AppBrain: Application Review

Here is one application which seriously eliminates the shortcomings of android market. I believe that at some stage either Google should fold in this functionality in their market or just acquire these guys. It really eliminates most of the hassles of the market today.
Every time you upgrade software on your phone, you end up having to reinstall all the apps on your phone because the phone does not remember what softwares were installed on it. This application provides that functionality.
Give the application a try, use the QR code attached with this post. One can use their web portal (http://www.appbrain.com) to search and install applications and these are automatically pushed to the mobile phone and installed. In summary, I have found this application to be of great use.

Ripping movies to watch on Milestone

Here are the instructions to watch movies by converting them from DVD to a format so that they are optimized for Motorola Milestone. These would also work well for a Droid phone.

• Install Handbrake Software, make sure to install the CLI
• Install VLC software, Handbrake will not be able to decrypt DVDs without this software and will give error.
• I use both of these on a Linux machine but both these software are also available for windows and one can easily figure out how to work these from respective websites. 
  

Once this setup is done, just insert the DVD and run following command line.

HandBrakeCLI -e x264  -q 20.0 -a 1 -E faac -B 128 -6 dpl2 -R 48 -D 0.0 -f mp4 -X 854 -Y 480 -m -x cabac=0:ref=2:me=umh:bframes=0:subme=6:8x8dct=0:trellis=0 -i -o MovieName.m4v --longest

If the DVD has multiple titles then above command will pull out the longest title. Otherwise one can use --title option for getting specific title. This command scales the movie to correct format for Milestone/Droid.