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Showing posts with the label DVD

You're Only Borrowing That Digital Content

With Amazon's most recent removal of content off of the Kindle, we're reminded that you're only borrowing digital content; not buying it. Farhad Manjoo of Slate wrote a great article, Why 2024 Will Be Like Nineteen Eighty-Four , that reviews the limitations and dangers of having digital content. Most of the e-books, videos, video games, and mobile apps that we buy these days day aren't really ours. They come to us with digital strings that stretch back to a single decider—Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, or whomever else. For me, I'm still buying CDs and paperback books because I like the physical item. I also look for low cost and garage sale DVDs. One day I might not have the choice, but while I do, I choose to own over borrow.

Fix iTunes to burn CDs again

On February 26, 2009 I wrote about problems with XP and my CD/DVD drives . After a fix to the Registry, the last step was to re-install any software that I use to burn CDs and DVDs. It seemed all was good, but I apparently hadn't tried iTunes. The next time I launched iTunes, I was greeted with the following message: Warning! The registry settings used by the iTunes drivers for importing and burning CDs & DVDs are missing. This can happen as a result of installing other CD burning software. Please reinstall iTunes. With prior experience using iTunes, I was not about to uninstall iTunes. Instead I just tried a Repair through the Add/Remove Software interface. That failed. I then tried installing iTunes over my current install, and that failed too. Finally I went fishing on Apple's site. I found an entry that looked promising. Apple recommends I remove a Registry key, add an new one, and then re-install all CD/DVD burning software. Sounded a bit like a loop, so I tried just

Lose my CD / DVD Drives

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Recently I experienced several little problems with my Windows XP desktop. It started with losing the sound and the inability for Skype to answer. After trying various things, I rebooted, which brought back the audio and seemed to have corrected Skype. Unfortunately, I then lost my 2 CD/DVD drives plus one virtual CD/DVD drive. Losing the virtual drive should have been the clue, which I initially missed. They all displayed in the Systems hardware window, but with error 31 messages. After looking for and installing new or replacement drivers, I still had the same problem. I finally ran across a knowledge base article from Microsoft . You can no longer access the CD drive or the DVD drive, or you receive an error message after you remove a CD recording program or a DVD recording program in Windows XP: "error code 31" The solution was to delete two apparently corrupt Registry entries and then re-install all software that have a burn CD and/or DVD feature. A pain to go through th

The Best, Free CD and DVD Burner

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I was provided a used laptop at my new job a few months back, and I was surprised when I did not find a pre-installed CD burning software such as Sonic or Roxio. This led me on a hunt to find something for free; I ended up with CDBurnerXP . I was quite impressed with how easy to use CDBurnerXP is to use -- the screens are very intuitive and helpful. When creating a data disk, you get a Windows Explore like view on the top half of the screen, where you can navigate to the files you want to burn and drag them to the bottom half of the screen. Seems obvious and simple, but not all programs work so well. As I add my files, a bar across the bottom shows how much space I've used; if I exceed the capacity of my disc, the background color changes from green to red. To create an audio disk is very similar, except the bottom half shows my tracks and their details. CDBurnerXP makes it very easy to drag and drop audio tracks to put them in the order you desire. If you want to sample a file, yo

Want to rip a DVD to save as a backup or to play on your PSP or iPod?

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LifeHacker , one of my favorite sites for little tech hacks has posted a top 5 list of DVD rippers. This list is based on their reader's input, so you know these programs really work. If you're looking to rip your DVD collection, then checkout LifeHacker's article . I will say that I have successfully used 1 of the 5.

DVD Doesn't Play on Your PC

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Recently I took a class where the instructor could not get one of his DVDs to play for the class. This particular DVD was a custom compilation made by his organization. The error I saw when trying it on my laptop was that it was blocky and played fast. Another person tried it and got a black screen. I search Google on "free DVD codecs" and found a codec to that worked . Once installed, it still did not play with my default player, but it did play with the player installed with the codec -- the Media Player Classic. Because this first codec worked, I did not try the other downloads. I tried this one first because the file size was the smallest. So if you find that you still have trouble, try one of the other links within the first result ( Codec Pack All in 1 or K-Lite Mega Codec ).