Some of my friends had forked some months ago, and their descendants seems to really like DVDs. The problems is, besides loving to watch them, the kids really love to bite the discs, so, all the Noody and Nemo DVDs are getting quite disgusting. To fight this, my friends decided to think on a how to rip DVDs and store it in H.264 format.

Simple? Well, it looks like, the thing is, in total, we are talking of more than 1.000 DVDs, which can take a loooong time. So, they started to think on a distributed system that could offload the work to a network of computers attached to the Internet, each one contributing with spare cpu cycles, to do the job, which is pretty cool.

Meanwhile, I've found this application (Mac OS X and Be OS only) that can rip a DVD (even if encrypted) and store it in mp4 or h.264. It's called HandBrake, and his telling me that "Bowling for Columbine" will take 6h30m (!) to be completed. Come on boys, we definitly need that distributed network!