Hacked: Play VIDEO_TS files using Front Row

When I "legitimately backup" my DVD's, I usually do so in .avi format, which is usually good enough quality at a ton less disk space.

When I "legitimately backup" my DVD's, I usually do so in .avi format, which is usually good enough quality at a ton less disk space.

Agreed, but lately I've been going the Handbrake route to get them in MP4 with h264/AAC. I've been comparing this format to DiVX. With DiVX it's pretty easy to get the DVD down to 700mb and still retain some semblance of quality. With h264/AAC, at 700mb the quality is not quite as good (in my humble opinion) which is shocking because that was the major thrust of the h264 movement. Howevever, I don't compress that far. My target size is 1.1GB (so I can back up 4 to a DVD). At 1.1 GB the quality of the h264 video is far superior to the DiVX.

Great writing style!

Yuck sp0t, that's so slimy. Mash's comments are of course always excellent, aren't they, Mash? You want one more beer?

Sorry, gotta go now, my legitimately backed-up dvds are calling.

gid

This is great news except saving in those file formats takes up about 11GB for each movie on my 80Gb HD. I guess im gonna need an external HD. Moksha, what do you use to convert into avi. Thanks, and great story.

This is excellent news and eliminates the largest barrier to watching ripped DVDs on my MacBook.

That said, (a) having my movies in a more standard video format is still nice, and ( a reduction in size is always welcome. So I wonder: Are there settings for HandBrake or another app that will rip a movie with no loss in audio or video quality (or at least nothing perceptible on any viewing device)? And can the digital audio encodings be retained?

The news ir pobabily great for some but i would rather have avi divx file so i can burn it and watch on my large tv using my divx playable dvd player (wow that's longs)

When I "legitimately backup" my DVD's, I usually do so in .avi format, which is usually good enough quality at a ton less disk space.

What do you use to convert to avi and is it divx encoded?

My target size is 1.1GB (so I can back up 4 to a DVD). At 1.1 GB the quality of the h264 video is far superior to the DiVX.

Are you comparing a 1.1GB Divx quality to a 1.1GB h264 (why does it have such an odd name)? And h264 is better even though at 700mb it's the other way round? Weird.

While I'm sure the DRM Team at Apple probably can't see the beauty in this hack, a user over at AVS Forum has created DVD Assist, a "little Applescript applet I put together to allow Front Row to seemlessly play VIDEO_TS folders from inside of Front Row."

is there a way to get front row to recognize other formats? in particular, .avi?

Front row will play .avi (avi is a container) it is most likely you do not have the codec that the video/audio was encoded in, get the codecs for quicktime, then front row will play it, most likely you need divx, xvid and ac3, they are around if you google, and they're universal binary.

then open the file in quicktime, if it plays fine in quicktime, it is 99.9% likely to play alright in front row.