It's designed to provide travelers and home theater enthusiasts with quick, easy access to personal DVD movie collections for playback on laptops, desktop computers and home entertainment systems. Of course, you could do this before with software such as Handbrake, but Drive-in "legitimizes" and simplifies the process.

Drive-in provides pretty much all the benefits of DVDs. Each DVD image preserves the quality, navigation and special features of the original DVD and can be played directly from your computer -- without the physical disc -- using Apple’s DVD Player or Front Row.

How does it do this? Under license by the DVD CCA and DVD FLLC, Drive-in preserves the DVD’s original content protection by using a unique serial number and DVD password (which comprise your license) that locks the image. Drive-in allows you to play your DVD images using Drive-in on other computers with your license, but doesn't allow you to share your DVD images with others who don't have your license.

What's more, to simplify the way you search and access your DVD images, Drive-in collects info including the DVD cover art, names of actors and actresses, and the movie description when you create the image of the DVD. Drive-in stores the content of the DVD as a DVD image on your hard drive (in the DVD case package), so you can play the DVD anytime you want, without inserting the physical DVD.

If you're a home theater user and have the space (and you'll need lots of space) you can actually consolidate your movie library onto a single location. For travelers, Drive-in is a great tool as it saves battery life by removing the need to search and spin an optical disc. This extends the power and enables viewing of several movies on a single laptop battery.

You may have DVD sets, with two or more DVDs in a case. Drive-in supports imaging multiple DVDs in the same case. It's easy to set up and use. For most movies (about 120 minutes long), the process usually takes about 20 to 30 minutes. Of course, the actual time it takes to complete varies, based on your computer, the length of the movie, and encoding techniques on the DVD itself.

During the archiving process, a progress bar displays to the right of the virtual DVD drive. The display also provides status and information about how much data has been imaged, and about how long it will take to finish. If you want to stop the DVD imaging process, click the gray X icon at the right edge and click OK to confirm. When the process of creating a DVD image is complete, you can remove the DVD and put it away.

If you plan to image several DVDs in succession, it may be convenient to configure Drive-in to automatically eject the DVD when imaging is complete. While you're creating a DVD image, you can continue to use Drive-in for other tasks. (However, Drive-in may not respond instantly when it is creating a DVD image, because the computer is using most of its resources to image the DVD file). You can store one or more DVD images in a DVD case; you can delete DVD images from a DVD case you’ve created, without deleting the case itself.

If you plan on making lots of DVD image files, you'll need lots of space. For example, my image file of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang takes up 5.6GB of hard disk space, and my image file of Walking Tall (the original, not the horrid Rock remake) takes up 7.6GB.

Also note (and this isn't a complaint about Drive-in, just the way it is) Drive-in image files aren't playable on anything that is not designed to play a DVD, such as an iPod or Apple TV. However, once a Drive-in image is mounted on the desktop, any application that can read a DVD can use the image. For example, software designed to play DVDs such as Apple DVD player or Front-Row.

If you're a movie buff, and have the need or desire to put films on your Mac, then, like me, you'll add Drive-in to your list of "gotta have" software.

Drive-in is available in two versions; a single-seat and a multi-seat that enables users to image and playback DVDs on up to five computers in a household. The single-seat version is priced at US$39, while the multi-seat version is $59. Drive-in is available for download and immediate online purchase.

Macsimum rating: 10 out of 10

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