This one guy who makes Wingspan’s iLoad hasn’t been very kind to the online community. His rants against people who consider the product derivative and silly are legendary and I’ve personally been flamed twice by this guy. I let Ken Sander review the iLoad because I wanted nothing to do with it. I think he did a good, fair job. It’s basically a small-form-factor PC with USB in that rips optical disks and uses the iPod as a disk drive, dropping in media by directly reading and writing to the iPod’s hidden directories. Fair enough, right? Well, now it rips DVDs.
That said, the bugger can now rip DVDs using a mysterious “solution.” The resolution is 320×240, acceptable on the iPod’s screen, and it doesn’t work with the iPhone. Should you care? Not particularly. There are plenty of free ripping products out there and, as iLounge points out after their own “war” with the iLoad’s inventor, for the price of the iLoad you can get a fully-featured laptop or desktop. Five minutes of market testing would have told anyone this.
Again, if you and Martha are having people over and you need to rip some arias onto the iPod for connecting to the in-wall Bose sound system, I’m sure the iLoad is for you. Otherwise, download iTunes like the rest of the free, industrialized world.
iLoad now rips DVDs direct to iPod. iPhone incompatible. [Crave]