Well in backing up a DVD, I tried DVD “Decrypter”:http://www.mrbass.org/dvdrip/ but it failed with some structure errors and it is old having been updated March 2005, the other two rippers to try are “DVD43”:http://www.dvd43.com/ which runs in the background and “Smart Ripper”:http://www.afterdawn.com/software/video_software/dvd_rippers/smartripper.cfm which is now hard to find.

I’ve had this problem just about forever, many times I will get a can’t playback anything message and I have always thought it was something to do with the video codecs. I logged onto the Sony Vegas editing forums and found this issue from way back in 2003. It says that the problem isn’t with […]

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Well, I use TMPGEnc Creator to encode my MPEG2 streams. DVD-Labs really likes to have the audio and video streams split into M2V for the video and M2A for the audio (sometimes called MP2 if it is encoded in MPEG2 audio). But, iPod Videola really likes either the complex MPEG2 or VOB files, so I […]

OK, I need to get a bunch of my home movies from their DVD .VOB format back into a long .MPG file so that I can make H.264 files for iPod Video. As usual, there are a zillion formats and it is hard to figure out the easiest way to do it. Here is the […]

Well, I haven’t been super serious about this, but “Plastic Bugs”:http://plasticbugs.com/?p=305 has a good guide for Mac users. I use Videora to do the conversion. The worst part is figuring out how to transcode. The short story is that if you have home videos, the H.264 format is the best. It is very efficient. Just […]

There are lots of reviews on the web on DVD writers, but very little on the media itself. The right kind of media can make a big difference. I’ve used the Verbatim Data Life Plus line for CDs for a long time with great results, but with the plethora of DVDs out, what’s the right […]

If you buy a DVD camcorder, then you are going to need lots of: * Verbatim Mini DVD-R 1.4GB 4X DigitalMov (Verbatim-95089) – PriceGrabber.com. This is a 5 pack and Verbatim has been reliable for me in the past. They are about $13, so about $3.50 each from buy.com * “Sony 3 Pack DVD-RW”:http://www.pricegrabber.com/search_getprod.php/masterid=1597832/sort_type=bottomline. These […]

Mini DVD (DVD-R) Mini DVD (DVD-RW) Camcorder Video Media – PriceGrabber.com. If we are going to get a mini DVD Camcorder, you need special 8cm media to put in there. Here is Pricegrabbers list. The choices are essentially * DVD-R which is write once and stores 20 minutes worth of video. They are about $5 […]