DVD Ripping 101, OS X style

Hands down this is pretty much the way things get done. When Roxio's Toast and Popcorn yell at you and say "No! You're being bad!" Mac The Ripper says "You ready? Let's do this." From their site:

"MacTheRipper is a free DVD ripper (extractor) for Mac OS X. It can extract commercial DVD movies to your hard drive, minus all the copy protections and region controls put in place by DVD publishers. You can then use various tools to burn the movie back to DVD-R for use in DVD players, or convert the movie to different formats for playback with a variety of devices. MacTheRipper is intended to backup DVDs you have legally purchased for personal use. Any copyright-infringing activity you choose to perpetrate using this application is illegal, immoral, and beyond our control."

Fair enough. Download it here.

Torrents anyone?

For those of you that are using OS X and don't know how to download .torrent files, here's a basic tutorial. First of all, you need torrent client software. I recommend Azureus. After you download and install Azureus, you should add the Pirate Bay search engine to your Firefox browser. Then you simply do a search for the file you are legally allowed to download because you already own it. When you find the desired file, Firefox will ask you to pick a default action to choose when handling .torrent files. Go ahead and select "Always open with Azureus." And then wait. A long time. But it's sooooo worth it.

Why Toast when you can Burn?

For you OS X kiddies out there. I handle all of my disc burning needs with Burn. Open source, free, OS X only. It even handles some format conversions also. One of the best free apps I have ever used.

VLC

VLC is an amazing piece of software that will play just about any audio or video format I throw at it. I use it on both my iBook G4 and my Ubuntu box. I just gets better and better everytime. It's cross-platform, free, opensource, and it just works. Get it here now.