Looking for a DVD to MPEG (or AVI) converter

[LilKim]

In thread http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=105&topic_id=3395825
On Mon Jun-06-05 03:15 PM, sir_captain wrote Response to Reply #14:

15. No, no
you have to actually run the gordian knot program. It's a front end for all the other programs, and is designed to turn dvds into divx or xvid encoded avis.

Check out this guide here...it explains how to do it: http://www.doom9.org/index.html?/gknot-main3.htm

it's actually pretty easy

hope that helps

OK, I did it, though I wouldn't exactly call it easy, particularly if you've never done anything like this before and are completely unfamiliar with the dozens and dozens (and I do mean dozens and dozens) of options, settings, and switches to run through and check. Just reading through the doc and setting it all up took an hour or two.

The conversion itself? Oh, only about 18 hours. This is on an old 800 Mhz Pentium 3 with 320 meg of ram running Win 98SE. It would've been about 12 hours shorter had I not left a single three-tabbed Firefox window open where I'd been reading the setup doc. That alone chewed up enough memory and Windows resources (the entire task bar blanked out) to bring everything to a crawl. Once I came back to my computer and closed it things picked up quite a bit and I got my task bar back.

The end result? A 2 gig set of DVD files is now a single 650 meg AVI. The only problem now is the audio is way out of sync. The conversion process had created and used AC3 files for audio (I think I was kind of stuck with that choice) and supposedly these are problematic in this way. Any chance there's a simple fix for this, or will it mean starting all over again?

Thanks for all your help.

[Rick Myers]

1. Without knowing the details, I think you need to re render

There is a chance you could 'slide' the audio in an editing program, but I still doubt that would fix it.

[sir_captain]

2. Ok, if it's all out of sync the same degree

for the entire movie (ie, 1 second late) then it's easy to fix. Use virtualdub (or virtualdubmod) or whatever similar named program was included with the gordianknot package and follow this guide: http://www.doom9.org/virtualdub_procedures.htm

Specifically, the "delaying an audio track" and/or "manual synching" sections.

Sorry this has been a bit tough... PM me if you've got more questions.

[Awsi Dooger]

3. With a Mac I use ffmpegX for video conversion

I'm not sure if they have a version for Windows. I use it virtually every day with excellent results, modifying type and size. They have a very good user forum with the developers answering questions from users.

[merwin]

4. Try AutoGK

http://www.autogk.me.uk/

It's an all-in-one Gordian Knot package that automates everything. That's honestly the easiest way to do it and achieve good results. It ends up with DIVX or XVID video and MP3 or AC3 audio (whichever you want).

Just remember, install Microsoft Anti-Spyware (free) beforehand and have it running when you install AutoGK, as it tries to install a 'browser helper' (MS AntiSpyware will block it)

MS Anti-Spyware