Bah. I deleted my post from yesterday in regards to Handbrake. The long and short of it is that Handbrake is an extremely useful tool if you're planning on ripping/backing up your DVD collection. I was successfully able to rip one of my DVDs, but then deleted the rip once I tested it was successful. The LAST thing I need is someone from the MPAA or whatever knocking down my door for backing up my own DVD collection. Yes, it's still a "legal gray area," but I'm not taking chances here.

Any who, I mentioned that the handbrake package is extremely outdated in the official Arch repos. If you don't believe me, check it for yourself. According to the Handbrake guys in IRC, 0.9.1 is more than a year old. In fact, they've made some major improvements since then, including a fully functional gtk gui (not a frontend to their CLI tool) and presets (also very useful). I emailed James Rayner about the outdated package, so hopefully we'll see an update in due time.

Also, I just read an article about ext4. If the diagram pictured is factual, then WOW. Ext4 more than doubles ext3's write times in the benchmark pictured. Be warned, though: some of the commenters seem a bit skeptical as to the legitimacy of the test, commenting on the fact that they were performed on Solid-State drives. However if all tests were run on the same drive, then what's the big deal? I guess it's one of those things that you'll have to time for yourself. Literally. With like, a stopwatch and stuff.