Stupid Robots

I rip my DVDs using a combination of Handbrake and MacTheRipper. I use the 3.0 R14m version. Find a good torrent on TPB, I can;t remember where I got it, but I didn’t pay the stupid ‘donation’. As they’re using libdvdcss, it’s kinda illegal for them to be using it without releasing the source. For Handbrake, I’m using a beta I compiled a while back that has processor specific optimizations. It also has the patch for the Quicktime AAC encoder. If you want it, drop me a comment, and I’ll put it up, but it’s only for Core 2 Duos.

First, I rip the main feature of the DVD. I don’t have any need for the special features. Select just the languages you need, and let MTR do it’s magic. Occasionally MTR will die right at the end of the rip, but switching so it rips the whole disc usually solves it. Be careful when ripping foreign films, as the English track may not exist even of MTR selects it. I usually rip the whole disc for those.

Next, I encode it using Handbrake. For video, I use the x264 encoder into a MP4 file. Two pass encoding with a turbo first pass. Average bitrate of 1850kbps, and for widescreen movies I use strict anamorphic. For audio, I use the AAC (CoreAudio) encoder, mixing down to Dolby Pro Logic II at 192kbps. I fill in the chapter titles when I can from the DVD liner notes, and I have a custom advanced settings string:
ref=6:bframes=4:subq=6:me=umh:deblock=1,2:trellis=2:direct=auto:weightb=1:brdo=1:bime=1:analyse=all:8x8dct=1:merange=24:mixed-refs=1:psy-rd=1.0,1.0

These settings take a while (if it’s the only thing running, you’re looking at about 5-6 hours per movie). I get about 1GB per hour of movie, and minimal blocking and a high enough quality for me. For most people, the defaults will work fine.

I have a ‘Scratch’ Folder on my desktop where I store the files used in the intermediate steps so Time Machine doesn’t fill up on unfinished files. To do this, Go to the Time Machine Preference pane and add an excluded folder.

Here’s a good portion of the applications I use on a day to day basis. Hopefully someone finds something they didn’t know about and I’ve helped them out.

First up are my media apps. Music, Photos, Movies, it’s all here.

The biggie is iTunes. I manage all of my music and movies on there, but there’s some tricks I take advantage of. My internal laptop drive is only 250GB, with 160GB of it for OS X. My movies on the other hand, take up almost 100GB. So, I keep my movies on an external terabyte drive, and have a thing called a symbolic link connecting the “Movies” folder in the iTunes Library to the Movies folder on my external drive. Other things special to my iTunes is the original Magnetosphere visualizer, which is what the newest iTunes visualizer was based on. Looks cooler in my opinion.

Related to iTunes is Last.fm, which keeps a nice little log of what I’m listening to, and also suggests new stuff to me.

PandoraBoy is a standalone Pandora client that has support for the Apple Remote, so it can be controlled from across the room

I use VLC and Mplayer to play esoteric media files. Mplayer for OS X is old and beta, but works well enough. Related to those is Perian, which is a driver pack for Quicktime. Another driver pack that gets a lot of use from me are the Windows Media Components for Quicktime.

To rip DVDs, I use a two step process of first removing the copy protection with MacTheRipper (torrent the latest beta, as charging for open source is BS), the encoding with a custom build of Handbrake that uses the Quicktime audio encoder and optimizations for my machine only.

Synergy is a cool little app I got that puts a little overlay of the track name whenever a new track starts in iTunes.

I also have the latest version of iLife, so there’s iWeb, iPhoto, iMovie, and iDVD on here. Note a lack of Garageband, which I don’t use at all, and takes up a load of space on a hard drive. Instead of Garageband, I use Audacity for my audio editing needs. It’s small, and has some extra things I like (generating sine tones for one).

Delicious Library 2 is a kinda cool app, though I still haven’t gotten around to adding my books into it as I just got it recently.

So, yeah! An honest-to-god website. I’ll try to fill it up with funs stuff over time, so check back in a while (or subscribe)