Ripper wrapper

Supposed to be getting my Nano words done and, more importantly, finishing the final proofing of Hal 4. So what did I do today? Amongst other things, I went to a concert my wife was playing in and wrote a system tray prog which wraps Video Lan Client (VLC).

VLC has this great transcoding mode you can run from the command line, so if you happen to have a DVD with home movies on (you know, a menu system plus several tracks, some of which are the ones you want), then my prog lets you view the DVD contents by track and playing time, tick the tracks you want and then rip & transcode them to much smaller AVIs in the background. It names them track by track, and does the whole lot one after another before stopping. (Incidentally, VLC is my movie-playing app of choice. Worth a download - and it runs on Windows, Linux and OS X.)

On a dual core CPU you can merrily do this ripping bizzo while foreground tasks run as fast as ever, which is sweet. And making it a systray app means no clutter on the desktop. For now there's a big kludge where the command line options are dumped into a text box, but ticks and checkboxes will follow. First I have to proof Hal 4 and finish my nano words for the day...

Simon Haynes is the author of the Hal Spacejock and Hal Junior series (Amazon / Smashwords / other formats)