Telestream, the provider of Flip4Mac Windows Media Components for QuickTime, announced a new product for digital media enthusiasts. Drive-in is a first-of-its-kind software application that allows Mac users to create and store images of digital video discs (DVDs) on personal computer hard drives. Released Friday, September 5, Drive-in provides travelers and home theater enthusiasts with quick, easy access to personal DVD movie collections for playback on laptops, desktop computers and home entertainment systems. A Windows version is planned for future release.
Drive-in provides all the benefits of DVDs, however disc-free hard drive storage offers a number of advantages over conventional physical DVD storage. Drive-in provides a richer user experience, for browsing, searching and accessing movies. Plus, the risk of misplacing or damaging physical discs is eliminated. Home theater users can consolidate their movie libraries onto a single, secure location. For travelers, drive-in saves battery life by removing the need to search and spin an optical disc, enabling viewing of several movies on a single laptop battery."Any family that has a collection of DVDs is well aware of the hassles of losing and damaging personal DVD movie discs," said Dan Castles, CEO of Telestream. "Our goal with Drive-in is to preserve all the original content, while improving search, storage and retrieval. Drive-in provides a great playback experience on personal computers. It removes the hassles of the physical disc and allows users to store away their DVDs, so they are not lost or damaged."
Under license by the DVD CCA and DVD FLLC, Drive-in creates an image that is an exact duplicate of the information that is on the owner's original DVD disc, thus preserving original content protection. In addition, Drive-in locks the software to the owner's computer and locks the images to the software. Drive-in allows users to play movie images on computers that they own, but it does not allow users to share their images with others.
Drive-in also preserves the quality, navigation and special features of the original DVD. Additional helpful features include the ability to store thumbnails of cover art, names of actors, and movie descriptions which simplifies searching, browsing and selection of movies. Users can play Drive-in software using Apple's DVD Player or Front Row to further enhance the user experience.
For more than a year, tens of thousands of users have participated in the Drive-in public beta. Digital media enthusiast, Jeff Puritz, reports, "I have been looking for exactly this program for a long time. I have no interest in stealing video but want to keep some DVDs on my hard drive for travel."
In Dave Peterson's article, Building a Disc-Free DVD Library With Drive-in which appears on GadgetyTech.com, he says of Drive-in, "I like the idea of being able to load in all my DVDs for ease of access and still have all the features built into the disc. Picture quality of the video image is excellent, the same as if you were running it from the original disc, and all menu and special feature content is available as it would be on the disc."
Michael Driskill writes, "I've been storing DVDs left and right. The saved movies are just like the original; no loading problems, nice product."
Drive-in is now available in two versions; a single-seat and a multi-seat that enables users to image and playback DVDs on up to five computers in a household. The single-seat version is priced at $39, while the multi-seat version is $59. Drive-in is available for download and immediate online purchase at www.flip4mac.com. A quick video user tutorial is also available at www.flip4mac.com . More information about Telestream is available at www.telestream.net.
Full Disclosure: Author, Derrick Freeman, serves as a consultant for Telestream.
