10
Unheard of
Utilities
6 MA XIMUMPC OCTOBER 2004
Once you start the utility, you will see the contents
of your DVD. The main elements appear on the left
(menus, movie, extras) with their contents on the right.
Select what you don’t want, and set the appropriate
compression level.GSpot Codec
Information Appliance
There’s nothing more
frustrating than waiting patiently while
you download a new video clip dubbed
“The funniest thing ever!” by some mes-
sage board maven, only to hit “play” andget just the sound, or worse, no video or
sound. This is the tragic consequence of
a missing codec. But how do you know
which codec to add to your media player
in order to play the video or audio (or
both)? Enter GSpot.
Discovering the elusive codec is as
simple as loading the app, pointing it
at the file in question, and clicking therender button. Mystery solved. This util-
ity tells you the name of the codec being
used for both audio and video. If it’s
unable to render the file, it tells you in
plain English why.
GSpot gets our endorsement because
it’s the only utility we know of that per-
forms this valuable function, and if an
alternative does exist, we doubt it’s as
easy to use or as splendidly useful.
Free, http://www.heAdBANds.com/gspot nThis is the screen that appears once
the utility loads. Click the “...” next
to the Path bar to locate the file you’d
like examined.Finally, click Render and watch
the results appear onscreen. If the
rendering is successful (and it usually
is), you can “click for more details” to
Next, select the video and click Open. find out everything you need to know.There’s nothing moreDVD Shrink
We’ve reviewed a lot of DVD
backup utilities over the past
year or so, but none are
as handy as our freeware
favorite, DVD Shrink. If
you’ve ever tried to back up
a DVD you own, you knowhow tricky the process can be. The aver-
age commercial DVD is an 8.5GB dual-
layer disc, which means most movies
don’t fit on a puny 4.7GB DVD+R.
(Dual-layer writable discs are just now
becoming available and will alleviate
this problem, but for now dual-layer
burners and media are
rare and pricey.) With DVD
Shrink, though, you can
remove all the unnecessary
items from a DVD such as
subtitles or the director’s
commentary, and then com-
press the remaining con-
tents to a manageable size.
We’ve sampled a lot
of DVD backup utilities in
our day, and DVD Shrink
is by far the easiest we’ve
used. Plus it’s freeware and
is regularly tweaked and
updated by the author. It’s
one app we wouldn’t want
to be without.
Free, http://www.dvdshriNK.orgSqueeze commercial DVDs onto
a single disc
Find the codecs you need to play digi video and sound
Once you’ve made your selections,
run the utility to compress the video
and save it to the designated file. You
can enable Video Preview to watch
the progress.Select a folder in which to save the
final, compressed contents of the disc
and click OK.