[dbergstrom]

I recently bought some VCDs for me to watch on my Wallstreet and my wife to watch on her Graphite 366 iBook. I love the technology - a much better alternative to shelling out $500 for a DVD kit.

Anyway, an advantage of VCDs should be that with enough hard drive space, you should be able to copy them to your hard drive for viewing. This seems like it would conserve battery life, as well as let me watch movies with batteries in both bays.

I've tried copying .dat files to the hard drive, and that doesn't work (error message about missing software component). I've tried using diskcopy to copy the disk, but I get an error message when I try to mount the image (MacOS can't open this type of disk).

Any ideas. I'm trying a couple of other approaches and will post if anything works.

[dbergstrom]

WooHoo!

I figured out how to do it!

You must have QuickTime Pro (got mine with my sweet FireWire-to-Go card). All you need to do is save the movie with the "make movie self-contained" option checked in the save dialog box.

Pros:
1) Less battery consumption.
2) Better sync between audio and video, fewer dropped frames (since hard drive is faster than CD-ROM/has bigger buffer.
3) Ability to edit out trailers/ads, as well as combine the video from two disks into a single file (no switching disks in the middle of the movie).

Cons:
1) Quicktime movie is a little (10-20%) bigger than the original .DAT file stored on the VCD.
2) You need >1 GB of hard drive space for each movie. However, in this age of ridiculously cheap storage, this isn't that unreasonable. Also, it only takes about 2-3 minutes to save a movie, so you can do it on the fly. The night before you leave for a trip, just save the movie or 2 that you want to watch on a plane to your hard drive. Or create a library of movies on some external firewire drive or something.

This is way cool.