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 (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.)
The Answer to my (Friend's) Dilemma
3 thoughts on “The Answer to my (Friend's) Dilemma”
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This is exactly why I steer teachers away from video and closer to podcasting these days. So much more flexible at the end.
Yeah, I don’t usually steer students to video. But they sometimes want to make movies — and I need to learn how, so this is how we learn. Personally, I prefer audio, not only because it’s much easier to edit and work with, but also because it’s more portable — both to create and to consume.
I have also been using handbrake (for Mac). Once I get the MP4 I have been using ffmpegx or VisualHub to convert the files to another format. At this point we are using moodle to house the students videos and we have been converting the kids work to .fla format to display on the web.
gary