DVD

An enterprising geek has set up an incredibly fast DVD ripping rig, using the unholy union of a PlayStation 3, Yellow Dog Linux and an Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive. This enables him to encode the DVDs to H.264 in near real-time.

Thomas McGonagle says of his new Franken-setup:

I am now able to rip with the best of them. I compiled handbrake from source, and I am now able to RIP all my DVDs and encode them in H.264 in near real-time. I am officially very happy!!!

You hear that? He’s not just very happy, he’s officially very happy.

Until he posts a detailed tutorial, you can read his quick and dirty instructions here.

via MaxConsole

A spokesperson from Bizarre Creations has posted some unfortunate news on their official forums:

You won’t see different times of day per city because this involves recreating all the textures again (one for day and one for night). Whilst this wasn’t a problem for our dev team, it was a problem fitting all this data onto a single DVD. So we’ve worked around the problem by providing different lighting models per city. For example, Macau is always in the daytime, but if you play it during a storm everything looks darker and more foreboding. If you play during a blizzard then things are slightly tinged blue and everything seems more frozen. Of course, playing this track in sunshine will make everything appear bright and yellowy.

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