Notebook owners always enjoy the ability to watch a DVD when traveling — who trusts that airlines will play a movie you like, if any? But then again, carrying multiple DVDs can be a chore — especially on your poor notebook’s battery life. What can be done to improve the overall experience? That’s where apps like Drive-in come into action.
What Drive-in does is completely rip a DVD of choice (just be sure to own the actual disc!), add information gathered from Amazon.com’s database, and store it for later playback. Simple and effective. Then the actual playback takes place in Apple’s DVD Player because the app actually creates a disc image — so it behaves like a normal DVD. And since no physical DVD is involved, you can save battery power by having the optical drive not do any actual work. The only drawback is that all files are on-par with the DVD’s original file size — so you better have a big HD if you plan on ripping various movies.
Drive-in is currently in beta, and you can check it out here. I’ll try to give it a proper review when it comes out.
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[tags]Apple,Mac,Software,Notebook,DVD,Drive-in[/tags]
Galley on May 28th, 2007 at 5:10 am says:
Drive-In is an excellent app, but without some kind of compression, it’s not quite as useful as it could be.
Frank on May 28th, 2007 at 6:45 am says:
If you want to rip and save some disk space, Handbrake is the app you’re looking for. Since it only rips the movie and not the whole DVD — not to mention you end up with a normal video file that can be played in QuickTime — the file size is reduced dramatically. This one’s my weapon of choice.