Bud the Teacher

    I’ve been meaning to mention that I had an opportunity to speak with Harris at VisualThesaurus about my classroom practice for a feature interview at his place.  Might be interesting to some of you.
    Then again, might not, but I enjoyed the conversation.  Thanks, Harris.

    My thanks to those of you who offered help and assistance, both in public and in private, to my "friend" yesterday.  After lots of right moves down wrong roads, I thought I’d, as Stephen asked me to, share how I got from the DVD to a file that we could use in Windows Movie Maker. 
    Via the comments, I discovered Handbrake, a cool piece of software that did the ripping/encoding work that I needed.  Using Handbrake’s Windows version (which is pretty new, I guess), I was able to get the video and audio off of the DVD and into .mp4 format.  But Windows Movie Maker couldn’t work with that, so I needed to do another conversion.  I immediately thought of Zamzar, but my file was too big (Zamzar has a maximum upload size of 100 MB per file).  So I searched for, found, and installed several promising little programs.
    Since not a single one of them worked properly, or would allow me to do a full conversion without paying a fee, I’m not going to tell you which ones I found.  What I will tell you is that I eventually realized that I could use Handbrake to encode the files into smaller chunks (basically, going chapter by chapter from the DVD), which I could then upload to Zamzar and transfer to .avi. 
    Within twenty minutes of uploading an awful lot of video, I was able to download the converted files, which I then burned to a CD for my student. 
    Whew.   I rather hate video.  But, as more and more folks get into using video online on a regular basis, I have a hunch that there’ll be more universal tools out there so, hopefully, I won’t ever have a funky video experience like this again.
    (Hurry up, video software folks.)