Chaleur!

So I've been trying, for the last week, to rip my DVD of HEAT onto my hard drive. [And before the MPAA comes knocking on my door, let me just add that this is MY copy of HEAT, that I bought, and that I want to have permanently on my laptop for long flights and boring waits in coffeeshops and whatnot. So, off my back, Jack Valenti.] First, I tried copying the VOB files off the disc using DVD Backup. That worked okay (after ten hours of processing), but I ended up with the movie spread over a couple of gigabyte-sized files. Not very convenient. Tried combining the files with DivXRay, but I couldn't get one single file out of them, the program kept crashing, and there wasn't any usable audio. Tried again, using Forty-Two, a wonderful program that was able to rip The Bourne Identity [rented from Blockbuster--in your face, Jack!] in one step, with no fuss. Forty-Two chugged away for a while (twelve hours), then produced a single 1GB avi file. Which Quicktime couldn't recognize, even after I ran Divx Validator on it. Luckily, VLC Media Player COULD read it, and very well at that. Beautiful picture quality, and very good audio quality...

...in Spanish. It was all in Spanish. I'd ripped the wrong audio track, somehow.

Tried again with Forty-Two, this time attempting a lower quality video with mp3 audio that Quicktime would be able to read. Let 'er rip overnight, woke up this morning to check it out, aaaaannnnddd....

...it looked good. Nice video. Quicktime could process the file. Played the French dialogue beautifully.

Argh.

Somewhere, Jack Valenti is laughing at me...