ATMac

Keeping your CD and DVD collections on the computer can make them much easier to access and use. ITunes makes it easy to keep music from your CDs on the computer - just use the iTunes “import” command and your music is copied to the computer. Keeping a DVD collection on the computer is a little trickier, but you don't have to be a geek to do it.

There are two main ways to copy a DVD to the computer: you can copy just the movie (with any audio tracks and captions) or you can copy the entire DVD with the menus, extras, everything on the disk. Just the movie will take as little as 700mb of space whereas th whole DVD can be up to 6.5gb - 6500mb - of space.

These are some programs that you will need:

MacTheRipper
Copies whole DVDs to the computer. It doesn't take long to copy - between five minutes and half an hour in my experience. You can play copied DVDs with DVD Player using its “Open DVD media… ” command and selecting the VIDEO_TS folder to play.

Handbrake
Turns video from a DVD into a movie file that can be played with iTunes and QuickTime Player, amongst others. Handbrake only converts video, not the DVD menus and other fancy stuff, and it takes a very long time to run (I usually leave it overnight) but the resulting file is much smaller. If you don't want your DVD drive to be in use for the entire time you can copy the whole DVD with MacTheRipper then use Handbrake to convert the movie part. Handbrake can also be run from the command line.

You can keep your digital library on an external hard drive if your computer doesn't have enough free space. The simplest way is to attach a hard drive to one of Apple's AirPort Extreme wireless base stations - ask your local Mac store about this.

- Ricky Buchanan, ATMac