I used Handbrake to produce an .avi file from a DVD movie. Like all the avi files I have, the damned thing won't play in Quicktime, I must use VLC Player to watch the movie on my computer. Well, I'm not even half-way happy with this arrangement because VLC has (at least) one damned annoying bug — you can't blithely click ahead and have the movie seamlessly re-start at that new point. More often than not, VLC starts sulking and quits.

To add insult to injury, one movie reaches a point very near the end and chokes on something. VLC quits. A re-start brings up that old bug that stops me moving forward to near that point in order to check if it was a one-off or what.

To hell with it, I thought, I'll try a different tool. Enter VisualHub. I launched it, pointed it towards the avi movie and asked it to make an mp4 version. I tried several variants.

In every case: (a) I could not convince VisualHub to present the movie on my computer unsqueezed horizontally. (Yes, I read the manual. There is passing reference to an anamorphic setting but no way to use it to give what I want.) (b) Way more annoying, VisualHub used only the first few chapters of the movie to make a new file. Yes the output plays in Quicktime but only half-way through the damned movie! Totally useless.

For all its simplicity, Handbrake has a much-richer feature set. My only quibble is that the output won't play in Quicktime and I'll wager if I fool around long enough, I'll solve that one.

Goddamn. Audio, pictures and so on are so simple on a computer. Why is video so damned confusing? All I want is to copy from a DVD and make the output playable on my computer using Quicktime and in a DVD player. Seems impossible.

And don't even mention MacTheRipper. For my money, way less useful than Handbrake.

Sigh Guess someone will write something some time fully-featured that works seamlessly, bug-free, usefully. On that day, I'll happily shell out something like $100 for it.