, here's a great guide to modifying partitions with GParted)

No matter what tool you use, we recco backing up your data before you resize a partition... just in case.

Now, Naevek, if you're looking to format and wipe a drive before you, say, sell the computer it's inside of, our favorite tool is Darik's Boot and Nuke... it should be more than enough to protect your identity... tho Wikipedia says that as of November 2007, "overwriting is no longer a DoD-acceptable sanitization method for magnetic media".

Converting FLAC files to MP3 files? No problem, John. We use dBpoweramp, tho you will have to pay for MP3 support... ya know, since you're using a Zune, you might want to go with WMA instead of MP3... you should be able to do that for free in dBpoweramp.

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

problem viewing episode 22 about half way through

Posted by cedon on 03/03/2008 at 03:08:51 pm in Tekzilla

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.

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

Posted by TNVWBOY on 03/03/2008 at 01:20:32 pm in Tekzilla

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.

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

Posted by Fawkes on 03/03/2008 at 12:32:41 pm in Tekzilla

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.

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

Posted by MD2389 on 03/03/2008 at 11:02:35 am in Tekzilla

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.

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

Posted by TNVWBOY on 03/03/2008 at 10:48:46 am in Tekzilla

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!

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

Posted by Brundlefly on 03/02/2008 at 07:24:51 pm in Tekzilla

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.

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