video wrassling

Recently I’ve been playing with a bunch of video clips; rippng from DVDs, converting from one format to another, resizing - all the fun and games of a video production engineer (with none of the tools). In the process I found out some interesting things, which I thought I might share here.

Firstly, there are plenty of applications you can download and try out. Most specialise in one or two things (like converting windows media files to iPod ready movies). Typically they’re limited to 5 minute clips or a 30 day evaluation period, and cost around $US30 for a full working version.

They are also almost all using free and open source software (FOSS) like FFmpeg to do the real work. FFmpeg is a great cross-platform solution to record, convert and stream audio and video, but it’s not very user friendly, hence the cottage industry that’s grown up around building front end apps for it.

Digging deeper I came across Super C, which is also free and open source and puts a front end on FFmpeg plus a whole gaggle of other FOSS video utilities - making it a veritable video production swiss army knife.

Of course, all that power comes at a price (usability), but there are a couple of tutorials online; one on videodownloader.net and (my favourite)  the very young Chris the feral on YouTube. You can use Super C without understanding much of what Chris is talking about (just follow the bouncing cursor), but if you’re terminally curious the Wikipedia has a short article on codecs.

A couple of other links that might be helpful:

• VLC player - which will play just about any video or audio file you care to throw at it
•  DVD Decrypter - for converting regular DVDs into computer files
• A tutorial on using DVD Decrypter by Elliott Back
• Avidemux - for video editing (it will also covert video between various formats, and has a good wiki on how to use it)
• InfraRecorder - a free, open source CD/DVD burning solution for Microsoft Windows.

Happy video editing…