In Canada backing up dvds for for personal use is legal, but it is not as easy as ripping audio cds. This is (mostly) thanks to the Content Scramble System present on almost all dvds. The companies that author and press the dvds sometimes throw in other tricks to prevent computers from reading the discs.

The first step in backing up the dvd is to decrypt it. There are many free ways of doing this, often involving decss. My recommendation is a commercial app called AnyDVD. Yes, you can use free apps to decrypt 90% of the dvds out there and yes AnyDVD is expensive and only runs on Windows. AnyDVD is actively maintained, in fact they have released a version that will decrypt Blu Ray discs. I guess I am old enough to choose my software battles.

After installing and inserting a dvd into the drive, backing up the dvd is as simple as navigating to the drive and copying the VIDEO_TS directory to your hard drive. The size of the backed up directory will usually be about 7 Gigs or less.

At this point the backup can be played on any software that can play dvds. I suggest VLC media player, which is cross platform and will display the full dvd menus.

Finally, if you wish to play back the content on your ipod or game console I would suggest HandBrake. It has profiles for the different platforms and allows queuing of transcoding jobs.

Side note: The OS X DVD Player will play the backed up image, start the application first and drag the VIDEO_TS onto the icon in the Dock.)

In an effort to share some of my iPhone dev efforts, I am linking into my confluence space from the ‘links’ section on the front page, here are the links themselves:

iPhone and xcode notes

iPhone adhoc provisioning notes

Went to the WirelessNorth.ca meetup meet some new faces.

One of the things that came up was the iphone techtalk, it looks like there is still room for the Toronto event:

http://developer.apple.com/events/iphone/techtalks/

The Pragmatic Programmers is an agile publishing and training company and they are responsible for some of the best computer books available.

They have taken the innovative step of releasing ‘beta’ versions of their books as pdfs. I have taken advantage of this by paying for the beta version of their iphone sdk book.

Now it might seem dumb to pay for a book that isn’t done and may contain errors and I would tend to agree. But now that the iphone NDA has been lifted, the beta pdf is the fastest way to get a book to market and for me to get my hands on it.

What I would like to try next is an ebook reader. I like the Sony readers because they don’t tie you to one provider and copying a pdf onto memory card (as opposed to a download service) makes more sense to me.

I have had the iPhone for about 2 weeks now, here are 3 things I like and 3 things I don’t.

Hits

1. You can actually browse the web on it. I think this is the best browsing experience on a phone out there right now. The iPhone has a great screen, landscape mode rocks and the zooming and panning are implemented well. Now if they would only get Flash to work…
2. I can connect to my email servers. All of them. I run my own IMAP server, I use GMail and I can connect to them both seamlessly. Best of all, when I synced to my Powerbook for the first time, the server settings were automatically copied over.
3. Visual Voicemail is great. It seems so obvious, but wow. List my messages visually and let me manage them on the phone UI, not over some outdated 80′s voice mail interface. About time.

Misses

1. Battery life. A trade off I guess, such a great piece of hardware sucks battery. Especially using the network or gps. But for me, as long as it will survive a day of ‘normal’ use and charge over night, I am happy.
2. No iChat / GTalk client One application I did use on my Blackberry was the GTalk app, I could sign in and holster my phone. I would get a buzz when someone IM’ed me. There is a GTalk webapp, but when you are running another app you are signed out.
3. No Cut and Paste. This is a pretty big one, no clipboard. There are lots of functionality built into the apps to minimize the impact, but this is something I used all the time on my Blackberry. There is a bit of a design challenge to do it ‘right’, but this is a rather large gap in functionality.