I keep getting junk mail that claims to sell software that will let you burn DVDs, VHS cassettes and 8mm tapes to CDs. Although I never actually opened any of the e-mails (I hate SPAM), the thought of putting a DVD onto a CD seems pretty ridiculous.
Does anyone know the story behind these e-mails? Are they just the latest attempt at SPAM or is there actually such technology out there?
VHS is no problem, just hook it up to a TV card and use any commercially available video editing software (Windows XP comes with Movie Maker built in). Several USB decoders are available for 8mm/hi8, as my friend's a film maker and has one.
DVD is more complicated, basically involves ripping the .vob and .ifo files to your hard drive, then encoding them (FlaskMpeg is a popular one) into the DivX4 codec. Sometimes you have to play about with the audio stream (having never done it I'm not an expert). The codec can reduce a movie to around 650MB with not too much loss of quality. A quick search on google will give you links to all these, the spam you get is just trying to sell you what is already available for free (check here for tips)
The same friend of mine puts DVDs he owns onto his hard drive, encoded to around 350MB each. Laziness on his part as the quality is much much lower, but has plenty of hard drive space and makes it much easier for him. Pretty sure it's illegal though, but it's only for his personal use!
He's saying she's receiving email (spam) saying that there's software that will do teh ripping/encoding for all of the above formats... In theory not a big problem I suppose.
I have done it... it was pretty good sound quality from DVD remained fairly good, although the picture is a little shoddy.
The only thing is that if you want to do it properly, you need to do it in *real* time, which means playing an hour and 3 quarter movie (or longer) and encode at the same time. Encoding is about 10 minutes per minute of video. That means one film takes about 17 hours, and you can't do anything else with your comp whilst its going!
What software did you use? I have tried this this weekend, and whilst ripping it is fine, Flask encoder just hangs and doesn't do anything. I'm running Windows XP.
Sorry dominique, I don't mean to hijack your thread!
What software did you use? I have tried this this weekend, and whilst ripping it is fine, Flask encoder just hangs and doesn't do anything. I'm running Windows XP.
It was a while ago that I did it but I think it was dvd2mpeg that I used (put it this way it was the one that wasn't flask). It was different because rather thank ripping the .vob files to my HD it actually plays the DVD whilst encoding it. It creates a file which is about 1.0gb which you then need an MPEG splitter to get on to two CDs.
At the time I was running Win98 and it did it happily enough. Haven't tried it ever since I moved to Win2K (and actually bought a standalone DVD player [not just the one in my comp]).
When I was doing it, there was LOADS of info on the net about it... I guess it must be kicking around out there somewhere. I think I still have backups of some of the programs if you have any problems finding them.
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