Looking for a way to back up your old DVDs onto your hard drive? Want to watch your purchased DVD movies on your iPod? You're certainly not the only one. For some reason however, developers are not very keen on developing tools that do this. Luckily, HandBrake has stepped up to the plate with a free tool that lets you take control of your media.

As you probably know by now, the entertainment industry is still busy trying to sue The Pirate Bay out of existence. If they get what they want and The Pirate Bay closes down, their big piracy problem will not suddenly melt away. It may in fact continue to flourish, with or without The Pirate Bay.

So last week there was a story about a girl, Colby Curtin, that touched the hearts of thousands of readers, and Pixar played an important roll in it all. She was dying of vascular cancer, and her last wish was to see the movie Up. The only problem was that the movie is only in theaters, and she was to ill to be transported.

One of the things that is always hard about downloading from the BitTorrent network is trying to figure out what's legit and what's not. A lot of times I rely on the comments from other people to tell me whether the content is what it should be, or whether someone is trying to play a cruel trick.

The Al l Things D conference is going on right now and one of the most interesting things to come from it was when Walt Mossburg was interviewing Jeff Bezos, founder, president, and chief executive offer of Amazon.com. Bezos announced that within the next couple of weeks, Amazon will be launching a streaming movie service that users will pay for.

Mac only Tired of hunting down the various codecs to play your movies in QuickTime? Perian (free and open source) is pretty much the one-stop-shop when it comes to codecs on your Mac. It adds support for over two-dozen different types of media that QuickTime doesn't ordinarily support:

When Steve Jobs first announced the Apple TV, a device for playing digital content from iTunes, he was probably expecting it to become more of a hit than what it is. Sales aren't exactly stellar which leaves plenty of room for competition to come in and steal the show. In this case, it's Netflix's first streaming box made by Roku which in some ways, is coming in to shine brighter than the Apple TV.

Last week we wrote about how iTunes was getting new movies and making them available to purchase the same day as the DVD release. This is a pretty big step for Apple, and now we're learning that they're actually losing money on these new movies. The Wall Street Journal reported that while Apple is selling newly released movies at $14.99, they're actually paying the studios about $16 for each movie.

One of the questions that I get asked rather frequently is how people can take their media with them to places (normally work) without carrying a media player around. There are plenty of services out there that will let you upload, for example, your music so that it can be accessed from anywhere. But most of the time people want to stream it directly from their home machine.

Well, Blockbuster has apparently decided that it won't be sitting on the sidelines when it comes to distributing digital media.