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iVI Pro is a Mac application for importing and converting video; I’ve been using it to rip all my DVDs in anticipation of having to downsize in the near future. The following is a list of suggestions that I’m sending to them:

I’ve been happily using iVI Pro to rip all my DVD sets (413 sets, many of which have multiple discs, so the disc count is well over a thousand) and I’d like to offer a few suggestions that would make my workflow easier.

First, although I’ve checked the setting to assume an unidentified video is a TV show, when I insert a DVD the first import screen still assumes it’s a Movie, so I have to change that manually.

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Now I have a lot of “TV” show DVDs that are not to be found in the normal databases, such as sets from The Great Courses. There are typically six half-hour “episodes” on each DVD, and when I tell iVI that the DVD is a TV show, it usually finds each of the episodes and checks them. So far so good, but then I have to enter the name of the series for each of them, as well as the episode number (it numbers them 1 through 6 by default). It would be nice if I could input the series name just once and let iVI Pro automatically fill in the rest. And couldn’t iVI take the first episode number that I enter and increment it by one for each succeeding episode?

Then there’s the problem of subtitles. If a DVD has Closed Caption subtitles, iVI Pro can’t seem to find them, whereas the open source Handbrake can. So with any DVD that I think might have CC captions, I have to let Handbrake examine it first; if it finds them, then I’ll let Handbrake rip the movie. It would certainly be a time saver if iVI Pro could handle Closed Caption subtitles.

I hope you’ll consider these little suggestions. Thanks!

–JT

Update: I originally identified the open source software that I using as VLC rather than Handbrake. How embarrassing!