ReviewSaurus - The Techie Dino!

There are cases, when you feel that you should make a copy of your personal movie DVDs to make sure that the original ones don’t get bad and that you don’t lose your favorite movie. However, there is a small problem when it comes to making the backup copy of any DVD and i.e. that a DVD gets uncompressed and becomes bigger in size and it fails to get back on the other copy of the DVD.

There are few things which you can do to make sure that you can get exact copy of the movie DVD and that too without the lose of quality of the picture and these steps & softwares can help you in that :

1. Make the virtual drive & store it on your hard disk : You can always make use of various virtual drive softwares and make the backup of the DVD and store it on your computer’s hard drive. However, the problem is that it may take up to 8–9 GB of space of the hard drive. Here are some of the virtual drive software :

• Daemon Tools (Freeware)
• Virtual CD (Shareware)

2. Copy the content of the DVD and write it on two DVDs : This can be one scenario, where you can copy the content of the DVD and using your DVD writing software, you can make the individual copy of the movie. Mostly, you get various ads or small clippings from the movie too and you can just keep them separate and just copy the VOB files (the actual movie) and then using your DVD writing software, write those files on the other DVD. Just make sure that you don’t make the Data disc using the software instead choose the option of Making DVD VIDEO. Because you’ll be leaving the extras and only concentrate on the actual video, then you’ll be able to make the copy of the DVD on two of them.

3. Using software which can create the direct copies : There are various software which are available and can make the copies of the DVD by removing some unwanted things (again the same unwanted episodes, the menu etc.) and then compressing the DVD content on the fly and writing it on to the backup disc. Here’s the list of the softwares :

• DVD Shrink (Freeware)
• 1Click DVD Copy (Shareware)
• DVD Cloner (Shareware)

These are the ways of making the backup of your favorite movies, in case you are aware of any other then feel free to share it in the comments section.

Please note : Creating copies of copyright content can be illegal. This post is only for sharing the knowledge. Please check the laws in your country, before following any step.

IrfanView is one of the most popular image viewer available on the internet. Benedict Herold has reviewed IrfanView and found it extremely useful for small editing of images.

He loves the fact that it’s free and still it has got so many features and supports so many image formats. He points out some of the important features of Irfanview :

* Many supported file formats ( almost every image format)
* Multi-language support
* Thumbnail / Preview option
* Slideshow (Save as EXE / SCR)
* Fast directory browsing
* Batch conversion / editing
* Multipage editing
* File search
* Email Option
* Multimedia Playe (plays popular video)
* Change color depth
* Scan Support
* Cut/Crop
* IPTC editing
* Capturing
* Lossless JPG operations
* Effects (sharpen, blur, Adobe Photoshop filters)
* Extracts icons from EXE/DLL
* Lot of shortcut keys for ease of use
* Command line options for experts
* Customized plugin

There’s one place where Benedict and I agree when it comes to IrfanView and i.e. its user interface. Irfanview is very light weight and fast application, however its interface needs some more work.

Tips for IrfanView :

1. Ten Ways of using IrfanView by Edward de Leau
2. Ten things you can do with IrfanView by Pallab
3. Just make sure that when you download IrfanView, then don’t forget to download its plugins too. It’s almost nothing without plugins.

Links : Download IrfanView

Every webmaster likes to track the visitors’ information and for that they use different analytics services or packages and most of the times we want that if we can get a service where the information gets to us without making too much efforts and that we get real time information.

ReInvigorate (which I reviewed recently) has launched a utility called SNOOP, which alerts the webmasters or concerned person about any activity on your website/blog (for e.g. any purchase/donation, comments on blog posts) and that too in real time. The utility sits in the system tray and with the help of sounds and flashing icon, it alerts the users about page views, new user, comments, referred visitor, unique visitor & purchase or donation.

(Taken from ReInvigorate’s website)

What I liked about Snoop :

Snoop is certainly a nice utility and the good thing about snoop is that it gives the ease of checking the stats in real time. Apart from that, Snoop is available, both for Windows and Macintosh, I hope they come out with Linux utility too so as to be called true platform independent software.

What I would like to see in Snoop :

Although, it provides most of the information like IP address of the visitor, whether the visitor is unique or not or page views but it provides the information in very simple list. What, I’ll be really interested in will be that if it can store all the information on your computer’s hard disk and also display you the data in form of charts, as we can see the information by logging into ReInvigorate. I think that it should provide the same interface in Snoop too.

This is really nice and great option and I think that other analytics services should follow the steps of ReInvigorate and must provide this kind of utility.