I Demand iTunes for Movies

Posted 07/01/2005 at 1:10pm | by

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By Will Smith
For this month’s Do-It-Yourself Guide, I spent a long time testing various video ripping and compression utilities, which reminded me of my early experiences ripping my music CDs. Eight years ago, when I made my very first MP3 file, the process was a cast-iron bitch. It required three or four different apps—including a couple of command-line utilities—to rip, encode, and apply ID3 tags to each track. Even worse, it took about 12 hours to rip a single CD at a measly 128kb/s bitrate.

Today, I drop a CD into my computer and iTunes rips the entire disc in four minutes flat.

I’ve ripped every CD in my collection at least twice, either to clear up imperfections or just to record at a higher bitrate. (I’m reasonably certain that 160kb/s MP3s sounded better when 14GB hard drives cost $200.) Every time I re-ripped my CDs, the process has been easier and faster—despite the fact that my collection grows every month. These days I can even use my computer to play games or browse the web while I rip music!

Late last year, I decided it was time to rip my DVD collection, so I started experimenting with different utilities. I tested about a dozen utilities that promised one-click DVD-to-Divx rips, but the experience was eerily similar to the early days of MP3 ripping. It took about five hours to encode a single movie, and everything was difficult, from finding the movie on the DVD to choosing the proper encoding settings.

Dual-core CPUs are poised to take away some of the time-crunch of DVD ripping—our tests show 33 percent faster encodes than a faster single-core CPU can deliver—but that’s not enough. The software needs to be more reliable and easier to use.

There’s nothing more disappointing than opening your hot-off-the-bit-forge Divx movie and realizing that you inadvertently encoded the French audio track, or that the sound and video are three seconds out of sync. Getting subtitles to work properly on Kill Bill took three attempts!

Getting ripping right is just the first step. Ideally, I’d select the content, language, and subtitle options I want in the DVD’s menu, then click Rip and record exactly what I selected, directly to Divx, in 45 minutes or an hour. Each MPEG-4-encoded movie would be saved with relevant meta-data—title, director, genre, and year—embedded for easy movie management.

The first application that’s able to fulfill all my criteria gets the First Annual Maximum PC Award for Achievement in the Field of Excellence. That’s a promise.