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So the wonderful folks over at Handbrake have released their newest version of their DVD ripping and encoding software. The highlights? Well now that the AppleTV supports Dolby Digital 5.1 you can now grab the surround sound and encode it into the video file! Awesome right? Well there’s more… They also have figured out how to support a Stereo AAC feed contained in the same file. What does all that mean? For the first time you can encode once with 5.1 and Stereo in 1 file and have it playback with 5.1 on your AppleTV and stereo on your iPhone. Just awesome! I am commencing ripping my entire DVD collection!

Kind of a bummer. I had been hoping that HD-DVD would pull out a win but alas it wasn’t meant to be.  Even though they never got around to implementing it Mandatory Managed Copy was the big piece that made me hope for HD-DVD. Managed copy would allow you to not only make copies of your HD-DVDs but also potentially move the content to other non-HD-DVD devices. It is a part of the Blu-Ray spec but is not mandatory and doubt it will be ever used.  A real shame. I had only purchased about 25 HD-DVDs so I am not too bad off, I had read the writing on the wall about 6 months ago and picked up a PS3 for the Blu-Ray player and now have about 35 Blu-ray Discs. In one sense I am just glad the format war is over and now I no longer have to worry I am building an obsolete library. Feel sorry for my brother though who has about 100 HD-DVD movies, man if my investment in 25 hurts I can only imagine how 4 times that investment has got to feel…. ouch! RIP HD-DVD.

Seriously it seems like YEARS since the last season of LOST.  Good news is we are only about 6 weeks out from new episodes. Bad news is the lame studios are killing me by not caving to WGA demands giving us only 8 episodes for this season. Never-the-less looks to be the best season yet. I really believe by having a solid end-date it really has liberated the writers to write with more purpose and direction and fully expect these last seasons to be the best yet. Check out the new trailer below it looks amazing.