Gerhard Potgieter

So you own a couple of DVD’s and they are just lying arround the house gathering dust and scratches, well I had the same scenario this weekend.

I’m had just moved to a new place and with the move I discovered a few DVD’s packed away so far I forgot I owned them. So I thought wouldn’t it be better if I just digitize them, I mean I watch all my movies via my xbox streaming them from the PC so why not just backup the DVD’s to the PC and then they are available in my playlist aswell.

After carefully thinking it through I decided not to just make ISO images of the disk, cause then I won’t be able to stream to the xbox, and the space could become a problem as your collection grows. So I opted for the DVD to DivX conversion.

After searching high and low on the internet I couldn’t quite find a suitable free product that could do this for me, and all the paid ones was a bit pricey. So after searching a little bit longer I came across a nice application called AutoGK. It is a application that allows backup from DVD to DivX / XviD, and best of all its free.

Program features support of:
- DVD/VOBs(unencrypted from hdd), MPEG2, MPEG1, transport streams (including multi-program ones) and AVI/DV input sources
- XviD or DivX(5/6) output formats
- AC3, DTS, PCM, MPA input audio tracks
- AC3, DTS, MPA, CBR/VBR MP3 output audio tracks
- two audio tracks in AVI
- external (vobsub) or internal (burnt-in) subtitles (with support of forced subs)
- HDTV input/output resolutions(upto 1920x***) and frame rates (50/60fps)
- automatic crop and resize based on compressibility of the source to achieve best results
- automatic detection of input source: PAL, NTSC, FILM, HYBRID
- automatic deinterlacer and IVTC
- automatic split into CD-sized chunks for main video and external subs

The program is really good and it doesn’t compromise quality at all, and if the default quality settings isn’t good enough for you , you can always adjust them to your liking. I think AutoGK is a must for every DVD collector wanting to back up their collection to PC. So if you have a few DVD’s lying around go dowload AutoGK and start backing up those DVD’s.

Not many South Africans know about the ZA Tech Show yet, but its popularity is growing with every podcast.

The ZA Tech Show is a weekly South African technology podcast where they discuss all the latest trends and technologies thats happening in South Africa. The podcast is now at their 10th episode and can be download for free from their website.

The ZA Tech Show is led by a panel consisting of Simon Dingle from Hypertext Media, Duncan McLeod from the FM and FM Tech, Jon Tullett from IHS, Benedict Kelly from Finweek and Brett Haggard also from Hypertext Media.

So if you are a technology junkie and would like to keep up the trends then this podcast is a must for you. Big up to Simon Dingle - founder of ZA Tech Show - and his team for a great weekly podcast, i’m sure you’ll make it big with this show.