Media Intoxication

[snousle]

Would you believe that just the other day I ripped a CD for the first time? I was pretty impressed - you can set up Windows Media Player to rip disk after disk, just pop it in and it spits it back out in five minutes. With album and track info automagically downloaded. Of course, when you have an import disc with, like, thirty tracks, each one of them by a different composer and artist with foreign names containing lots of annoying diacriticals, it decides to leave you on your own. Still...

I know this is old hat for most of you but being an old-fashioned kind of guy I found it pretty amazing. ;-) I've gone a little nuts ripping our collection.

I'm also very surprised to discover that it is possible to rip DVDs as well. I thought there was some sort of encryption involved. I knew one could get hacker tools to decode them, but this is with regular commercial software (Cyberlink PowerDirector, specifically), and given recent lawsuits and such I thought that was considered illegal.

Also watched a Blu-Ray disc for the first time as well. I browsed the Netflix list of blu-ray movies and most of them were the usual stupid crap - but There Will Be Blood stuck out as an excellent candidate for hi-def pleasure. They should have called it StubbleVision - I swear, you can see every bristle! [Swoon] Great film, absolutely riveting. Sort of like Scent of Green Papaya done as a Western.

All this media exposure has made me feel a little bit dizzy. I'm not quite used to it.

Comments

[furr-a-bruin.livejournal.com]

That's a two part question.

One, is the ripping. I personally am partial to DVDdecrypter, but there are other tools for the job. One of the nice things about it is that it can remove the "Prohibited User Operations" - you know, like not being able to skip past the FBI warning, or the studio logo, or whatever they thought you just HAD to see before getting to the actual content.

Then, because many such discs are dual layer - that is, the data is (probably intentionally) larger than a typical single-layer DVD-R, the content has to be shrunk. My favorite tool for this is DVD-Shrink - and again, there are others. Generally, they allow you to excise material you have no interest in - say, audio tracks for languages you don't speak, extras you've found banal, whatever. Then if there's still too much, someone discovered a clever, fast way to recompress the MPEG-2 video that results in excellent picture quality, and a number of programs have implemented this. (MPEG encoding math is over my head, frankly. I'm sure the details are out there somewhere if you want them.)

If it's television or other such material that lends itself to this approach, you might want to consider splitting the material between two discs rather than recompressing; many of these tools will help you do that.

Once all this is done - you can burn your copy. Sure, you could use dual-layer DVDs - but they're still a LOT more expensive than two single-layer discs.

Once again - www.VideoHelp.com is your friend in this area. ;)