Let’s say, just as an example here, that you do a lot of video work, including DVD authoring. Further, let’s say you have an old project that you need to use part of. And, sadly, the hard drive with the only backup of your original project has died with a horrible whining crunch.
Enter MPEG Streamclip.
I’ve already used it half a dozen times at work, grabbing bits out of DVDs recorded by one of the newer Ultrasound machines. It used to take a huge amount of time and hard drive space to rip the full track, slice out the chunks I want, and then re-compress them. Not any more.
This is quite possibly the best DVD extraction tool I’ve ever seen. You can tell this program to open up a video track from a DVD, preview it full-sized, set start and end points, and export just the little chunk of video that you want in any of a vast variety of formats, including uncompressed DV.
And it’s free.
That’s a very attractive price point.
There are a few caveats. You’ll need Quicktime, and you may need a couple of non-free Quicktime components. If you’re the DVD authoring guru from my example, you’ve probably already got them. Otherwise, they’re listed on the “Requirements” part of the download page.