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[The Sage of Chico]

Once again the Sage of Chico has straightened out my view of reality. If everybody wants to rip off DVD movies, they must already have devised a way of doing it, he said. Look for software that will do that, he counselled. He was right. Not only is there a whole genre of software that will convert DVD movie files to files copyable and transferable on your pc or Mac, but they are relatively cheap. Such softwares are, appropriately, called 'rippers'. Ostensibly because they rip the tracks out of the album or video. As though we believed that.

I downloaded a trial version for free, tested that it worked satisfactorily, then paid $29 for a version that did not print "trial version" on every frame.

The ripped files can be played on one's pc or Mac or transferred to a device that will play MP-4's such as one's iPod. If I had been willing to spring for $45 I could have gotten a ripper that would convert to any file format one wanted.

To quote an old friend, "Copyright licenses? We don't got to show you no stinking copyright licenses!"

The caveat here is that not all pirates are honest. According to a review I read, many rippers are not only home-made and work badly, but also contain suites of spywares. Price does not correlate with quality. Google on 'DVD converters' for reviews.

The absurdly too-large iPod is now merely larger than I could ever have time to fill with movies. It loads about 4 times real time so a 2 hour movie is converted in 30 minutes. But there is still the opportunity to transfer photos to it. I wonder if it accepts RAW files?

...time passes while he googles...

It will store RAW files but won't display them. As to them it is thus a storage device rather than a display device. Good enough. For a long bicycle trip in which there will be lots of pictures but few opportunities to store them to external hard drive or DVD, more than good enough.