So I am about to return my Mac for a PC. . .am I making a mistake?

[mcatt66]

If you're sitting down at a Mac and expecting to use it like a Windows computer, you're going to be really disappointed. Profoundly disappointed. When I've been asked "How do I...?" by new Mac users, I usually say, "You're thinking too much" and that's usually a good solution. Then again, that particular advice might not apply some users.

Like some other posters, my already limited reserve of sympathy drops a few notches when you're running a crappy P2P client like LimeWire and looking for warez, porn and burnable copies of DVD movies. I think it takes some level of savvy to do those things safely and properly, and the number of things that could be wrong are almost infinite. Are you downloading Mac apps, or just anything that strikes your fancy? How are you burning the movies? Do you have the right ports open on your firewall in order to connect to other LimeWire users?

As far as returning the iMac, you should ask yourself: If you were relatively happy and comfortable doing all these things on a Windows computer, why did you ever switch?

a movie is a movie right. . .not sure why it would burn and work with PC and not on mac. . .as far as programs I was actually trying to get mac programs. . .toast parellel ect. . .the reason i switched honestly was looks. . i was going to purchase a new PC and saw the mac got in a converstion with some people at the store and went with the mac. . .I just feel like 90% of the stuff out there is made for PC and in orde3r to get it to work for mac i have to jump through hoops. . .but time will tell ill give it another week or so. . .I really just want to burn movies

 

[clevin]

so if i am a program and movie stealer are u telling me Mac is not for me?

many p2p softwares work on mac, and mac is not a police. Some ppl here have strong law-binding spirit, which is good. But for your question, mac doesn't prevent you from doing those, and Steve Jobs didn't intend to stop you neither.

 

[Turkish]

a movie is a movie right. . .not sure why it would burn and work with PC and not on mac. . .as far as programs I was actually trying to get mac programs. . .toast parellel ect. . .the reason i switched honestly was looks. . i was going to purchase a new PC and saw the mac got in a converstion with some people at the store and went with the mac. . .I just feel like 90% of the stuff out there is made for PC and in orde3r to get it to work for mac i have to jump through hoops. . .but time will tell ill give it another week or so. . .I really just want to burn movies

Could you be more specific on what types of movies (file formats, please) you are trying to burn to what type of media and what program you are trying to use to do it with?

It's a new platform - there's a learning curve - but there are plenty of programs out there for the Mac that let you do what you seem to want to do.

You just don't seem willing to learn and look for them or learn how to use them.

Take it back already or suck it up and try and learn.

 

[clevin]

I really just want to burn movies

yes, softwares for mac isn't as abundant as on windows platform, but for your task, there ARE some freewares that can do the job. such as
simplyburns
burn
mac the ripper
dvd imager
DVD remaster
etc.

anyway, for mac OSX softwares, u can check www.versiontracker.com or www.macupdate.com or www.pure-mac.com there are many freewares that can meet your need.

 

[Max Payne]

a movie is a movie right. . .not sure why it would burn and work with PC and not on mac. . .as far as programs I was actually trying to get mac programs. . .toast parellel ect. . .the reason i switched honestly was looks. . i was going to purchase a new PC and saw the mac got in a converstion with some people at the store and went with the mac. . .I just feel like 90% of the stuff out there is made for PC and in orde3r to get it to work for mac i have to jump through hoops. . .but time will tell ill give it another week or so. . .I really just want to burn movies

Use iDVD... I tried it & worked. Gotta love Bleach

 

[jsw]

many p2p softwares work on mac, and mac is not a police. Some ppl here have strong law-binding spirit, which is good. But for your question, mac doesn't prevent you from doing those, and Steve Jobs didn't intend to stop you neither.

His comment seems to be that much of the stolen software he downloads turns out to be Windows exe files.

Imagine my concern.

 

[robbieduncan]

so if i am a program and movie stealer are u telling me Mac is not for me?

Normally I'd not bother but here's my answer: you can still break the law if you want. But you have to remember you are sitting at a Mac not a Windows computer. If you want to steal software you've got to steal Mac software. Windows software will not run in OSX. It's like if you've got a Ford that needs fixing and you steal Toyota parts. They'll not work.

 

[eji]

u drop 2 thjousand on a comoputer it should come with everything, but lets not get off track here. ..we can back and forth about downloading ethics in another thread. . .so if i am a program and movie stealer are u telling me Mac is not for me?

Well, a Mac does come better equipped than its Windows-based counterparts. With the 20" iMac, well, let's see... camera, SuperDrive, iLife, Front Row, OS X... yep, all there. What exactly are you referring to? Does Vista come with WindowsWire, the new user-friendly Microsoft P2P downloading and pr0n DVD-burning program?

The Mac might not be for you if you're not a fairly savvy program and movie stealer. You have to understand what you're doing, and arbitrary clicks won't always produce satisfactory results. Windows might be easier in that respect, because you can click like a monkey on anything and it'll happily open and install God-knows-what onto your system.

A movie is a movie, yes, but some of them were ripped with Windows-only software in a Windows-only format. VLC might play them, and it's only a (free) download away, but again, you do have to know what you're doing to get the right movie file in the first place for less hassles later on down the road.

I looked at my first Mac and my Linux PDA as a slight and welcome challenge. I wanted to learn new stuff, to become computer multilingual, in a way, and become familiar with ways of doing things outside of what I already was comfortable with. In time, I came to realize that each OS is best used with a certain mindset, or according to a certain philosophy, and OS X best matched my own. Much as I rave about my Mac, you might be finding that Windows is more up your alley. It's not necessarily a bad thing.

 

[SpookTheHamster]

lol, its easy for you to say so, for those who has more than 50 friends on MSN, ur way isn't gonna work.

Since when did aMSN not work?

 

[clevin]

Since when did aMSN not work?

?? since when aMSN can handle audio/video together?

 

[robbieduncan]

A movie is a movie, but not all CDs (or DVDs) are the same. OSX burns data discs in HFS+ format by default. Windows (and XBoxes) can't read this. They need Joliet. There are a number of third party apps to solve this or you can use the built in tools with a bit of command line goodness...

 

[dextertangocci]

Don't download off limewire, it gives you crappy search results and crappy quality files And it is illegal...

 

[MrSmith]

um, correct me if i'm wrong, but isn't that valid advice?

No. It was the only comment you made and it was clearly preaching. I just don't think preaching, whether right or wrong, belongs here. That's what we have parents for.

I think you'll find that posts advocating that people not illegally steal software are very well tolerated by the moderators here.

The OP asked a legitimate question and mentioned something that could be illegal (he didn't actually say he was downloading movies). The reply in question - clearly without any intention of helping - went straight on the attack. For what purpose? It's just a case of Class Prefect mentality that I'm sure most people don't want to see. Why not attack the OP for viewing porn? He might go blind/It degrades women, etc.

Posts advocating the opposite are not. When I said OS X met his needs, I didn't include the "need" to steal software and music.

Where did this come from? No one is protecting the right of anyone to indulge in illegal activities.

 

[mrgreen4242]

?? since when aMSN can handle audio/video together?

I never got the video chat thing. Text chatting I get. Audio chat I get. Audio chat with whiteboarding I get. Shared desktop conferencing w/ text and audio I get.

What's the added usefulness of video chat though? If I want to show you something I'll send you a picture. I don't even like talking on the phone, though, so I might just not be the right audience.

 

[mcatt66]

A friend had sent me a couple of comedy central stand up shows I wanted to burn on a disk. . I have ur standard dvd-r blank DVDs. . one of the movies was .avi and one was mpg. . .I used BURN to do it and it worked and burned good. . .then when i went to play it in my X box it said it did not recognize the disc,. . .Ive used these disc and these movies on my xbox before and it always reads and plays. . .is there another step or program i need to download?

 

[ezzie]

No. It was the only comment you made and it was clearly preaching. I just don't think preaching, whether right or wrong, belongs here. That's what we have parents for.

yo, no one's preaching. it was suggested that the OP might have better luck with purchased software...right?

also, look up a bit and you might notice that i actually asked him some questions which were never answered.

 

[robbieduncan]

A friend had sent me a couple of comedy central stand up shows I wanted to burn on a disk. . I have ur standard dvd-r blank DVDs. . one of the movies was .avi and one was mpg. . .I used BURN to do it and it worked and burned good. . .then when i went to play it in my X box it said it did not recognize the disc,. . .Ive used these disc and these movies on my xbox before and it always reads and plays. . .is there another step or program i need to download?

As I said a few posts up the burn will be in HFS+ format. You need to burn them in Joliet format. The file format of the moves does not matter. We are talking about the disk format. Toast (or maybe Disco) will work fine for this. It is possible to use the command line tools to burn Joliet without any other apps but it's a but time consuming...

 

[gnasher729]

i know its not right to steal programs, but its also not right for these billion dollar companies to charge extra on top of an overpriced machine to get things to work. . u drop 2 thjousand on a comoputer it should come with everything, but lets not get off track here. ..we can back and forth about downloading ethics in another thread. . .so if i am a program and movie stealer are u telling me Mac is not for me?

Well, Safari comes with a built-in spelling checker. For free. And did you use it? No, you didn't. Ungrateful git.

 

[mcatt66]

As I said a few posts up the burn will be in HFS+ format. You need to burn them in Joliet format. The file format of the moves does not matter. We are talking about the disk format. Toast (or maybe Disco) will work fine for this. It is possible to use the command line tools to burn Joliet without any other apps but it's a but time consuming...

hmm. . not really sure what HFS or Joliet means or if I can do them on the program "burn". . .maybe I should just buck up and buy toast. . .

 

[Eraserhead]

A friend had sent me a couple of comedy central stand up shows I wanted to burn on a disk. . I have ur standard dvd-r blank DVDs. . one of the movies was .avi and one was mpg. . .I used BURN to do it and it worked and burned good. . .then when i went to play it in my X box it said it did not recognize the disc,. . .Ive used these disc and these movies on my xbox before and it always reads and plays. . .is there another step or program i need to download?

On Windows don't you have to use Nero or Easy CD Creator to burn DVD's that play in the XBox, movies have to be converted to DVD format first so they will play on an XBox.

On the Mac it's exactly the same, except you buy Toast or something...

@RobbieDuncan, Mac data disks are cross platform, it's just avi's don't play in DVD players.

And on software companies making obscene profits from software, the only ones I can thing of are Microsoft, Adobe and the Anti-virus companies (and possibly Apple, though AFAIK their large profits come from hardware). Just because software doesn't cost anything to distribute doesn't give you a right to steal it. Many software developers are small and are selling their software to put food on the table, it doesn't give you a right to stop them doing that.

 

[robbieduncan]

@RobbieDuncan, Mac data disks are cross platform, it's just avi's don't play in DVD players.

Then my MBP must be strange. It definitely defaults to HFS+ when I burn from the Finder via a Burn Folder. I've burnt a disk this way and it refused to mount on any PC. Creating a CD Master disk image, populating that with the data then using the command line to turn that into a Hybrid Joliet/ISO9660 image and burning that resulting in disk that the PC could read.

 

[Eraserhead]

Then my MBP must be strange. It definitely defaults to HFS+ when I burn from the Finder via a Burn Folder. I've burnt a disk this way and it refused to mount on any PC. Creating a CD Master disk image, populating that with the data then using the command line to turn that into a Hybrid Joliet/ISO9660 image and burning that resulting in disk that the PC could read.

I've definitely made cross platform disks before, without Toast.

 

[robbieduncan]

Apple say you are correct. I'm only posting from personal experience!

 

[jsw]

The OP asked a legitimate question and mentioned something that could be illegal (he didn't actually say he was downloading movies).

I think that his follow-up:

i know its not right to steal programs, but its also not right for these billion dollar companies to charge extra on top of an overpriced machine to get things to work. . u drop 2 thjousand on a comoputer it should come with everything, but lets not get off track here. ..we can back and forth about downloading ethics in another thread. . .so if i am a program and movie stealer are u telling me Mac is not for me?​

makes it perfectly clear what his intent was.

People with legitimate Limewire download needs usually find that what they download works, or at least they say "I'm trying to download ____ and I'm having problems." People with general Limewire issues have historically always been thieves.

yo, no one's preaching. it was suggested that the OP might have better luck with purchased software...right?

It was a suggestion from me only because I can't actually arrest the guy. It's theft, period. I sincerely doubt that any of the pirated software is actually needed by the thieves, making the crime even less ethical. They steal it simply because they can.

 

[MrSmith]

yo, no one's preaching. it was suggested that the OP might have better luck with purchased software...right?

also, look up a bit and you might notice that i actually asked him some questions which were never answered.

Sorry, you did indeed offer good advice. My comment was meant to be directed at dukeman, not 'you'.