Small list of useful Mac stuff.

Computer issues and app recommendations
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JQW
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Small list of useful Mac stuff.

Postby JQW » 19 Nov 2004, 15:39

Just really a placeholder at present.

Mac OS X comes with many useful bits and pieces as it is, so there's not much really to add. I'll only list things that I've tried, and things that are native Mac OS X applications. So no geeky Unix command line stuff or X11 applications.

CD-R Tools

For CD and DVD burning, such as copying Audio CDs (impossible with the Mac disk utility), then I recommend Toast http://www.roxio.com, but you have to pay for it. There's not that much else out there at the moment.

Peer to peer file transfer

Bit-torrent - http://bittorrent.com/download.html
Acquisition - http://www.acquisitionx.com/

DVD Ripping Tools

Mac The Ripper - http://www.losprimates.net/mtr/
HandBrake (rips DVDs and converts to MP4 format) - http://handbrake.m0k.org/

General Unix type stuff

The Fink project http://fink.sourceforge.net. Essentially the Debian package manager for Mac OS X. 1000s of packages available, although to get the very latest you have to compile it yourself.

I'll add more when I find stuff. Add your own stuff too.
Last edited by JQW on 16 Nov 2005, 18:13, edited 2 times in total.
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Postby Guest » 09 Dec 2004, 19:54

Onyx.

http://www.titanium.free.fr/english.html

Maintenance stuff which helps you keep your Mac clean (more so than with the basic stuff included with OSX).

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Postby The Prof » 16 Dec 2004, 15:26

Running out of hard disc space?

Do you really need those Swedish Help files?

http://monolingual.sourceforge.net/

Gets rid of all the language files you don't want.

I recovered about half a gig on one machine, but be careful, once done you can't get the files back without a system re-install.

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Postby JQW » 16 Dec 2004, 16:00

Prof_K wrote:Running out of hard disc space?

Do you really need those Swedish Help files?

http://monolingual.sourceforge.net/

Gets rid of all the language files you don't want.

I recovered about half a gig on one machine, but be careful, once done you can't get the files back without a system re-install.


If you install Mac OS X from scratch (instead of using the system restore images bundled with a new Mac), you do get the choice to not install any of these extra languages. However installing new software and/or patches may put some of this stuff back.
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Postby Teabag » 06 Aug 2005, 07:34

I have just tried copying my legally bought DVDs of 'The Office' but get a message telling me I do not have authorisation. Is there anything available out there for free that will allow me to make back-ups (the climate here is pretty merciless on media) using the external LaCie DVD-RW I bought?
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Postby JQW » 06 Aug 2005, 08:20

Mac The Ripper - http://www.ripdifferent.com/~mtr/ will extract the contents of a DVD to a local hard drive. You can then burn that to a DVD-R, but only if the original feature is short enough to fit on a single sided DVD, using something like iDVD.

I'm not aware of any free software that will compress as well, although there may be some Unix command line tools that work.
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Postby Bucolic Old Sir Henry » 07 Aug 2005, 23:13

For users of Tiger, a neat little iTunes widget called Symphonic. Very straightforward: a little box that you type into. It then finds the nearest track in the iTunes database and plays it. Does quite a lot more, too. Well worth a try.

For those digitising vinyl, there's a neat little de-clicker called ClickRepair. It's a Java app, so will run on any suitably equipped computer - though I think you need something reasonably powerful to get good performance. I haven't done much with it yet, but it seems to do what it says on the box.

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Postby The Prof » 08 Aug 2005, 11:53

Paul G wrote:Mac The Ripper - http://www.ripdifferent.com/~mtr/ will extract the contents of a DVD to a local hard drive. You can then burn that to a DVD-R, but only if the original feature is short enough to fit on a single sided DVD, using something like iDVD.

I'm not aware of any free software that will compress as well, although there may be some Unix command line tools that work.


Not free, but Roxio Popcorn does the trick about £35.

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Postby Teabag » 13 Aug 2005, 07:19

Prof Hoffman wrote:
Paul G wrote:Mac The Ripper - http://www.ripdifferent.com/~mtr/ will extract the contents of a DVD to a local hard drive. You can then burn that to a DVD-R, but only if the original feature is short enough to fit on a single sided DVD, using something like iDVD.

I'm not aware of any free software that will compress as well, although there may be some Unix command line tools that work.


Not free, but Roxio Popcorn does the trick about £35.


I'll go Googling and check it out. Thanks, Prof.
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Postby Snowdog » 08 Sep 2005, 01:27

Teabag wrote:
Prof Hoffman wrote:
Paul G wrote:Mac The Ripper - http://www.ripdifferent.com/~mtr/ will extract the contents of a DVD to a local hard drive. You can then burn that to a DVD-R, but only if the original feature is short enough to fit on a single sided DVD, using something like iDVD.

I'm not aware of any free software that will compress as well, although there may be some Unix command line tools that work.


Not free, but Roxio Popcorn does the trick about £35.


I'll go Googling and check it out. Thanks, Prof.


For compressing larger amounts of data to fit on a DVD-R:
Again, not free but very cheap, there's also "DVD2oneX" which will reduce a dual layer (up to 9GB) DVD to fit on a 4.5GB DVD-R disc.

You can do a complete reduced clone of the original disc but it also gives you the option of what not to include. If you leave out menus, additional audio, subtitles etc. (stuff that you might be happy to live without) then it has more room on the disc to gain a better picture quality for the main feature & so on.

Burning DVDs in Toast
Just for the record, once you have your disc image, Toast will burn it just lovely provided you follow the following procedure (you need the full on Toast, not a lite version):

Go to the "data" tab.

Select the "DVD-ROM" option from the list on the left.

Important!: Create a "new disc" - there's a button at the bottom. Name it if you want to.

Add your VIDEO_TS folder & burn away. (You can add whatever else you like on there in separate folders. Artwork, text files, whatever, just so long as that Disc icon has a VIDEO_TS folder for the player to see.)
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Postby Bucolic Old Sir Henry » 13 Oct 2005, 22:06

Here's a handy guide to using Mac The Ripper and a programme called Handbrake to rip DVDs to iPod format.

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Postby Snowdog » 13 Oct 2005, 22:23

Just got a neat little app called CDfinder.

It will catalogue the contents of any disc, creating a searchable database that is handy for me when archiving my vast collection of bootlegs onto DVD.

It maybe useful for something you need too.

It's not free but it's cheap.
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Postby Snowdog » 13 Oct 2005, 22:43

Snowdog 2005 wrote:Just got a neat little app called CDfinder.

It will catalogue the contents of any disc, creating a searchable database that is handy for me when archiving my vast collection of bootlegs onto DVD.

It maybe useful for something you need too.

It's not free but it's cheap.


And no sooner had I typed that in than an e-mail arrived from Apple about the Delicious Library Back-Up plug-in.

A bit of further investigation shows that it works in Tiger. It would seem that Delicious Library is the app itself which works as a widget in Tiger. The backup plug-in allows you to back up your data to the .mac account so that it's safe.
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Postby JQW » 13 Oct 2005, 23:26

Bucolic Old Sir Henry wrote:Here's a handy guide to using Mac The Ripper and a programme called Handbrake to rip DVDs to iPod format.

Pip pip!


Trying it with one DVD. After ripping the estimated time for the re-compression is over 2 hours, which is longer than the playing time of the film. This is on a 1.8 GHz G5 iMac.

You need the latest beta of Handbrake and not the standard version, BTW.
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Postby The Prof » 31 Oct 2005, 22:38

http://www.inquisitorx.com/beta/


Ye just type stuff in and it guesses what you want.

There was a free version that could be added to the Safari browser, but you have to make a donation now.

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Postby Bungo the Mungo » 01 Nov 2005, 19:32

abobe, quark and web publishing products for MACs are awfully expensive. can anyone pm a cheap alternative :wink:

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Postby Snowdog » 02 Nov 2005, 10:20

solarskope wrote:abobe, quark and web publishing products for MACs are awfully expensive. can anyone pm a cheap alternative :wink:


Download them from Limewire! :D
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Postby Bucolic Old Sir Henry » 02 Nov 2005, 21:05

solarskope wrote:abobe, quark and web publishing products for MACs are awfully expensive. can anyone pm a cheap alternative :wink:


There's a very excellent pro web design program called Freeway, which is not that expensive, but it does have a cheap version, Freeway Express. I find it really easy to use.

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Postby JQW » 10 Nov 2005, 15:19

Bucolic Old Sir Henry wrote:Here's a handy guide to using Mac The Ripper and a programme called Handbrake to rip DVDs to iPod format.

Pip pip!


They've now updated that to just require the latest version of Handbrake. It'll rip and encode a DVD in one go, splitting into multiple files if needed. It took me about 6 hours to do a 90-min DVD this weekend on a G5 iMac, but I was also running other CPU intensive things at the same time.

Now to get the video iPod.
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