DISCLAIMER: The DMCA prohibits the ripping of DVDs that have DRM or any form of DRM on it like CSS, so make sure you only rip DVDs that don’t have content protection. If you decide to proceed with ripping a DVD, you can use this process at your own risk.

NOTE: For this tutorial, I used VLC Media Player 1.0.3 Goldeneye

1. Open VLC Media Player and go to Media > Open Disc or you can do a Ctrl + D.

2. Make sure that DVD is selected and Disc Device is pointing to the DVD drive.
3. Click Play to check if its the DVD/video that you want to rip. If not, change Title value to 1 or the next number until you find the right video.

4. Now that you have the right video, go to Media > Convert/Save or do a Ctrl + R.

5. Click on the Disc tab and click on Convert/Save. Under Destination, select the folder or location where you want to save the file and type in the title of the file. Make sure you type in the correct file extension – “.ogg” or “.mp4″.
6. Under Settings > Profile, select Video – MPEG-4 + AAC (MP4) if you want to play it on your iPod/iPhone or Video – Theory + FLAC (OGG) if you want lossless audio.
7. You can edit the Profile settings by clicking on the button beside the profile options.

8. When you’re satisfied with the settings, start the ripping process by clicking on Start.

Just wait until VLC is done ripping the DVD and that’s it. You can now watch the finished file with VLC. If you selected the Video – MPEG-4 + AAC (MP4) setting then you can upload the video to your iPod/iPhone and watch it. Hope you’ll find this simple tutorial on how to rip DVDs with VLC useful.

Anyone else use VLC to rip DVDs or do you use regular DVD ripping software? Do you know of an alternative way of ripping DVDs without the use of software? Please share your thoughts.

Three weeks ago, 15-year-old David Nelson together with his dad Mark released a music service called Muziic. This music service slash media player uses YouTube’s API to gather the millions of music videos from YouTube and enables its users to sort and add these videos into playlists like they were mp3s. It basically turns YouTube as a streaming multimedia library.

How did a young boy come up with such a brilliant idea? The idea of creating Muziic was born about a year ago, while father and son were watching Star Trek. Mark, David’s father came up with a brilliant idea of creating a music site using YouTube’s API. David then came up with the idea of creating a desktop app that users can use from their computers to play YouTube videos using the app’s built-in media player. David did all the programming behind Muziic and that is quite amazing considering that he is a self-taught programmer. He started learning HTML at age 8 and later on developed his skills on Javascript, Visual Basic and PHP.

Muziic is simple and straightforward. To start using Muziic, you first need to download and install the desktop app into your computer. The desktop app works both as the main user interface for searching music videos, creating and organizing music videos into playlists and media player where the user can listen and/or watch the music videos. With 8 custom skins to choose from, you can change the look and feel of Muziic’s media player. Btw, Muziic’s media player UI (user interface) kind of reminds me of another popular media player – Winamp.

Muziic media player

Searching for music videos is easy, all you need to do is type the name of an artist or title of a song in the search bar and Muziic will display a list of all music videos related to your search. The user then can listen/watch to any music video by double clicking on the song. When playing songs/music videos, the user can choose between standard and HQ stereo quality. Adding/saving music videos into playlists requires the user to have a registered account on Muziic.

Muziic comes with its own encoder that users can use to convert their own media files to flv format and upload them to YouTube. As of now, Muziic is only available for Windows XP and Vista.

Muziic encoder

Within two weeks after it was launched, Muziic has already been covered and featured on CNET, CNN, CBS News, The Huffington Post, Ars Technica, Billboard, Yahoo, Wired and other big name website/blogs. Due to Muziics popularity which gets about 70,000 visitors each day, David Nelson has decided to quit public high school and attend a private online high school so he can concentrate and spend more time developing his new project.

Muziic was created and launched without the consent of YouTube and with that, many are questioning the legality of the service. When asked about Muziic, a Google spokesperson had this to say:

“We encourage people to leverage the power of our open API to embed YouTube videos in creative and innovative ways that comply with our terms of service.”

While Mark Nelson, David’s father and CEO/Co-founder of Muziic had this to say:

“We feel that YouTube now has a better understanding of Muziic’s intentions for creating a YouTube-powered music site, and we have a much greater feel for what YouTube would like out of a music service driven by their API.”

Right now, Mark and David Nelson are now in talks with Google, YouTube’s parent company. So we’ll have to wait and see if both parties can work out a deal and hopefully they would. It’s also interesting to see what the label companies have to say about Muziic and what their reaction would be.

After trying out the past couple of days, there are only two things that I don’t like about Muziic. First, is that the media player window can’t be resized and second, that you can’t play the videos fullscreen. Other than that, its user-friendly and works like its supposed to. Regardless of the legal stuff, all I can say is that Muziic is a very brilliant idea. It makes you go, “Why didn’t I think of that?”. I hope Muziic and Google/YouTube can work it out so that users can benefit from both awesome services.

Check out Muziic – YouTube Media Player

What do you think about this new Internet phenomenon called Muziic? Have you tried it already? If you have, what are the things you like/dislike about it? What other features would you want to see added on Muziic? Please share your thoughts via the comment section. Thanks!

The first time I came across Songbird was back in 2005 when it was still a proof-of-concept. I was looking for a free media player alternative and fortunately for me, I came across Songbird. I installed the 0.1 beta version but wasn’t able to really try/use all of its features because I didn’t have an mp3 player at that time. Three years later, the development team behind Songbird has finally released Songbird 1.0.

Here’s a short excerpt from the email I received from them.

We set out to build an open, customizable music player. Today, we’re launching with dozens of integrated services, hundreds of add-ons, and a growing developer community. We’ll be the first to admit that there’s plenty left to do. And, while we’re not ready for everyone, 160k users a month are expressing their vote for an alternative music player.

Songbird is not only an open source media player but it also works as a web browser so its like iTunes and Firefox rolled into one application (the Songbird browser uses the same Mozilla engine). Songbird supports MP3, FLAC, and Vorbis on all platforms; WMA and WMA DRM on Windows; and AAC and Fairplay on Windows and Mac. For now, Songbird couldn’t rip albums nor can it sync to the iPod Touch or iPhone.

Screenshots:

Songbird Beta Version

Songbird Version 1.0 (default skin/theme)

Based on the screenshots of the first Beta version and the recently released version 1.0, there’s not much of a difference in the design and layout. All the changes made are in the backend of the application. If you think that the default skin/theme is boring, you can change the look of Songbird by installing a new skin or theme called a “feather”.

New Features

• GStreamer – We now use GStreamer as our main media playback system, across all platforms – giving us higher performance, better reliability, and a platform for much more media-related functionality in the future.
• Improved mashTape – When you listen to music in Songbird you’ll have the option to see Flickr photos, YouTube videos, last.fm biographies, google news (and more) for the currently playing artist.
• Improved Album Art Support – The album artwork feature now supports drag and drop of images, as well as, toggling between Now Playing and Currently Selected tracks.
• Complete Keyboard Shortcuts – We’ve cleaned up our Keyboard Shortcuts this release (and added some new ones for power users).
• Updated Linux Installer – We’ve created a single archive that has all the necessary dependencies so that Linux users can run Songbird without having to install any additional dependencies.
• Re-usable Smart Playlists – By popular request we’ve implemented the ability to use a smart playlist as a rule within another smart playlist.
• Reveal Original Files – We’ve added the ability to expose the media items in Songbird as files in your filesystem by right clicking and choosing “Show File”.
• Recommended Add-ons Updater – A new update mechanism ensures that all upgraded users have an option to install the latest Recommended Add-ons.
• Hide & Show Display Panes – We were inspired by Atrieu’s Pane Button add-on and decided to add a few buttons to allow you to toggle between showing & hiding Display panes.
• Simpler Column Headings – We’ve refined the column heading property list and made it easier to enable the properties you care about.

Performance Enhancements

• Drastically Faster Search: Searching in Songbird is now anywhere from 10x faster for small libraries to 1000x for large ones.
• Reduced RAM Usage: There’s a 70% reduction in RAM usage when importing and using large (100,000 track) libraries.
• Faster Media Importing: Importing media into Songbird is now 2-4x faster.
• Reduced Startup Times: Large library users (10,000 tracks or more) will notice that Songbird startup times are now twice as fast.
• Efficient Scrolling: Scrolling through your library now uses half the amount of CPU.
• Snappier Sorting: Sorting your library is now 3-4x faster, which adds up to significantly smoother browsing when scrolling and filtering.
• Optimized DB Size: We’ve optimized the database in Songbird and reduced its size by, on average, 60%. This leads to a variety of performance improvements throughout the application.
• Fewer Crashers: We’ve worked hard to identify and fix 11 of the most common crashes in Songbird.

Although the Songbird has an addon/extension that lets you use it as your playlist and library manager to sync and transfer media files to your iPod, Songbird’s device support is limited. Here’s a list of supported iPod models and a list of other MTP devices supported by Songbird.

I still have to try Songbird with an iPod so I can’t really say much about that part. I’ll probably write another post about that later on or maybe write a tutorial on how to use Songbird as an alternative to iTunes.

For more detailed information and list of features, check out the official Songbird website.

Get Songbird 1.0

In my previous post about Songbird Mp3 Player, I said that it would be released within a week. But I guess, the guys over at Pioneers of the Inevitable LLC wanted to make sure that Songbird was fully functional before it was released.

Since I was away for more than a week, it was just today that I was able to check on the status of Songbird. Looking at their blog, I found out that it was released last Feb 8th.

Songbird 0.1 Proof-of-Concept is now available for download. I’ve downloaded and installed it on my machine but have to try it out yet. Even though it is still on a test-phase, it is fully functional. Just like Firefox, this mp3 player will make use of extensions to make it more interesting and fun. It can play almost any type of media file. You can read more about it’s features here.

System Requirements:

Minimum system requirements

• 733MHz Pentium III or comparable
• 128MB RAM (256MB for WinXP)
• 30MB Hard Disk Space
• 16bit Sound Card
• Windows 98 SE, Windows ME, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 2003
• 1x speed or greater CD Burner (Required for Burning)
• 2x speed or greater CDROM (Required for Ripping)

Recommended system requirements

• 1.5 GHz Pentium IV or comparable
• 256MB RAM (512MB for WinXP)
• 30MB Hard Disk Space
• 32bit Sound Card
• Windows 2000, Windows XP
• 8x speed or greater CD Burner (Required for Burning)
• 16x speed or greater CDROM (Required for Ripping)

What others have to say about Songbird:

“At first it only looked like a black iTunes…it is XUL based and more open than iTunes, expect a large number of plug-ins and extensions to really do some wild new things in the frustratingly stagnant world of media players.”
-Studio Moustache

“Screw Web 2.0, XUL moves us straight into the Web 3.0 that technologists like you and I that “get it” are really looking forward to :)”
-Mike Rundle on TechCrunch

You can download Songbird 0.1 here.