Thursday, April 30, 2009

iTunes Movie Ripping? Again?

You buy (or more likely bought) a CD and now you want to listen to it on your iPod. iTunes does the conversion, with as little fuss and drama as you could wish for (generally).

Chances are your iPod will show movies, maybe you've downloaded a trailer from the Apple website or even converted one of your own home movies. A process which reminds you of the dark ages of computing.

If only you could just put your movie into iTunes and have it rip the film into the digital file you need. Now wouldn't that be great.

There have been suggestions in the past that this feature would be added to iTunes, it does seem to me and many other people that this is the "missing link" in the entertainment flow, all the more important now that Apple TV seems to be gaining ground. You can handle all sorts of entertainment products, but that DVD you bought, well .... you're on your own for that.

So I was interested to see a footnote to a recent post on Mac Rumors noting that a forthcoming release of iTunes will have a facility to download Blu-Ray DVD data from Gracenote (the database currently used to source your CD metadata). OK, it's a major leap from that snippet to concluding that DVD ripping will be offered soon, but if you add it to all the other suggestions it could be that a major new feature upgrade is on the near horizon.

Put it another way, why add movie database features if you're not going to offer movie ripping?

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