09-18-2006, 07:41 AM
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Thoughts Media Review Team
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 599
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Jason's DVD Ripfest
Not sure why I had to start a new thread about this ... the "Discuss this story" link just took me to the OT forum.
Anyway ... I'm off to China on business next week so I find myself in a similar situation to Jason and wanting to take a ton of films & TV shows with me. On my last trip abroad, I used Sky's "Sky by broadband" service to download half a dozen movies (for free) that would expire after 30 days. However, they have temporarily shut down the service until (apparently) MS solve the DRM removal problem ... I didn't think that applied to movies!
I've got a Samsung DVD recorder as part of my AV setup and I've been recording programmes off the Sky+ PVR onto DVD. Now the biggest problem here is that the DVD recorder doesn't mark the video stream as widescreen - just 4:3 PAL. VLAN (www.videolan.org) does a great job of playing back the DVD, so long as I remember to tick the box that says "interpret this as 16:9". My preference, though, is to try to rip the video off the DVD and onto my laptop's harddisc - less messing about with discs on planes, etc.
So far my experience has been mixed. VLAN can transcode to MP4, but the Samsung creates multiple VOB files and VLAN doesn't seem to be able to re-combine them on the fly to create a single MP4 output. I'm now experimenting with going from the VOBs to a TS file, and then to MP4. That seems to work OK in terms of transcoding but I'm struggling with getting the settings right for going from 4:3 to 16:9 without too much loss of quality.
The free tools do the job but surely I'm not the only one who wants to do geeky things like this and there is surely a market out there for some software to do everything automatically and with the minimum of fuss?
Enjoy the trip, Jason!
--Philip
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