I’m tempted to say “long live the cd…”, but… EMI’s CEO has declared that the CD is dead. He does point out that you’re not likely to give your Aunt an iTunes download, so “dead” just means “in decline” in this parlance. However, I can’t help but laugh to myself of the notion that I release a cd through lulu of hymns and within the week the CD is declared dead. No, seriously… I haven’t bought a cd in quite a while myself. Mainly because I don’t want to put up with all the DRM restrictions these days. I want to be able to have a simple cd that I can extract to another player IF I WANT. But I want the original CD as a “high quality archived original” in comparison to the mp3 that might be lost when a flash drive or hard drive dies and isn’t quite as high quality.
Tag: dvd
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Vmware launches beta of real to virtual converter
Vmware has launched a tool (windows only it seems) aimed to convert a REAL running system into a virtual machine. (For use with VMWare’s virtualization products. The converter also can convert images from competing virtual machine “platforms”(?) (Microsoft Virtual PC, Microsoft Virtual Server, Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery (formerly LiveState Recovery) and Norton Ghost9 (or higher) to VMware virtual machine disk format.)
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Mandriva 2007 download now available
Several days ago there were announcements of the release of Mandriva 2007, only thing was, the download wasn’t available yet. Well, today the download appears available. I haven’t looked to see what differences there are between the free and the powerpack download (powerpack can be downloaded by club members as well.)
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Project Gutenberg July 2006 DVD
I just noticed over the weekend that Project Gutenberg has updated their downloadable DVD/CD of free etexts. (Tracker at this link.) The last update of the dvd has been a few years (as far as I can tell (2003?)) It should be noted that you can now create your own image of selected works through a web interface. Given all the hoopla over Google releasing free book downloads, I would have thought that there would be more people reminding us of Project Gutenberg which boasts 19,000 FREE downloadable ebooks (which has been quite a labor intensive process – they’re all in text or html format.)
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Wiping cd-r/rw and dvdr/rw media
It looks like those shredders that take on optical media nor the physical scraping of the reflective surface is enough for some…. Plextor will be marketing a drive designed to wipe optical media (cd-r/rw dvd+-r/rw single or dual layer.) It essentially fries the colored dye on the disc and it seems that it would be very difficult to reconstruct anything from the results.
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Mandriva 2007 beta 1 is out
Here is a link to the info page. It sounds as though there are several images available. Mandriva 2007 Beta 1 has Gnome and KDE centric 586 and x86_64 versions of cd images for download as well as an all in one (well – both architectures in one) DVD and cd set (6 disc cd set). They’re interested in people testing it out and reporting bugs. Not all new features are enabled and it is BETA so use it at your own risk.
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Converting MPG video to dv files
I don’t know much about the dv format, except that it is a standard format that many camcorders use. For this reason, many video editors (such as kino for linux) prefer to see files coming in dv format. The problem I ran into is that the new handycam dvd puts images in .VOB files (which are really MPG). So, I found this handy script… that runs on Mac or Linux and is called mpeg2dv. It does the trick and is public domain. The only requirement I can see is ffmpeg.
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Sony Handycam DCR-DVD405
Well, the Sony Handycam DCR-DVD405 that I ordered from Amazon has arrived today (ordered the 5th of July, arrived the 11th with the “slow boat” free shipping option.) I’ve had it long enough to charge batteries, set time and do a few still pictures and a few short video clips. So, these will be my initial impressions, and I’ll likely follow up later with further thoughts/experience/etc. This was certainly not a small purchase for us and I spent quite a bit of time narrowing down choices. I really wanted a dvd based recorder. The idea of having it already in a format that we could archive was a real plus there. Yes, I might pull it onto the computer for editing, but life will be much simpler if I don’t HAVE to….
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Camcorder shopping and a reminder of caution
The last few days I’ve been heavily researching the purchase of a camcorder. I guess I can’t just go out and pick something, I have to research at a number of levels. (Editorial reviews, user reviews, pricing, media, computer compatability, quality, etc. all of these come into play.) So, after several days of researching the product itself I was VERY close to going ahead with one place that had a fantastic price. But then I wondered, how come, this one place had a price that was a clear $100 lower than most anywhere else?
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Vista torrent pulled
Several days ago I mentioned vistatorrent.com that had copied the Windows Vista download into a bittorrent tracker and allowed bittorrent downloads of the DVD iso. Well, they’ve received a cease and desist order as thanks for their efforts. Some are saying the fact that the download servers are slammed to the point MS is recommending that people order the DVD for a shipping charge is proof that Windows Vista is eagerly anticipated and that the response trumps any open source release. Well, ok – I’ve got to say I was interested to see it for all the press it’s been getting (and I’m sure WILL get), and in 12 months I’ll likely be trying to support it, so I wanted to dip the toes in now. I don’t plan on running it on a desktop myself. In fact the last 24 hours I’ve been on a quest to install it in a virtual machine and I’ll pass along details of that in another post.