Telestream's Drive-in

[deckeda]

Thought this app needed its own thread from lipskidder's intro: http://forums.macresource.com/read.php?1,689225

papercup wrote:
Never heard of Drive-In. Gonna take a look.

Me neither. Here it is: http://www.telestream.net/drive-in/overview.htm

Short answer is that it won't satisfy anyone looking to copy their disks or rip them for transcoding. It's not even a substitute for RipIt actually.

What it does is rip to a proprietary disc image as-is (all menus preserved etc.) that can only be opened by Drive-In, and only on your Mac. The Mac sees the mounted image as any other and plays it in DVD Player. May be other ways to play it I suppose.

What I think truly sets it apart is that it licenses, as in, has the legal blessing from, the DVD CCA (the folks who dream up encryption for DVDs) and the DVD FLCC (which allows them to use the familiar "DVD" logo, etc.) Could this mean that Drive-In should be a truly reliable ripper, if they have the inside info on all the nasty DRM used??

It downloads artwork and metadata from Amazon and "puts" the disk image in a "DVD case" that holds everything. It does this if you input the disk's UPC code. Didn't see a way to scan that in a la Delicious Library. Is it a 2-disc set? You can put 'em both in the same "DVD case." This whole thing could be a cool function if rolled into Delicious Library, IMO, because those folks already have the library aspect down very well.

Telestream is who codes Flip4Mac, and in browsing their site they have a strong background in transcoding and enterprise solutions. That freeware Flip4Mac plugin you've used to view your WMV porn clips (just sayin') is only a tiny part of what they are all about. Flip4Mac is distributed my Microsoft but not owned by them, nor is Telestream. Given Telestream's strong broadcasting background and "real" business (apart from these inexpensive desktop things) I'm not sure how they escaped MS's claws.

[Harbourmaster]

Telestream wrote: "Drive-in creates an image that is an exact duplicate of the information that is on the owner's original DVD disc, thus preserving original content protection"

# The Single Seat license allows you to image DVD's and play them back on a single computer. Cost for single seat is $39.00.

# The Multi Seat license allows you to image and playback DVDs on up to 5 computers in your household. Cost for Multi Seat is $59.00.

So it copies everything, including the gigabytes of garbage that are included on many discs, simply to thwart legitimate copying for backup purposes. Sounds like a great way to waste a ton of space on your hard drive.

[Robert M]

Harbour,

True. But, some of the extras are quite cool. That and storage is far less of an issue in this day and age of spacious hard disk drives that can be purchased for a reasonable price. For example, a one terabyte can hold nearly 100 movies in their original ripped non-compressed format. I suspect most people don't have that many DVDs in their collection. Compress the movies with a program like Popcorn or turn them into mpegs with something like Handbrake and a terabyte drive can hold far more movies.

I recently used part of my electronics budget to purchase a one terabyte drive. Originally, it was going to be for backing up my Mac Pro, but I decided the 250 gig drive I ripped out of my old G5 was sufficient for that task. The new terabyte drive is now a media drive upon which I'm storing about 1/3 of my DVDs in their original non-compressed format. I want to see if I can rip a movie via Drive-In, store it on my tower and then stream the content from the tower to my TV via my Popcorn Hour. I'd do this just for giggles and to see if it's feasible. For me, it'll be easier to just connect the media drive directly to the Popcorn Hour and be done with it.

Robert

[Sam3]

But what can you do with the ripped video? Just watch it on the computer? That seems pretty limiting, it doesn't appeal to me to watch movies on a 17" monitor when I have a 50" plasma. Unless the video can get imported into iTunes and be made viewable onto the AppleTV, then I don't see the purpose for spending the 40-60 dollars.

[deckeda]

Robert, modern DVDs often include a dummy version of the main feature in the hopes that a ripper will get tripped up and copy the bad one. That's literally gigabytes of garbage no one uses.

Sam, I agree that the restrictions remain Draconian. Imagine the scenario --- you spend "30 minutes" (Telestream's estimate) getting a DVD ripped, sorted, cover art etc. in order to not have to carry the disk with you later. That's a huge time waste in light of the benefits.

[Robert M]

Deck,

True, but how many actually use this method of copy protection? It's far more common to come across intentionally bad sectors and such. I stand by what I said in my previous post. This is not to say, I'll still use MacTheRipper for movies. That way, I can rip the a DVD in its original form, store it on my media drive in its original form (for use with my Popcorn Hour) and, if necessary, reproduce it. I can't do that with Drive-In since I need a computer for it to work properly. For me, MacTheRipper is the better overall solution by far but I'm intrigued to see where Drive-In goes in the future. At some point, it may become a very useful application.

Robert

[papercup]

Thanks for the synopsis, deckeda.

RipIt & MTR can do 90% of everything out there (100% if you are willing to muck around with the files)

The MTR forums are really full of people hell-bent on ripping the hardest & messiest DVD masters, just to say they could. Kudos to them.