One of the first things that impressed me about Mac OS X when I first saw it was its screensaver. Instead of just showing a simple slideshow of your pictures, it actually used a ‘Ken Burns’ panning and zooming effect with a fancy fading transition to make the otherwise static pictures really come to life. It always sounded like a fun project to create a standalone tool to create slideshow movies that used this effect, with full control over where and how much pictures should be zoomed.

I own a couple of multi-channel Surround Sound music albums on DVD, Blu-Ray, and SACD discs. I wanted to extract them all to a hard drive to avoid the nuisance of putting discs in slow (and often stammering) CD/DVD/Blu-Ray players with unfriendly navigation menus, and wanted to have a backup of the audio in case the discs go bad. Each of the different formats requires different tools to convert them to a playable format, so it took me some time to figure out how to convert each one of them.