Macintosh How To » CD/DVD

How to convert a DVD to quicktime.

admin — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 23:52:04 +0000

Here’s how to copy a DVD to your harddrive and convert it to a movie that will play on your iphone, ipod or in quicktime on your computer. Go to http://handbrake.fr/ and click on ‘download it now’ to download the latest version of handbrake.

Instal and run handbrake.

Insert the DVD you want to copy.

Click the ‘source’ in the top left of the toolbar, and select the DVD.

Under ‘source’ select the title and chapters that you want. You can work out the chapters by opening DVD player and looking in the information window. To verify them you can check the duration. Click ‘toggle presets’ in the toolbar and this will give you a pull out window where you can select the output quality that you want.

AppleTV is better quality, iPod is lower quality and a smaller file.

I made my own setting called phone for my samsung mobile phone, which makes a very small file. I used: MP4 file, MPEG-4 Video/AAC Audio. Video was 320×240 and 15 frames per second and 350kbps. Audio was 128 kbps and 24khz. This was as small a filesize as I could make with still an OK quality. Select a destination directory (eg desktop) and press the start button. It can take quite a while, allow a few hours!

How to rip a DVD

admin — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 02:44:51 +0000

Mac the ripper is a little program that allows you to copy a DVD to your computer, and at the same time it removes the copy protection. (This is called ‘ripping’ a DVD)
Click here to go to the mactheripper page to download it. Otherwise click here to download it locally. Basically it will copy a DVD from your DVD player to your computer – you’ll need to watch it with DVD Player.If you want to convert a DVD it to a different format, for example to watch on your iphone, or to put on the web, try handbrake.

How to create a disk image of a DVD or CD

admin — Wed, 30 May 2007 23:33:55 +0000

This is a little bit advanced, but useful.

1. Insert the DVD/CD into your drive.

2. Run the TERMINAL application (In your Appplications Utilities Folder)

You will get a little window with a prompt something this: Macintosh:~ wayne$

3.Type the following and then hit return:

drutil status

It will give you some info like this:

Vendor Product Rev
SONY DVD RW DW-U21A AADB

Type: DVD-R Name: /dev/disk2
Cur Write: 4x DVD Sessions: 1
Max Write: 4x DVD Tracks: 1

This is information about your DVD/CD drive and the important thing to notice is the name, it will be /dev/disk1 or /dev/disk2

4. If it is disk1 type this: (If the name is different (eg disk2) then just replace all the disk1 references with disk2.)

diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk1

This will make the DVD icon disappear from the desktop.
5. Type the following:

dd if=/dev/disk1 of=~/Desktop/file.iso bs=2048
6. Wait about 10 or 20 minutes while it now makes an image of the CD/DVD onto your desktop.

When it’s finished it will give a message like this:

2170784+0 records in
2170784+0 records out
4445765632 bytes transferred in 1335.111379 secs (3329884 bytes/sec)

7. Type this to make the DVD reappear on the desktop and you are done:

diskutil mountDisk /dev/disk1

How to copy a DVD.

admin — Mon, 14 May 2007 22:55:07 +0000

Someone asked me: “do you have any advice on how to copy a DVD onto another DVD.”

It’s quite easy.
You use apple’s built in disk utility (in your utilities folder) to make a disk image of the dvd (select the DVD then select ‘new image’), it copies it exactly. The default options of compressed and none are fine.

You then use disk utility to burn the disk image you have just created back to a dvd. Select the image and choose ‘burn.’

It must be your own dvd, not a commercial one to to this.

This works with data DVD’s as well as movie DVD’s.

Wayne

How to backup a DVD

admin — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 00:56:56 +0000

If you’ve tried watching DVD’s on your laptop (eg on a plane or in the car) you’ll notice the batteries wear down pretty quickly. Here’s how to copy your DVD onto your laptop, which you can do at home, so when you take your laptop on the road you don’t need to take the original disk, and the batteries on your laptop last longer.

Download and run “DVD Backup”. (The developers site has been down for a while, here is here. http://howto.dubbo.org/public/DVDBackup 1.3.sit
Insert the DVD. If the Apple DVD player runs automatically, quit it.
In DVDBackup click on ‘Add DVD Files’
Select the DVD in the left column and then click ‘OPEN.’
Make sure that Remove CSS Encryption is selected.
Click Process Files and select a name and location for where you want the DVD files to end up.

To Playback the DVD you need to do the following:

Open Apple DVD PLayer.
Go to Menu called FILE:OPEN VIDEO_TS or on newer versions FILE:OPEN DVD MEDIA
Select the VIDEO_TS folder of the movie you want to open.

How to skip straight to the feature on a DVD

admin — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 00:41:40 +0000

When you’re watching a DVD do you get annoyed that there are those compulsory credits at the start, and copyright warnings, and you can’t skip them. Well, you can skip them with this simple program that modifies your apple DVD player so that it ignores the directions on the DVD about which bits are compulsory viewing.

You can download it from here:

http://xvi.rpc1.org/playerpatch.html

Then just run it, hit return when it prompts you to, type your password when it prompts you to, and then you’re away!

STOP PRESS: In the new Leopard DVD player you can do what you want so no hack is needed in Leopard. Thankyou Apple!