Warning! The 75-year collection DVD of past MRR issues (1934 to 2009) is not MAC compatible with OSX Yosemite or El Capitan. Does anyone have a patch? Kalmbach recommends that users run a prior old operationg system. Really? They are a publishing company and this is 2016 - right? First of all, these should be streaming not DVD based anyway. How many people even still have a DVD on their computer? I just bought the DVD on DCC Programing and it works fine, but a single DVD is a different format than a collection of files from back issues.
Old news. I got less than three years use out of a product marketed as an “archive”. Kalmbach’s stance is that you should never upgrade your operating system, which is rediculous. Perhaps they should never upgrade their web site and see how that works out. I suggested that they grandfathered the DVD purchasers into their replacement “live” product, to no avail. As a result of their stance, I discontinued my subscription to Model Railroader.
Repeated ad infinitum now. The DVD uses an Adobe program that interacts with the OS in a way Apple decided to make not work in newer versions of OSX. It is not written by Kalmbach, and even the part that was written by the outside contractor is really just the search and ‘frame’ around it, the actual program that pages and displays them is a licensed Adobe embedded PDF reader. Neither Kalmbach nor their software developer has any control over that. You might ask why Apple made changes that disable a common standard application.
Second, if you had bothered to look around, you’d find that it IS streaming - the All Access Pass allows you to view all issues of MR, from 1934 right up to the most current issue. It doesn’t stop at 2009. This is the product you should be buying today, not the out of production and only available second hand 75 year DVD.
Indeed it is, ~7 years down the track since the DVD was issued, though it still works just fine on Windows 10.
It is your choice which Operating System you use but your need to understand that your OS choice has implications/consequences that you need to deal with yourself!
The DVD file system and application can be easily moved off the DVD and onto USB, SSD or NAS storage, so that is a quite trivial complaint.
If you are creating an “archive” you owe it to yourself as the creator/owner of said archive to keep the backend as simple as possible. Imagine if this DVD project had not been a commercial product, but an internal system to replace paper libraries, and the contractor had used software that was easily broken by changes in the Adobe API.
The files themselves are completely readable. They just happen to be secured with a password, which Kalmbach rightfully retains control of, otherwise you could just copy the files to everyone and just open them in ordinary Adobe Reader.
Each page of every issue is nothing more than a standard PDF file. The covers aren’t password protected - you can browse the disk and open them up outside of the software.
Pretty sure Kalmbach had the same issue, they are a Mac shop. Difference is, they own the magazines, so they have the scanned files they sent to this vendor, plus the ones they supplied for the All Access Pass website, so they have not lost access to any of their content.
We haven’t sold these DVDs for years, so I don’t know where you bought yours, but if you’re just now finding out about the Mac OS10 incompatibility, it likely wasn’t from us. When we found out about the issue, we’d already been sold out for a long time. We spread the word about it, here on the Forums and elsewhere, so nobody contemplating buying one second-hand would be caught unaware. But since it was an already deprecated product, one that we weren’t planning on re-issuing, the high price the software company would have charged us for an upgrade was impractical. It wouldn’t have been a matter of a patch – the vendor told us a whole new interface would be needed. Which didn’t make us happy, either; we’d much rather have the good word of mouth that a fix would have brought us. But that was not financially practical.
That’s the last word, so this thread will now be locked.