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DVD and Video conversion for the iPod

Thursday, January 22nd, 2009

Updated Mar 19, 2009.

I’ve found a very good donateware program for converting video for the iPod. It’s called iPodMe, and it works very well. Select videos you want to convert, select a profile and screen size. Can add additional files to be converted while it is currently converting.

Well worth checking out

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I recommend DVDFab for ripping DVDs. Just download the installer, and when it starts, it will ask which version you want to run.

A 30 day trial to the full-blown version, which has built-in functionality for splitting and merging dvds in various ways. There is also an option that never expires that allows for copying of the dvd to your hard-drive. Either then entire DVD or just the main title.

Once it’s on your hard drive, you have to convert it.

If you have Nero, Nero Recode is very good for taking a dvd and converting it to iPod format. Also works for most data files.

I imagine Roxio has tools that are similar to this, but have no personal experience.

If you don’t have Nero, then Super is a very good free converter. It doesn’t handle dvd files ‘elegantly’, but works very well for everything else. The interface is a bit tough to work with initially, so expect a learning curve.

Super will convert DVD files, but a movie is broken into 1GB files on the DVD. So, you’ll end up with 4 or 5 files/movie, instead of one file.

I haven’t looked for other free options that will convert a DVD nicely, so don’t have any suggestions.

Also, if you do decide to purchase Nero, don’t buy it directly. Right now, the Nero site is showing $79.99 US for download, but you can buy it boxed at Future Shop/Best Buy for $69.99.

If you’re really comfortable with computers, then Super will work, and there are likely programs around that will convert a DVD nicely. If you’re willing to invest a little money to have an easier to use experience, I would suggest Nero or Roxio.

Also note that this conversion is very CPU intensive. If you have a relatively new dual-core computer, expect the conversion to take about 1/3 of the length of the movie. i.e. a 1 hour movie would take 20 minutes to convert. If you have a really fast machine, it will obviously be faster.

For television shows, I recommend uTorrent for downloading, and EZTV for finding show downloads. If you’re interested in this as well, I can provide more specific information.

Tags: ipod dvd conversion
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Movie Catalog Software

Wednesday, March 16th, 2005

Want to catalog your movies? Keep track of who has borrowed a movie, and check it back in when they return it? Output an HTML document listing your movies? Then here’s a freeware solution that I’ve been using for awhile now.

When you add a new movie, you can retrieve the information from IMDB using a built-in script. Then you can customize any information retrieved. Sorting, grouping, custom reports and scripts. Quite powerful.

antp.be > Software > Ant Movie Catalog

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Taking a movie for your CD equipped notebook

Tuesday, September 14th, 2004

I’m going to Florida in January with my daughter, and am trying to plan ahead so she doesn’t get bored. I don’t have a notebook with a DVD player in it, or a portable DVD player, so I thought about converting some of our DVDs to SVCD. This format can be burned to a CD, and played back on a computer with the right software (and a number of DVD players will play it too. Did some searching and found this very useful web page. Provides guides to convert movies into VCD, SVCD and DIVx format. Decided against DIVx as it requires a lot of computing power to play, which my notebook doesn’t have, and which also will kill the battery very fast.

DVD Ripping Guides by KalEl

Just worked my way through it and it went fine.

The SmartRipper installer dialog is in German, but the program dialogs are in English. Just change the directory to where you want SmartRipper put, and push the right most button to extract. It doesn’t have an installer per se, so whatever directory you put it in is where it will be run from.

SmartRipper took about 15 minutes to rip a 1:40 movie. Not bad time.

DVD2AVI again isn’t intuitive (Thank goodness for this guide), but it worked quickly. About 5 minutes to create its index. The one thing I forgot to do the first time was set Audio to Encode to Wav format.

For TMPEng, some of the interface has changed since the guide was written. No show stoppers, as the functions are the same, just some of the text has changed. I did run into a problem taking a widescreen movie and outputting it to SVCD. The result ended up being a full screen movie, and I couldn’t quite tell if it was stretched or cropped.

To overcome this, I modified the settings on the Advanced tab so that the Video Arrange Method was Center (Custom Size) and set the size to 480×320. This seemed to fix it up so the movie filled the output width and was the correct height (or at least close enough).

This portion takes a looong time to do, even on a quick machine! It took almost 5 hours (I took the 2-pass VBR option) for this movie.

For my purposes, I didn’t burn it to CD. I just copied it from the harddrive of my machine to the notebook (via my local LAN). Much easier to carry the notebook than to have 3 CDs per movie, and the notebook had enough space on the HD for this (although 30GB doesn’t go very far anymore)

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