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Tag: DRM

How to put DVD’s on your iPhone (for free)

Posted on 2009-02-28 By rolfje 11 Comments on How to put DVD’s on your iPhone (for free)

For A Few Dollars More

A lot of companies like to sell you applications to put DVD’s on your iPhone. Usually these apps are just wrappers around existing tools, and are pretty expensive if you consider you can do it for free. And you don’t need to be a computer wizard either! The steps are simple:

  1. Use Handbrake to rip the DVD to iPhone format
  2. Drag the generated mp4 file into iTunes
  3. Sync it to your iPhone like all other content

To show you exactly how this is done, I’ve  written up this “babystep-by-babystep” tutorial. Let me show you how I ripped “For A Few Dollars More” and put it on my iPhone:

Disclaimer: The DVD I ripped is bought and payed for. This article does not relief you of your responsibility to obey the law, so please be careful. And be nice, don’t pirate.

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Apple

Rip and Convert FLAC, M4A, MP3, AAC files

Posted on 2009-02-14 By rolfje 1 Comment on Rip and Convert FLAC, M4A, MP3, AAC files

Max Audio TranscoderI recently found an old harddisk which used to be in one of my old PC’s. I discovered some FLAC files on there, which were rips of old CD’s I used to have. iTunes is not too happy with importing them into my library, and the original CD’s are in a box in a deep dark corner of my garage.

I searched for a converter and found this wonderful converter which can just about convert any audio format out there. It’s called “Max”, it’s Open Source, free to use, and available as bundled OSX application. Brilliant! It does have a bunch of options, but as long as you go for the “MP4 Audio” output format, high quiality, 256 bits and VBR, you can’t go wrong.

According to their website “Max can generate audio in over 20 compressed and uncompressed formats including MP3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, AAC, Apple Lossless, Monkey’s Audio, WavPack, Speex, AIFF, and WAVE”.

Happy transcoding!

Uncategorized

We are Free! Free, I tell you!

Posted on 2009-01-07 By rolfje 2 Comments on We are Free! Free, I tell you!

iTunes iconRegular readers know that I’ve been ranting about the way  the music and movie industry are selling us crippled content, which actually feels like punishing you for honestly buying your digital content. Coincidentally, a month after that rant, Steve wrote a mail to the music industry in which he stated that DRM clearly was not working, and we needed to approach things differently.

A few months later, Apple and EMI actually started a new service in iTunes called iTunes plus, selling 256kbps DRM-free AAC files. If you’ve seen the latest Macworld 2009 Keynote Address by Philip (Phil) Schiller, you will have noticed that Apple hasn’t been sitting still. At the end of this quarter, all songs in the iTunes store will be available as DRM-free iTunes plus version. And there’s an easy button in iTunes which let’s you upgrade all your DRM-ed music automatically (payed, ofcourse). The link is in the iTunes Quick Links box, top right. I tried it, works fine.

Upgrade to iTunes Plus

Finally, your music will travel with you and play anywhere, just like those trusty CD’s did. Even better: with your iPhone you’re now able to buy music anywhere you are, because Apple has added 3G to the iTunes store on the iPhone.

Uncategorized

You are a pirate!

Posted on 2008-10-25 By rolfje No Comments on You are a pirate!

A briliant post on xkcd.com today explains in one single cartoon why DRM is bad:

Steal This Comic
Steal This Comic

I couldn’t have made it simpler (although I tried).

Fun

The Digital Revolution

Posted on 2007-05-04 By rolfje 1 Comment on The Digital Revolution

Nice example of digital revolution and power to the people can be found at http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2007-05-02-n67.html. Let’s hope manufacturers understand that people don’t want to pay for crippled content.

Digital copies where copyright is removed are actually better than their DRM protected originals, which makes good willing people move to pirated content, like I stated earlier. The important sentence here being “If I buy a DVD, I have to watch a few minutes of copyrights notices and commercials, without being able to skip them. If I rip it, and re-write it, these notices are gone…”.

Viva la Revolution!

Software

Apple and EMI follow up

Posted on 2007-04-03 By rolfje 1 Comment on Apple and EMI follow up

In a previous post I told you that Steve Jobs wants to provide DRM-free music through iTunes, but was held back by music companies. Steve must have had a few long and hard talks, because now EMI and Apple are teaming up to provide high quality DRM-free tracks through the iTunes music store, priced at $1.30. The same track, in a lower sound quality, with DRM costs $0.99. For 30 cents, you get a track you can actually use, with a higher bitrate.

At the same time this could be a trick by Apple to get around the legal issues currently being discussed about iTunes music not being available to other players than the iPod. Smart eh?

Apple, Software

PureTracks also gets it!

Posted on 2007-02-23 By rolfje No Comments on PureTracks also gets it!

The DRM discussion that was started by Steve Jobs is generating some interesting ripples in the music business pond. More people are starting to think DRM is not the answer: PureTracks will sell DRM-free tracks.

Apple

Steve Jobs gets it!

Posted on 2007-02-06 By rolfje 3 Comments on Steve Jobs gets it!

Remember my rant on copy protection in the post about opening iTunes to other players? All the things record and movie companies tried the last few years has only encouraged people to rip, copy and distribute illegal media instead. It turns out that Steve Jobs also thinks that DRM is not the answer, according to bloomberg. Steve Jobs has sent a letter to the four largest music companies, in which he Asks Music Labels To End Copyright Protection.

Sure it might sound bad when you have serious record company stock options, but the idea is not so dumb as it sounds. For years, Apple software has been reasonably priced, and of good quality. You can buy it online without too much hassle. Result: There is not much illegal Mac software out there. This will surprise the Windows user, who is acustomed to running all kinds of illegal software, up until the point they are practically forced to continue to do so, because they have all their content stored in propriatary formats.

I like Apple’s way of doing things much more: Deliver good quality products, ask reasonable prices, and trust your users (up until a point ofcourse ;-). In return, Mac users are often more like “fans” than customers, because they don’t feel like they’ve been “had”.

I think loosing the copy right protection and then lowering the prices on music is a good thing. The iTunes music store is an easy store to search music or other content in, and does not force millions of tracks onto you (like your friend with the 200GB music library on an USB disk does). Who cares if I have to pay a few cents for a track if I feel like iTunes has helped me find that track? The feeling shifts more to like “paying for the service” than “paying for the track” which is probably what we all look for. As an added value, we have the old “it’s my product, I bought it” feeling back, where we can do with the content as we like because we payed for it. We are no longer restricted to stupid things as “you can listen this track only twice on your Zune before it will selfdestruct”.

Update: More information and the response from Norway is online at MacNN. Norway showing it does not understand iTunes at all, because you can configure iTunes to store the files at a location of your destination, which can ultimately be any (large enough) USB disk, which in turn can be a media player device 🙂 .

Apple

Opening iTunes to other players

Posted on 2007-01-25 By rolfje 2 Comments on Opening iTunes to other players

Today I found an article about Norway suing Apple because music bought in the iTunes store could not be played on a non-iPod music player. If Apple looses this legal attack, it would result in an even stranger digital rights management situation than we already have.

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