On Feb 5, 2025, at 3:03?AM, Otto Nikolaus via groups.io <otto.nikolaus@...> wrote:
I *think* an Apple Superdrive can read any DVD format so you should be able to rip it using Handbrake into any format that will play on your TV. I assume the TV can play files over your network, or from USB?
MacTracker says that Apple didn’t discontinue the USB DVD SuperDrive until August of 2024 and that it could read AND WRITE multiple formats. The USB connection was USB 2.0 with a USB-A connector.
A quick search in my office doesn’t discover mine, but I do have another place to look in my garage. I can’t figure out when I bought it, but it was probably before the 2017 Tubbs Fire in Sonoma County destroyed pretty much everything I owned, and my records SINCE then are fairly good, so I suspect I don’t have it any more.
Isn’t NTSC the USA standard anyway?
I’m pretty ignorant on this, but I DO know that the FCC mandated a change in the way TV stations broadcast over-the-air from analog to digital some time in the past 5 years or so, and the antennas that receive signals from TV broadcast over-the-air are now flat plates less than 1” thick and about 12 inches on a side rather than enormous eyesores that sit on your roof.
I DO have a 4K-capable LG DVD player attached to my 4K OLED TV, so I should be able to play the video on my TV, and that will be good enough and durable enough for me.
I think I’ll check out BestBuy and OWC, however, because those drives were pretty cheap and I likely would want to play some of my own DVDs on a Mac at some point, and since they were JUST discontinued (they’re still listed as “supported” on MacTracker) it would be useful to have one.
Thanks to everybody who addressed my core questions.
My “extra credit,” “no Googling allowed” question elicited only one comment (off list) and even with an additional clue (“perhaps the wealthiest Walter Mitty who ever lived”) he didn’t take a stab at the riddle. It’s a fascinating story, so I’ll tell it here and permit Googling just BECAUSE the minutia of the story are so amazing. (begging indulgence from the ListMoms).
Gilbert Kaplan was a NYC investment banker who made his millions publishing an investment newsletter. At some time in his extraordinarily successful career, one of his associates suggested that the two of them do a brown bag lunch at an open rehearsal of a prominent NYC classical orchestra, which happened to be prepping for a performance of the Mahler 2nd symphony, at that time not SO renowned as it is now as sitting at the very PINNACLE of gargantuan classical compositions. Kaplan enjoyed listening to classical music, but he was by no means a musician. At lunch, he was transfixed, WAY beyond losing interest in his sandwich. He COULD read music, and he became obsessed with the Mahler 2. With his unlimited resources, that eventually extended to acquiring Mahler’s original HAND WRITTEN score.
I’m vague on some of the details, such as the timeline, but at some point he contacted the managers of the orchestra and told them he was planning a private party for associates and clients, for which he wanted to rent the venue AND the orchestra for a private performance of the Mahler 2nd Symphony. This is a piece that most medium sized city orchestras could never DREAM of performing because it is SO expensive to perform, just on the basis of the salaries required to pay the performers. The orchestra manager at first said a polite “no,” but then Kaplan revealed the size of his wallet, and the manager changed his mind.
But, Kaplan was not done. “There’s one more thing,” he added. “I want to conduct.”
A sizable number of the musicians in the orchestra ABSOLUTELY refused to perform under Kaplan’s baton, because by then some word had leaked out, and Kaplan had admitted to some that the Mahler 2nd Symphony was the ONLY piece he “knew” how to conduct, even if the other choice was a simple nursery rhyme. (Just in case someone doesn’t grasp this, that’s equivalent to saying you can drive an F! racecar at Lewis Hamilton’s pace on a famous British racetrack, but you don’t know how to pedal a tricycle to your next door neighbor’s house). Needless to say, it happened.
Eventually, that led to commercially published recorded performances with famous orchestras on famous record labels (for example, Deutsche Grammophon with the London Symphony, and others).
My apex experience with the piece is far more humble, but just as important to me. When I lived in the SF Bay area, the conductor of the world class San Francisco Symphony was Michael Tilson Thomas (at one time a protege of Leonard Bernstein, and, like Bernstein, widely regarded as one of the world’s premier interpreters of Mahler’s entire musical library.? Once I fell in love with the Mahler 2, I NEVER missed a performance of the Mahler 2 conducted by him if it was possible to get there. The one I’ll remember best was when my son was 7 years old. His mom had refused to come with me (round trip from San Jose being 100 miles), so I took my son. The piece lasts 90 minutes, with no intermissions. just beyond the halfway point, my son tugged at my sleeve and whispered “Dad, how much longer?” Crestfallen and expecting him to add “I have to pee,” or “this is boring” I whispered back “why, Josh? Do we have to leave?” “NO,” he responded, “I don’t want it to end!”
30 years later, I still don’t know whether that was really sincere or whether, even at age 7, he already knew how to “play” his dad.
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?I used to compare notes on MTT with an accomplished symphony player and frequent poster to this list, now sadly gone from us (Jackie Kovach—she often posted as “iMom”). To her, Tilson Thomas was “like Bernstein, but WAY over the top."
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Jim Robertson
Paul