Opening/Copying Locked DVDs

At work we sometimes receive DVDs that we need footage off of that are locked. They will play back fine in DVD Player but we don’t want it for playback. The resulting DVD images are always titled SONATA_VOLUME and are created by a stand alone Sony DVD Recorder.

In order to copy the VIDEO_TS file off of the DVD you require sudo access but given that sudo access is limited to administrators (and not the editors) - this gets to be a bit of hassle because I have to be called to copy the DVD which adds unnecessary overhead to just get some footage off a simple DVD.

The solution? Create a droplet application (in this case AppleScript with shell scripts) so the editors don’t have to disrupt their workflow to get me to unlock the footage they need.

The source follows:

Tab Count to Growl for Safari

The following AppleScript snippet figures out how many tabs are open in the frontmost window and spits it out to Growl. Helps when I don’t feel like counting how many tabs I’ve opened in WebKit/Safari. Note: To get this to work with Safari change WebKit to Safari.