Month: January 2005

Backing Up DVDs

Since I spend most of my working day on various video-related technologies, I receive a lot of questions from people I know about the best/cheapest way to back up their DVDs.

Fortunately, the easiest way I’ve found involves using two free tools, DVD Decrypter and DVD Shrink.

First, I use DVD Decrypter to rip the DVD to a hard drive (I have a 500gb external drive just for storing temporary video files). Each ripped DVD is going to occupy anywhere from 5-7 gb. DVD Decrypter is by far the easiest-to-use DVD ripper I’ve seen. It automates a lot of annoying functions that other DVD rippers require active intervention by the user.

Second, I use DVD Shrink to create an image file of the DVD that can be burnt to a plain old single layer DVD+/-R. DVD Shrink makes it easy to quickly eliminate or downgrade the quality of stuff I don’t care about — like “The Making of” documentaries or director’s commentary track to boost the video quality of the main program when taking a 7gb DVD and putting it onto a 4.4gb DVD+/-R. I can’t usually tell that much difference between the original and what DVD Shrink creates. DVD Shrink’s results are comparable to my digital cable signal, and that’s good enough for me.

I also typically burn the ripped DVD on my hard drive to a couple DVD+/-Rs. Dual layered discs are still $7 or $8 even if you buy in bulk, but if they ever come down in price, it wouldn’t hurt just to do a backup on a dual layer. Or, as hard drive prices are falling, you can just throw the ripped version on a hard drive and play that through your TV.

In fact, Lacie just announced a standalone external 80gb hard drive which can do just that — copy a ripped DVD to it, and play it from the drive to the TV. Now, if they can just come out with a reasonably priced 80tb drive that will do that . . .

What the World Needs Now Are Fewer Video Standards?

On2 Technologies has a bizarre take on the world of video — it complains that companies spend too much time worrying about standards,

On2 CEO Douglas McIntyre says that his company is moving ahead of competing Windows Media and Real video codecs that are “growing long in the tooth,” and innovation was held up by such strict adherence to standards by both companies.

“The bottom line is that while our competitors make promises and debate in standards committees, On2 is delivering concrete results in marketable products,” said McIntyre.

Certainly the underlying basics are correct — if you wanted to start a company and create a codec that deliver the highest possible quality, probably the easiest way to get there would be to forget about any standards and create a completely proprietary codec tied to a specific technology/hardware platform.

What you lose, of course, is the ability for someone to take a video file in your proprietary codec and easily be played across a variety of hardware and software platforms.

On2’s major deployment appears to be in distributing video over XM Satellite, and in that particular case it may actually make sense to say “screw the standards” since they only have to worry about supporting XM. But if they want to go beyond such closed environments, ignoring and deriding standards committees and video standards is simply stupid.

Yes, it takes awhile from standard adoption to actual widespread availability, especially since a lot of video devices are embedded systems where you can’t necessarily just add the latest video codec at the drop of a hat. But its a worthwhile tradeoff to have that interoperability that standards provide.

Its a shame the article doesn’t say which codec he’s dissing precisely. H.264, which is finally seeing widespread adoption? Frankly, I’m extremely impressed in what I see from H.264 in a wide variety of video applications. I doubt On2’s codec can come close to matching the features of H.264.

Source:

On2: Standards Hurt Video Innovation. Ed Oswald and Nate Mook, Beta News, January 10, 2005.

Clueless Business Web Sites

It just amazes me that I know 12 year olds who can put together incredible looking, highly functional web sites, but companies wanting me to spend tens of thousands of dollars in some case have the most inane policies.

Today I was investigating a very expensive piece of software, and the company’s website offered a walkthrough/demo. First, however, I had to sign up and give all of my personal details. Very annoying, but not uncommon.

But after I submit my details do I get to see a demo or walkthrough of the software? No. Instead I receive an extremely annoying message saying a salesperson will contact me to set up a time when I can view the demo.

Like I want to make an appointment with a salesperson just to get a basic understanding of a software package. The fact that I can’t easily get information about the software or see a demo unattended by a handholding salesperson speaks volumes.

The Mac Mini

The Mac Mini is the perfect move for Apple. Personally, I can’t wait to get my hands on one.

This is a much better approach than Apple’s “Switcher” effort. I don’t want to switch — I have way too much invested in Wintel software and hardware to suddenly switch and go with a Mac-only solution.

On the other hand, KVM switches are dirt cheap and $499 is exactly the right price to buy a Macintosh as a second machine.

Way to go Apple.

FAO: World Must Do Better to Reduce Hunger

Thirty nations have managed to reduce malnutrition by 25 percent, but the world as a whole is a long way from the Millennium goal target of reducing hunger in half by 2015.

In December, the Food and Agriculture Organization released the 2004 edition of its annual report, The State of Food Insecurity in the World, which found that although the world is not making enough progress to meet the Millennium goal of cutting hunger in half by 2015, countries in all regions of the world have demonstrated that it is possible to reach these goals if the political will is present.

Thirty countries have managed to cut hunger by 25 percent, but hunger still takes a massive toll, being responsible for the deaths of as many as 5 million children annually. Hunger in those countries where it is a major problem is a serious drag on the economy — the FAO estimates that each year hunger and malnutrition costs as much as $30 billion worldwide just in direct medical costs. The economic damage to countries due to the loss of so many people from a preventable costs the world’s economy hundreds of billions of dollars annually.

Why is hunger still such a serious problem in a world that produces an enormous amount of food? Its largely the same issues that have exacerbated hunger throughout human history. According to the FAO,

Among the African countries are several that demonstrate another key lesson – that war and civil conflict must be regarded as major causes not only of short-term food emergencies but of widespread chronic hunger. Several countries that have recently emerged from the nightmare of conflict figure prominently among those that have registered steady progress since the WFS as well as those that have scored rapid gains over the past five years.

Not surprisingly, growth in the agricultural sector is also important for reducing hunger. According to the FAO,

Many of the countries that have achieved rapid progress in reducing hunger have something else in ­common – significantly better than average agricultural growth. Within the group of more than 30 countries that are on track to reach the WFS goal, agricultural GDP increased at an average annual rate of 3.2 percent, almost one full percentage point faster than for the developing countries as a whole.

Sources:

‘No drop’ in world hunger deaths. The BBC, December 8, 2004.

The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2004. The Food and Agricultural Organization, 2004.

State of the World’s Children 2005

UNICEF released the 2005 edition of its annual The State of the World’s Children in which it noted that about one billion children worldwide are deprived of any semblance of a normal childhood, facing instead the effects, of poverty, war, and AIDS.

Of the 2.2 billion children in the world, UNICEF estimates that 1.9 billion lived in the developing world. One billion of those children lived in poverty and were deprived of at least one of seven amenities that UNICEF regard as basic rights — shelter, water, sanitation, schooling, information, health care and food.

UNICEF director Carol Bellamy said on releasing the report,

Too many governments are making informed, deliberate choices that actually hurt childhood. When half the world’s children are growing up hungry and unhealthy, when schools have become targets and whole villages are being emptied by AIDS, we’ve failed to deliver on the promise of childhood.

The report notes that in 2003, 10.6 million children died before the age of five — the equivalent of all of the children in France, Germany, Greece and Italy.

Sources:

One billion ‘denied a childhood’. The BBC, December 9, 2004.

The State of the World’s Children 2005. UNICEF, 2004.