Mac users who transfer torrents to DVD and have the Philips DVP642 -- is there an easy way to make shows broadcast in HD appear letterboxed on my TV?

Instead of using iDVD, try using the Finder to burn the CD. Just take the file from the torrent and drop it on the disk then burn. The DVP642 will play any media files it finds, and I suspect there's a better chance of the aspect ratio being preserved.

I've never tried this with a DVD, but it works with .avi files on a CD.

I just burned a DVD with one of my torrents, and it did the same thing.

Googling "iDVD" and "Anamorphic" yields some not entirely satisfactory solutions to the problem. Basically, you have to save your DVD as a disk image, go in and fiddle with some binary files in the disk image, and then burn it.

My iTunes has decided that it doesn't know where a bunch of the songs in my iTunes directory live. It knows where most of them are, but there are several hundred that have the ! next to the track name. What's the easiest way to make iTunes locate them? Going through each track individually is not an option.

Jon, sorry I can't help. I have another iTunes question, though:

How do I get iTunes to show me the exact total length of the accumulated songs in a playlist? It says "16 songs, 1.3 hours, 108.6 MB" but I just need to know how long the playlist is, to know if it will fit on an 80-minute disc or not.

Kate, if you're on a Mac, just move your mouse cursor over ther 1.3 hours and do an option+click. It will change 1.3 hours to 1:17 or whatever. (If you're on a PC, maybe it's ALT+click?)

Jon, this is why I ended up consolidating my library. It was easier to let iTunes search my hard drive and copy everything to the iTunes folder rather than manually remind it where every MP3 was.

Kristen--perfect! Thanks. I just had to click.

Basically, you have to save your DVD as a disk image, go in and fiddle with some binary files in the disk image, and then burn it.

Huh. I think if Rob's solution doesn't work, I'll end up just watching them on the computer. The monitor's almost as big as the TV anyway.

Okay, HELP!

In the ongoing saga of my computer problems, the reinstall of XP on my box has not solved my repeated hard drive data corruption problems.

I reinstalled, grabbed all the new patches, downloaded and installed anti-virus, updated and ran it, ran multiple malicious software removal tools, and double checked that all my ports useless services are turned off, and I'm still having frequent problems on boot up requiring extensive use of the repair console, and repeated runnings of CHKDSK.

All of my anti-virus and removal tools swear I'm clean. What's going on? Do I have to do a hard reformat and reinstall? Will that fix the problem?

Also, CHKDSK keeps telling me that my main hard drive appears to have one or more unrecoverable problems.

Sean, that sounds exactly like what happened to my old machine before I had to wipe it and install a fresh version of XP, right down to CHKDSK giving out bizarre unsolvable error messages.

But in good news, burning from the finder TOTALLY preserved the aspect ratio! Woot! (And the bonus I hadn't thought of is because I'm no longer re-encoding everything to MPEG-2, I can fit many more shows on a single disc. The downside is I have no menu, so in the case of the 4 Rome eps I just burned, I have no way of knowing if they're in order or not before I watch them. Hopefully they were laid down alphabetically.)

Sean, it sounds like you may have a few bad blocks on that drive. If that is the case then a reformat really is the best thing since it should lock out any bad blocks.