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InqScribe and DVDs

February 27, 2007

InqScribe doesn’t support transcription directly from DVDs. If you catch me in marketing spin mode, I’ll tell you this is a good thing, because typical InqScribe use involves lots of little seeks and jumps around the media, and those seeks and jumps are an awful lot faster when you’re working with a file on a hard drive than when you’re working with optical media. (Nonetheless, DVD support is on the wish list for a future version.)

But whether it’s for performance reasons or simple necessity, if you need to work with DVD-based content, your best bet with InqScribe is to “rip” the DVD to a local hard drive file. And to that end, Lifehacker has a great article describing how to do this for both Mac OS X and Windows. The article talks about copying DVDs to an iPod, but to do this, you’re basically ripping the DVD to a MPEG4 file, which is what you need for InqScribe. Just skip the iTunes step.