4 posts tagged “dvd”
Well I finally bit the bullet and felt that technology for LCD flat panels rivaled that of plasma TV's and took the plunge. To that end I just ordered my Samsung 120hz LCD HDTV beauty with TOC (touch of color) which should be delivered any day. My review of the set will be dropped right here once I get it and have time to put it through both HD and SD viewing.
Right now the most "perfect" of the imperfect Blu Ray players is still the SONY PlayStation3. Price drops on current stand alone Blu Ray players are impending (can we just stipulate HD DVD is dead?) and hopefully the crop of new players will be more perfected and one won't have to make trade offs and start out at a better overall price point. *Fingers Crossed* Until that time I'm going with a well priced SONY Bravia Home Theater System model DAV-HDX576WF for just around $300 beans, which is amazing special outlet pricing (I live 2 miles from a SONY Style store with B-stock items, many which aren't refurb, but just open or damaged boxes) upscaling DVD player HTIB (Home Theater In a Box) until I find a Blu Ray that is more perfected at a price point I'm willing to throw down on.
So of course, it's nice to be able to bring the HDTV experience to my small screen on the go too. Not only is there not a lot of [legal] HD content, but it's also not "truly" HD. See the article below for an explanation of why online HD streaming is a "lie". To that end, my favorite site for now is Hulu when it comes to online streaming and they do offer some HD content, even if it is not the HD I will get on my TV. If anyone has other HD streaming sites (besides ABC's HD offering) they really like, please comment!
Why HD movie downloads are a big lie by ZDNet's George Ou -- There’s a lot of buzz lately about the delivery of HD TV and Movie content over the Internet with shows like Lost being delivered by ABC.com and other video download services with XBox360 or iTunes. I even have friends and colleagues telling me that BlueRay or HD-DVD won’t make it because HD will simply be [...]
A few weeks ago, I went into a well known chain of office supply stores to pick up some printer ink and some odds and ends since I have a business account, and happened to see a "special" clearance item that caught my eye. I usually don't shop at office supply chains for the best price or for anything for my computer, but again, having business account there means is a convenience and it's not directly coming out of my pocket. Anyway, they were practically giving away a discontinued or to me a "throw away" external USB [Lite-On who rebadges for many companies, including SONY] DVD-RW with Dual Layer recording technology (I happened to want an external drive with LightScribe, but the price was right on this one) for $39, including tax, so I figured, "What the heck?" and went for it. I really only need it to burn an occasional DVD and to back up larger files from my back up drive (yeah, I'm paranoid, my good stuff goes in a fire safe box) and to archive older material for which a CD is too small. (Who would have thought an external DVD-RW would be cheaper than dirt, literally, a couple years ago?)
Well I unpacked it, hooked up the power and the USB cord. Then I fired it up and XP automatically assigned drivers and we were all good, right? Launched Nero and got ready to burn baby burn. No burned disc, but I was burning. Yeah, el cheapo drive-o couldn't work that easily or flawlessly, right? Right. So due to Murphy's Law, I kept getting error messages saying the drive couldn't handle the media, even though the media was correct and other such nonsense. It wasn't the price of the drive though, it was the fact that sometimes XP has problems with external USB drives when it assigns drive letters.
I had Alcohol 120% on my machine at one point, which had assigned several virtual drives, which may not have been recovered on removing it. I don't know if XP assigned/mapped it to one of those old drives, but the drive wasn't showing up anywhere except when I went into Control Panel>System>Device Manager>DVD/CD-ROM Drives. The only way to hopefully rectify the situation was to go into XP's Disk Management by typing diskmgmt.msc at the run command prompt. If the drive shows up there, as mine did, the fix is to rename it. Mine was originally drive L. I right clicked the drive letter and highlighted "change drive letter or path". From the drop down box of available drive letters, I took the easy road and chose Z, knowing for sure it had never been used. Then I right clicked "properties" and ticked the hardware tab. I highlighted the Lite On drive and right clicked "properties" once again and then went under the "Volumes" tab and clicked the "Populate" button. After saving out of all that, I was good to go. My drive was now showing up in Explorer. I dragged and dropped the drive shortcut onto my desktop (being a USB device, it doesn't show up under "My Computer") and this time, my throw away external drive worked "like butta" and I'm still in the process of slashin' and burning the excess fat from my internal hard drives...and except that I don't have my light scribe, I'm happy as a clam.
Own an iPod video, but still in the dark ages regarding how to get
your home DVD collection on there because the disks are encrypted? Are
you sick of paying big bucks to download movies in MPEG-4 format a
second time that you already have paid and own in your home video
library and are paying for again due to encryption? Well, if you are a
Windows user, then you need to run this free program:
DVD Decrypter download DVD Decrypter
along with your ripping/burning software to strip the region coding. This will allow you to "unlock" the DVD's you already own and put them on your computer or iPod. I use Nero 7 to rip and then convert to MPEG-4, but you can use the free and very capable Videora iPod Converter to do the job just as well. Mac users can use Handbrake which combines the capabiltiy of the two Windows programs into one. Hopefully the Windows version of Handbrake will be out shortly.
