I came across an interesting site that provides us with the answer not to “Why am I here?”, but to: What is Mac OS X?:
© Amit Singh. All Rights Reserved.

What is Mac OS X?

This document attempts to give a hacker over-friendly answer to the question “What is Mac OS X?”. My original motivation in writing this was that somebody had proxy-volunteered me to give a talk introducing Mac OS X to the Linux Users Group at my work place. While thinking over what to say to those folks, most (if not all) of whom are strangers to Mac OS X, I decided to write a supplementary document that they could refer to at their leisure.

In OSX you do have choices to “backup” your css encrypted store-bought video. Unfortunatly, it is going to cost you money to do it properly.
1 method involves an application called FastDVDCopy4 which is an all in one app to decrypt, compress, and burn your disc with 1 button.

The other method (more popular), involves

(1) a freeware app called “MacTheRipper” to decrypt, (2) a compression utility to make the video fit on a standard DVD (it also allows you to remove menus, subtitles, etc), and (3) possibly an app to burn the resulting decrypted, compressed video_ts folder.

This is where you have a few options.

FastDVDCopy Review

Get them while you can HERE

Coming up a review of StoneStudio from Stone Works

FooBillard:

FooBillard is a free OpenGL-billiards game made originally for Linux, but with a Mac OS X port. The graphics are well done. If you are using a multi-button mouse, the came can be controlled from the mouse. If you are using a single button mouse, you will use the Control and Option button. Read thru [...]

Exclusive: Leopard to feature a totally redesigned Finder, based on Spotlight:

To date, the only information Apple has provided about Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is that it will come sometime between late 2006 and 2007 and that it will be Intel compatible. Meanwhile, anonymous sources revealed to MacosXrumors the first major feature of Leopard and it looks like it has …

invisibleSHIELD for the 5G iPod announced:

Protective Solutions today announced the invisibleSHIELD for the new video-enabled Apple iPod. The invisibleSHIELD is a transparent film covering that protects iPods from dust and dirt particles that…

[[ This is just a taste, visit MacMerc.com for the full story! ]]

WATSON

Wow, a tough one. When you are stuck without your digital camera and have to rely on your phone camera, what can you expect. Well not much with the built in software, but read the following review and you just might be amazed…..
QuickLink

Don’t take it from me that Mr. Gates has a Porn Star alter ego:

Check it out for YOURSELF

Flip4Mac
Saving your insanity in an afforable manner in a Windows Media world!
Check out the REVIEW

From Maccentral.com:

Editors’ Notes: Close-up on Aperture:

Kelly Turner expected Apple to unveil an advanced version of iPhoto Wednesday. It turns out that Aperture offers much, much more.

HandBrake homepage:

”
What is HandBrake?

HandBrake is a GPL’d multiplatform, multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 ripper/converter. HandBrake was originally available on the BeOS, but now has been ported over to MacOS X and to GNU/Linux.

* Supported sources:
o Any DVD-like source: VIDEO_TS folder, DVD image or real DVD (even encrypted)
o PAL or NTSC
o AC-3, LPCM or MPEG audio tracks
* Outputs:
o File format: MP4, AVI or OGM
o Video: MPEG-4 or H.264 (1 or 2 passes or constant quantizer encoding)
o Audio: AAC, MP3, Vorbis or AC-3 pass-through (supports encoding of several audio tracks)
* Misc features
o Chapter selection
o Basic subtitle support (burned into the picture)
o Integrated bitrate calculator
o Picture deinterlacing, cropping and scaling
o Grayscale encoding”

Right from the source:

About ffmpegX:

ffmpegX is a Mac OS X graphic user interface designed to easily operate more than 20 powerful Unix open-source video and audio processing tools including ffmpeg the “hyper fast video and audio encoder” (http://ffmpeg.sf.net/), mpeg2enc the open-source mpeg-2 encoder and multiplexer (http://mjpeg.sf.net/MacOS/) and mencoder the mpeg-4 encoder with subtitles support (http://sf.net/projects/mplayerosx).

* As simple as 1.2.3 : Drop a file, choose a destination format, and click “Encode”.

Download it HERE

DVD2Onex, FastDVDcopy4, Toast 7, MactheRipper.