DVD Catalyst 3.80 or higher.

New in DVD Catalyst 3.80 is to be able to save and load a “state”

Save State basically saves the current “state” of DVD Catalyst 3, specifically the selection queue and the device queue, enabling you to load this particular state at a later time.

It works similar as a “Save game” option in a video game, where your current score, amount of lives etc are stored for later access.

The best way to explain it’s use is by examples:

In our case, as the developers of DVD Catalyst 3, we use this feature in the following way: We almost always have some conversions going. As mentioned in various locations on this website, we actually use our own software, and we use it a lot.

Whenever someone contacts us with a question, we usually have to try a few things ourselves, so we have to abort the conversions we are doing at the time, try a few things asked from us, and when we have the answer, we have to restart our own conversion. Without save/load state, we have to figure out where we left off at, select the content we still need to convert, and start the conversion again. With the new save state/load state, we basically just save the state of DVD Catalyst, stop the conversion, perform the things needed to answer the question, and then start DVD Catalyst again, load the saved state and click Go. It makes things so much easier for us this way.

From a user perspective, it could be used in the following manner. Say you are converting a lot of video files, tv recordings for example. You still have quite a few episodes to go, but your Netflix shipment has come in, and you want to put that new movie you wanted to see on your Blackberry Bold. Rather than waiting for the conversions to finish, you want to convert the DVD first. Use Save State to store the current DVD Catalyst queue,and then just stop the conversion, restart DVD Catalyst, and convert your DVD. Once complete, click Load State, and DVD Catalyst is ready to continue with the files it did not convert yet.

TIP1: Items that are located in the queue will not be scanned again, however, when you start DVD Catalyst with a DVD in the drive, it will scan the DVD before you have a chance to load the state back. Before you start DVD Catalyst, make sure the DVD you were converting when you used Save State is ejected, that way, DVD Catalyst allows you to load the state first. Then insert the DVD, and it will not have to scan the DVD again.

TIP2: With Load / Save State, DVD Catalyst does not perform a check to see if the files/DVD is actually there before it starts the conversion. If your files are located on an external drive, make sure the drive is actually connected before you start the conversion.