Teaching - good!  :D
Thesis - bad!  :-[ :( :'(

-Darwin (January 03, 2008, 11:01 AM)

Oh man, are you living the story of my life or what. I taught US lit and translation at the university where I live for 10 years, never even thought of trying another job when I graduated. The teaching part was awesome, I miss it greatly. The writing part was something else entirely. In those 10 years I gave only one conference presentation, well received too, because I was speaking off the cuff, rather than reading my paper... because I couldn't be bothered to write it all down! Then I realized the net and computing in general were much more fun than writing a thesis on a topic in literature, and never even got as far as the title page. So after 10 years the university and me parted ways.

Teaching really, really good! Thesis ugh.

My understanding is that CloneCD will only make 1 to 1 exact copies of DVD movies.  CloneDVD will re-encode movies so they will fit on media with less capacity.  Many DVDs require dual-layer media for 1 to 1 copies, CloneDVD will make those fit on single-layer media.  CloneDVD also allows you to perform some basic edits (like remove advertisements, alternate tracks,etc.).  As far as I know CloneCD doesn't let you perform any edits.

-mwb1100 (December 22, 2007, 01:27 PM)

Thank you, this is very useful information.

However, if you're only going to get one thing from Slysoft, seriously consider AnyDVD.

-mwb1100 (December 22, 2007, 01:27 PM)

Yes, I've figured that out, but AnyDVD seems pretty useless by itself, so it looks like you need to buy three products, and that's almost $100. Subtract the discount, add 20% VAT, still $100 :)

Finally - if you're considering buying from Slysoft, they've announced that starting on Jan 1 their products are going to be sold in Euros instead of Dollars (while keeping the numbers the same).  In effect, this is a 40% price increase.  So if you're going to buy you should do it before then.

-mwb1100 (December 22, 2007, 01:27 PM)

I've seen that, yes :)  I must say this part seems somewhat disingenuous to me: Effective January 1, 2008, SlySoft will switch its pricing from U.S. dollars 1:1 to Euro. This will result in a price increase of about 40%. Nothing is stopping Slysoft from ensuring the conversion to Euro does not result in a price hike (or just upping the price in USD), they've just chosen to convert at 1:1 ratio.

The thing is, I've only seen one CD (a data CD I wanted to make a backup copy of) that I couldn't copy with Nero. That was a month ago, and I tried CloneCD, fully willing to buy it if it could copy that one disk - but it could not, either. Wouldn't even tell me what protection the CD was using or what the problem was. Through investgating files on the disk I found out it was SecureDisk (or was it SecureDrive?), which CloneCD claims to support.

I've never needed to copy a DVD disk yet - ever, though I expect this will change as I move my own storage to DVDs. I hardly watch any movies on DVD, so it's not a concern, but I do buy live (concert) DVDs occasionally, and I want to be able to extract audio tracks off those DVDs. (I have a dozen or so live DVDs I have never watched, but I listen to the audio tracks often). I used a program called DVD Audio Extractor once, trial version, but it didn't work with newer of those DVDs, so I had to resort to playing the DVDs on the computer and recording the audio stream. If CloneDVD doesn't do this yet, it seems like a good fit for its featureset.