Links

Added five new links to the index page and on the sidebar. These links are:
Lightstar Technologies - Themes for WinXP
Wine - "Wine Is Not an Emulator" - Win32 emulator for Linux.
ThemeXP - More themes for WinXP
Download.com - General freeware/shareware download site.
Doom9 - DVD Ripping/Video Conversion site.

Also, for my own reference, I am adding this, this, and this link here. These are LZW references.

The web is mighty slow for me today.

I give up
I am not going to be making very many "movie" DVD's at home. I'm not talking about ripping, I'm talking about movies/tv shows that I have on tape. The problem is quality. The tapes are, at best, fair quality. To get 1.5 hours plus requires shrinking to around 5mbps mpeg2. This reduction in the bitrate combined with the inherent lack of clarity on VHS pretty much makes for a bad DVD. So, I'm going to back up my "Star Trek" stuff to WMV format, and watch it on my PC. True DVD's will be home movies only.

I also learned an interesting fact about Sonic MyDVD yesterday. It seems that this product(version 4.0) can not handle compressed audio(such as the audio in an MPEG2 file). This is why, when I have a 4 gig mpeg2 file and I want to burn it as a DVD, MyDVD says that I've overloaded the disk. It is converting the audio to an uncompressed format(like a .wav file, I guess), and this takes up a huge amount of space(a full cd is 650 mb, so around two hours of sound is something like 1.2 to 1.4 gig). I found some shareware that can handle the compressed format, but as I've explained above, it doesn't help the quality very much.