dvd burning

I really need a haircut, but I doubt I'm going to get the chance this weekend.

In fact I know I won't get the chance, as I need to do loads of washing and I do that first thing Saturday, so I won't be able to go to the hairdresser's early, which is my usual slot.  Plus it's a cleaning weekend and that takes up all day Saturday anyway.

I'm a bit sick of this new pattern of doing stuff - it's kinda burdensome.  It was sparked because of my desire to save a bit of money (well, more like not be ripped off so badly) on getting my washing done.  This hasn't worked out too well, because I'm pretty sure my local laundrette charges a lot more for use of washing machines and tumble dryers than the place I used to get my washing done via service wash.

So although I'm not paying for the service wash and I'm able to adjust the payment base don size of load and how much drying it needs, the extra expense of the wash itself kinda wipes that out.

It also has the issue that it now sucks up a total of about two hours of my time on the days I do it.  This is quite a bit of time, and because I'm doing it first thing (so I can get easy access to tumble dryers) it blocks me from doing other stuff.

I've actually considered going and doing it after work or late on - the place is open pretty late, but I dunno.  A big problem there is I never seem to have much time in the evening anyway (I go to bed pretty early) and I've no guarantees it will be any easier.  I'd also be worried about getting finished before it closes.

I think the whole BBC loosing full rights to coverage of all the races may be a blessing in disguise, as it could free up a lot of spare time.

Anyway, that wasn't what I wanted to talk about.  What I wanted to cover was how my adventure with ripping DVDs is going.

Last weekend was actually stupidly busy.  There was all the GP stuff to watch, but I also decided I was going to process some audio books (more on that another day) and see about ripping the DVDs.

I mentioned this a little while ago and I've been investigating options.  The one that I thought I'd try was by slysoft and there are two parts.  Firstly they have a bit of software that allows you to watch any region locked DVD and then there's another bit of software you can use to clone/copy DVDs.

Both are available on free trial, so I downloaded them and gave them a go.

Results were pretty good.  Initially I tried it out on my laptop.  My theory was that this will be a convenient way of doing it - I can position my laptop to keep an eye on the progress of the rip and burn while I watch TV or whatever in the evening.

It worked well.  My laptop DVD isn't the quickest, but it took about 45 minutes to rip and burn a DVD containing a complete series of the show peep show.  I think it took less time burning a film, but I didn't pay attention tot eh time.

There was a problem with one disk I tried, but I didn't experiment to see if this was solvable.  The software has various options and it's very easy to use.  The only difficult is working out what's what ("title 2" doesn't mean anything, but it has a preview thing so you can see what it s).

It wasn't quite as successful when I tried it on my proper PC.  The issue was that it failed to burn at a decent speed, although I've had this problem before and I think it's more to do with the drive itself.  This meant it wasn't any quicker on the desktop, so I think laptop is the ay to go.

As I've said before it's a little daft if you think about it - why not spend that time watching the stuff instead of ripping it?  Well, I can still watch other stuff and it's way quicker ripping than watching - that 45 minutes was for a series with 6 half hour episodes, 3 of which had commentaries and about 45 minutes of other extras, so time wise it's better.

So yeah, I think I may actually purchase this software, with the hopes that it will quickly pay for itself via e-bay selling.