Henrik Carlsson's Blog

All things me.

Why I think DVDs suck (and how I solve the problem)

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DVDs suck! They really do. The basic idea was great and when they were news they were actually good news but today DVDs (and Blurays as well) suck.

Why?

The main reason in my opinion is their reliability, or lack thereof. The optical media is extremely delicate. If you are obsessively anal retentive about your discs – like me – and always take them straight out of the player, put them back in their casing and make sure the print on the disc lines up with the print on the case then this is only occasionally a problem. However if this is not the case, or even if you are like me but rent movies from time to time, the brittleness of the disc means the player will likely fail to read the content in a key scene of the movie, thereby forcing you to either restart the movie and try to fast-forward past the damaged section or forcing you to return to the video rental store with disappointment written all over your face.

Apart from this the disc format overall is very, very slow. For DVDs this means that it takes forever to transfer any data to and from them, which makes them pretty useless for anything other then movies. For Blurays it means that the time from the moment I put the disc in the player to the moment I can actually start interacting with the content is far too long.

Piracy is a crime!

Yes, I happen to agree to this. Piracy is a crime, that’s why I buy movies. But why should I, who do buy movies, be penalized by being forced to watch almost 2 minutes of propaganda declaring that I would have been a thief, if I had pirated the movie? (Incidentally, the simplest way of not having to watch this propaganda is to pirate the movie. )1

Time well spent?

Let me tell you a little story, and show you a little math. A couple of summers ago (3 I think) I bought a DVD box with The Complete X Files series (plus the first X Files movie). This meant 202 episodes of awesome TV magic. It also meant a lot of time spent watching ”Piracy is a crime” spots.

Let’s assume I watched one episode each time I put a disc into my DVD player. That means I watched ”Piracy is a crime” 202 times. That means I’ve spent almost 7 hours watching the damn infomercial, just for the X files watching. That’s almost a full work day! Now imagine how much time a person spends in his/her life watching this propaganda. And that is because you do buy movies.

(Also, let’s not forget the times that a microscopic dust particle managed to get onto a disc and interrupted the playback. In some players this actually mean you have to watch the damn thing all over again.)

Solution

Needless to say, these problems bothered me quite a lot. The solution was apparently to rip the content of the DVDs to video files and play them back from a computer. There are multiple tools to rip, convert and watch movies. I will just list and write about the ones I actually use.

Ripping

The ripping can be done two ways, either as a on-stop process where the source is the DVD and the result is a couple of movie files, or as a two part process where the DVD is first ripped to the computer, but still in DVD format, and then converted to movie files.

I generally prefer the second way since it means I can rip a lot of discs (which requires quite a bit of manual labour) during the day and then let the tedious (but very automated) converting be done in the night.

Mac the Ripper (rest in peace)

My tool for ripping discs has been Mac the Ripper. Unfortunately it’s a PowerPC application and with the discontinuation of Rosetta in OS X Lion, Mac the Ripper is now useless.

Handbrake

Handbrake is an awesome application that convert video files from one format to another. It is great for converting a DVD (or the ripped content of one) to H.264 video files that plays back smoothly on most modern computer hardware.

Playback

So ripping and converting things isn’t really a problem, which means the next question will be how to play back the video files in the best way. Playing it back in QuickTime and using folders to sort your library is one way. iTunes is another, slightly better but still not great, solution.

Plex

The solution that I’ve found to be the best is Plex Media Server. It’s a fork of XBMC, originally only for the Mac but nowadays compatible with Windows and various Linux flavors as well.

Plex is a two-piece solution with a media server and one or more clients. You can read all about it over at their web page, but the best way to really get to know about it is to download it (it’s free) and try using it.

What I’ve found to be great about Plex is mainly three thing:

Happily ever after?

So that’s that. A fairly long piece about the greatness of Plex. Apart from trying to convince all of you to try it, this article is also the first piece in a greater puzzle. The next piece in the puzzle is about clients for the media server, and that is maybe the more important piece but I felt that this introduction to why I hate optical media and love Plex was necessary.

  1. I will likely write a more lengthy piece about my opinions on copyright sometime in the future. ↩
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Replies and comments

How Peter Gabriel makes an album

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BneruaJqlsY

This is a great documentary about how Peter Gabriel wrote, recorded and produced the album Security, back in the early eighties. If you have even the slightest interest in music production, this is mandatory watching.1

All four parts can be found on YouTube:

  1. via Everything is a Remix ↩
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Storing Data the Simple HTML5 Way (and a few tricks you might not have known) | HTML5 Doctor

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This article1 has been lying around in my Instapaper cue for what feels like half an eternity. I while ago I finally read it and it contained som really good stuff on sessionStorage, localStorage and the storage event.

  1. Storing Data the Simple HTML5 Way (and a few tricks you might not have known) | HTML5 Doctor ↩
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New kent single – 999

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kent is probably my all time favorite band. Yesterday they released a new single called 9991. So far I think it’s a great song. It’s an unusually euphoric, almost Coldplay like, ”freedom rock” song. It’s definatly worth checking out.

There is also a video that you can watch:

  1. 999 in iTunes ↩
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Comixology let’s you update comics to HD for free

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If you own a comic that gets upgraded to CMX-HD format, you’ll be prompted to re-download the comic in the higher-quality format. There’s no upgrade fee, nor do HD-capable comics cost more than other comics.1

That’s the way you role out an HD upgrade.

  1. Macworld Comixology puts HD comics on the new iPad | Tablets ↩
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A great Lego campaign

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This1 is a really great Lego ad campaign. It shows how much you can do with a little bit of Lego and some imagination.

Can you see the Ninja Turtles?

  1. Lego Imagine Campaign | Daily Cool ↩
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The iPad at work – part 2

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(This is the second part of my short series about the iPad at work.)

The first day of the conference is about to end. I’m currently in my hotel room, writing this blog post. So far the iPad has worked great as my main computer-like tool for the conference.

I’ve mostly been taking notes, which has worked out a whole lot better than I thought. I can actually type really fast on the on screen keyboard, much faster than I’d imagined. There is however a small difference between taking the notes and writing this blog post, even though they’re both mostly done in Byword. The difference is that while the blog posts is written in English, my notes are in Swedish. Surely you’d expect me to be better at Swedish than English and that is certainly the case, however the small difference that makes a big difference is the keyboard. In Sweden we have the characters ”å”, ”ä” and ”ö”. This means that a few extra keys need to be fitted on screen which in turn means all keys gets slightly smaller, and have a smaller space between them. The difference is subtle, but it does have some impact on my typing abilities.

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The english keyboard

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The Swedish keyboard

Apart from taking notes I’ve also been preparing a keynote for tomorrow. This, however, will be saved for another blog post.

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The iPad at work – Introduction

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I’ve previously written a bit about using the iPad (and before that the iPhone) as an entertainment device while on the road. This is the first post of a short series about using it for work. I’m not the first to post about this and I will certainly not be the last, but I think it’s interesting for me to actually writing down my experience with the iPad as a post-pc workhorse.

Anyway, right now I’m on a conference in Örebro where all the sound and music production educations in Sweden meet. I’ve decided to leave the computer at home and just bring the iPad for note taking, email and all other things that might be necessary. This post is also written on the iPad in the newly launched app Byword for iPad.

(This post will be updated with links to all subsequent posts in the series.)

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John Gruber’s review of the new iPad

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If you’re interested in the new iPad, you should definitely check out Gruber’s review of it.

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Pay attention to the details

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If you showed TiVo to Steve Jobs, his head would explode1

Last weeks episode of Hypercritical featured a truly epic rant by John Siracusa about the TiVo Premier Elite. I listened to it this morning and thought it was really great. Apart from the pure amusement of hearing someone complain so passionately that you as a listener fear that he will get a brain aneurism, it also contained a pass about the attention to details, which he did not elaborate on, but that I found really interesting and important.

Part of the rant was about the menus on the TiVo. Apparently2 previously they haven’t been high definition, even though previous devices had been HD devices. In the Premier Elite version this was said to be fixed, but some lower level menus still contained standard definition graphics. This is the kind of faulty detail that most people will live with but that drives obsessive perfectionists list Siracusa insane. When asked by Dan Benjamin to guess why TiVo hadn’t bothered to fix something like this, Siracusa thought that it likely was because some number cruncher had decided that it would give enough return on investment to justify the efforts spent. It was in this context that he said the thing about Jobs’s head explode.

I think he really nailed what separates a few companies (among them Apple) from the rest; the attention to all those tiny details that in themselves will not provide enough of an improvement of the product to get sufficiently more revenue to justify the investment. It is however, in my humble opinion, this meticulous work that result in a product that ”just works” of feels so much more smother, better and is simply joyous to use. The result from all these small improvements is so much bigger than the sum of them. And, as proved by Apple, the return on investment can be tremendous in the long run if you stick to it.

The lesson I will take from this is to always sweat the details, keep pushing the good or workable to excellent. That is the only way to accomplish something truly amazing, whether it is a piece of computer hardware, a web site or a lecture.

Anyway, listened to Hypercritical #59 for some great entertainment and an important lesson and, most importantly, pay attention to the details as well as the whole in your work and you will output greater results.

  1. John Siracusa on Hypercritical #59 ↩
  2. I’ve never used a TiVo. ↩
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