Tunebite Help – DRM Removal Software Tidbits

If you are reading this page, you more than likely have purchased a copy of Tunebite and you’re running into a few issues or questions that you can’t seem to find the answers to. Hopefully I can answer some of the questions you have because I had to learn the hard way.

I recently bought the Radiohead “From the Basement” video album. It is 10 videos of Radiohead performing songs from their recent release, “In Rainbows”. If you are a Radiohead fan, do yourself a favor and look into the music and their videos. Anyhow, back to the point of this post, Tunebite.

The reason I bought Tunebite is because I wanted to take these iTunes videos, remove the DRM (Digital Rights Management) protection, then burn the videos to a playable DVD for use in my DVD player hooked up to my TV. iTunes likes to throw this DRM protection on all music and video files you buy from them to thwart any type of theft. Lucky for us, Tunebite is the program we need to make the media we buy a bit more user friendly .

Now you have a copy of Tunebite and you are ready to rip the DRM off. There are a few things I came across that I was unable to find any type of support on, so I figured I’d post my ‘trial by fire’ experience and hopefully it will help a few people.

• If burning videos, Tunebite will play the video inside the iTunes video player. In my situation, it placed the video in the top left hand corner of my screen and began recording. What I did not know was if you move anything over the top of the video which is being burned, whatever appears on top of the video will also appear in the ripped copy that you are creating. See, it basically records a specific region of your video display so if you put an open window or your mouse cursor in the region where it is recording, that will become part of your recording. My suggestion would be to start the ripping and leave your computer alone. Once it’s done, do what you need to do, but during the recording, go in the other room and leave your computer alone.
• Another thing that took me 2 days of back to back to back to back attempts of recording was the syncing of audio to video during recording. No matter what combination of settings I tried in Tunebite, the audio and video were not syncronizing properly. Usually the voice was a split second behind the video and it made me think the ripped copy was going to be way off.

  Quite the contrary. I finally decided to let the recording finish to see what it looked like once it was completed. Much to my surprise, even though while recording the video / audio was way off, the final ripped copy was spot on. It was at that time that I realized I don’t need to pay attention to what I’m seeing and hearing, I just need to let it finish and see how the ripped copy turns out. Probably the best bet is to start the ripping/recording, turn the volume all the way down or mute it and then walk away until it is finished. Once finished, check the file to make sure it is exactly what you needed.

• What audio and video setting should I use? There are so many different options on each audio and video, I have no idea which one to pick. Look at it this way, the higher selection you pick of each option, the better the quality should be.

  Now I must let you know the higher quality doesn’t really mean a hill of beans. If your computer is remotely slow, then the high quality isn’t really all that effective so consider doing the bare minimum. It speeds the process up and produces a web friendly file but still enough quality to play on a DVD or CD.

  In my situation, I used the audio setting of MP3 (128 kbps) and the video setting of MPEG4 (VBR Q98). The video and audio quality was perfect to play on my DVD player and stretch out to the size of my tv without distorting the picture or audio.

These 3 things were pretty important while I was trying to learn the software. I visited their support section but was unable to locate the answers I needed. Hopefully this post will help at least a few people to make it worth the time spent to type it all out.

If you have other questions or just want to let us know it helped, let me know below.