hawkeye is one app I’ve grown very fond of, despite a few setbacks and bugs. Think of this app as the iTunes of DVDs — it rips the video, adds it to its library, and burns them.
But this isn’t just a way for duplicating DVDs. It’s much, much more. You can create your very own “best of” from your TV shows on DVDs, for starters.
Ripping off the videos isn’t too complicated. Just insert the disc, select the desired videos or chapters, and you’re ready to go. It’s pretty fast too — a 22-minute video was ripped in about 5 minutes using a 2GHz MacBook Pro. And to burn new DVDs, you can easily create some playlists like on iTunes.
The real problem of the app is that you need a very large hard drive in order to keep a fair collection of videos on it, since all videos are ripped as MPEG-2 — just like they appear on DVD quality. And also since the videos are encoded like that, I’ve found that I cannot play them using QuickTime (even if I have the Pro version), unless I purchase the MPEG-2 extension — that will set you another $40. So, here the solution is to use hawkeye’s built-in video converters.
The video converters are able to automatically transform these files into an iPod, PSP, AVI, MPEG-4, SVCD, cell phone, or even a Wii-compatible format. When converting into an iPod format, I’ve found the timing to be comparable as to using an external tool like iSquint. But here the advantage is that all is done within the same app.
hawkeye is one of the most complete apps I’ve used for media purposes. But its bugs and errors have kept me waiting for over two months since I’d gotten the app for writing a review — all because it did not work properly on an Intel Mac, despite being a Universal binary. But after two months’ worth of waiting and a couple of updates, I’m ready to report that it’s now running smoothly, like it should have in the beginning. But when this app is priced at $30, it will make some users think twice before buying it.
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[tags]Mac,Hardware,Software,iPod,DVD,Video[/tags]
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