Boscos.org

All in all I love my Mac. But some of the things Apple (and others) does for DRM compliance are just plain silly. I have a Sony DVD camcorder that uses small DVD disc’s to record. I can stick these in any DVD player to play them back which is great. What I wanted to do is simply copy them to the the Mac Harddrive and use Front Row to select which video to play. Sounds simple enough, but….

1. The slot drive on the iMac can’t use small discs at least that is what I think since that is what a guy at the Apple store said. So I have to copy the disc’s on a Window’s machine with a regular DVD drive and then copy them over the network to the Mac. This takes a long time since I have many gigs of videos
2. I finally have all my raw DVD data on the mac in the Movies directory. I start Front Row, but it refuses to play them. They play fine with the DVD Player on the mac
3. Most of the google hits for this problem suggest ripping the DVDs to MP4 with handbrake. So I do this, but handbrake compresses the videos and they don’t look as good. Can’t figure out handbrake settings that keep them at the same level of quality. I give up trying after a while. Maybe
4. Some more googling finds this script called DVD Assist which allows Front Row to read DVD images on disk. It works great, but I might have to get Quicktime PRO to get personalized images for my videos.

So, try DVD Assist if you also have this problem.