DVDs should only be burned in Hell
Sunday, June 29th, 2008I hate DVD as a video format. It deserves to die, NOW. Preferably painfully, like with knitting needles through the ears. I lost several hours this weekend to trying to burn one of these motherfuckers and ultimately failed.
iDVD, the craptacular Apple DVD creation software, refused to recognize VOB files as valid media so I had to convert them to AVI first (VOB files are the native format which DVD video is encoded in, so a DVD creation tool should really recognize them).
Converting to AVI was done using the free sofware Handbrake, and was wonderfully fast, converting a two hour movie in about 20 minutes. Converting the movie back to DVD took 3 hours and 40 minutes. And then it failed.
And then it failed again.
Also, iDVD has no additional compression settings to squeeze content slightly larger than 4.2 GB into a size slightly smaller than 4.2 GB… meaning it demands a Dual Layer disc when a single should suffice.
And on a vaguely related note I paid $20 in fines to my local video store recently for keeping two of their shitty scratched silver discs (and some bad photocopied covers) out a couple of days longer than I was supposed to. Boy, that’s sure going to make me drive back in my 2 tonne car sometime to pick up some physical media again next time I want to see a movie. Or maybe, just maybe, I’ll download that movie next time, because it will be better for me and the environment.
June 30th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
I too wish that it would die, as every time a friend asks me to burn something to DVD format for them rather than divx etc, a little piece of me dies inside. If it really must be done, then VisualHub is the ticket though. Handles compression automatically, as well as converting most video formats to most other video formats (except stupid real audio/video) and also adds to iTunes. And as for rentals, get yourself a US-iTunes account (via ebay)… it’s relatively close to that future you got sick of waiting for and forgot about.
June 30th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
well, i have really one gripe with Apple, that is calculated to annoy me more than any other temporary (usually resolvable) issue,
and that is:
scratched DVD’s can hang Mac OS X to point that you need to pull the plug and start again. WTF?!?
why can we not have a kernal driver for optical media that goes, bugger it, i’ll look ahead 30 seconds instead.
June 30th, 2008 at 1:24 pm
oh i misspelt kernel! i’m such a dweeb, i wish there was an edit post button.
June 30th, 2008 at 1:28 pm
don’t get me started. Why is Wall•e not coming out in the southern hemisphere unitl september?? i thought Pixar movies got simultaneous release these days.
BIt torrent worthy if u ask me.
PS: i use quickflix, haven’t been inside a video shop for two years now.
June 30th, 2008 at 2:08 pm
When intepid 2.0 rolls around (check the temperature in Hades) it will allow for people to delete/edit their own comments, even anonymous ones.
July 3rd, 2008 at 2:22 pm
But… but… but!
So when you do add an edit feature, will it let us go back and edit comments that were posted prior to the introduction of that feature? Cos that probably keep me pretty busy for a week or so.
July 3rd, 2008 at 2:37 pm
No retroactive edits :)
Also… possibly I will only allow the last comment in a thread to be edited, or put a 24 hours limit on edits. Not sure yet.
July 4th, 2008 at 8:25 pm
15 min time limit would suffice. just to correct typos or bad URLs etc