Syma S107, Chinook and Apache helicopters

I really need to stay away from Amazon. I just bought shit load more toys, this time helicopters. I’ve wanted these for awhile, but in typical style I can’t just buy one. Oh no, that would be too damn easy and far too practical. I have to buy 4 at a time. I got two sport helicopters, a Chinook and an Apache. But it doesn’t stop there. I bought two wall chargers, extra batteries, replacement body kits and two USB chargers. All I can say is, these things better the coolest damn toys around or I’m gonna feel like an idiot. Well, that’s not true. Regardless of how this turns out I’m dive bombing the dogs.

CloneDVD Mobile hangs or closes after selecting a disc

I’ve been running into this for months and it’s been driving me mental. FINALLY, I found a way to make the problem go away. What happens is this, CloneDVD Mobile starts and you select the source disc. As soon as it starts to read the contents the program hangs or crashes. It happens with every disc or ISO image. You can rip a disc with CloneDVD no problem, but DVD Mobile soils itself and locks up every time. After months of dealing with the problem I found this article. I don’t know why it’s so hard to find, but it is. I had to implement steps 1, 3 and 5 to get CloneDVD Mobile working again. Like I said before, I got it working just in time to not use it. But here you go, here’s how to make CloneDVD Mobile work again. This thread is a short-list of all actions known to resolve the "crash" issue, which can appear […]

5 Discs in 30 Minutes

Now that’s the power of CloneDVD and AnyDVD. I just ripped 5 movies to my hard drive in less than 30 minutes. Before the night is through I will have a massive stockpile of videos ripped and ready to convert. Now, where did I put that 3TB drive I saved for special occasions?

Converting DVD to MP4

My big DVD conversion project has begun. As an aside, I finally got CloneDVD Mobile to work correctly for me. Based on this article from Slysoft, which isn’t as easy to find as it should be, I disabled the Tablet Input Server, added CloneDVD Mobile.exe to the BlackList inside RoboForm 7 AND set the EXE to run in Compatibility Mode for Windows XP SP3. Bloody hell, that’s just ridiculous. But after all that, I’ve decided NOT to use CloneDVD Mobile to rip my DVDs to MP4 format. And there’s a couple of reasons despite the fact that the quality of the file is actually quite good with CloneDVD Mobile. First, it doesn’t allow you to specify your output options like File Size, specific bitrate, audio bitrate, etc. The slide is good, but that’s not enough control. Second, CloneDVD Mobile isn’t very sophisticated, meaning, it rips a DVD and you move on to the next. What if I have a whole […]

Converting my DVDs to a Digital Library

So I’ve begun laying the groundwork for my big DVD conversion project. The goal – to rip my most watched DVDs to a 3TB drive so I can watch them anytime, anywhere. And last night I thought I had it all worked out. I planned to rip everything to AVI since that was the easiest format. But then, as I pondered some more, I realized that would be a dead end road. AVI is easy to rip and watch on my PC, but what about my iPad, iPod, Mac Mini and Kindle Fire? When you jump off the PC platform, the AVI format gets no love. I realized I was going to crash headlong into a wall. MP4 is the format I should be looking at, and then it hit me like a thunderbolt, I should be using Handbrake. But then I hit a dead end with that too. Handbrake hasn’t been updated in over a year. Handbrake is good, […]