Video equivalent of Audacity

[Light and Sound]

Audacity is fantastic for my main use, which is copying cassette tapes to CD and MP3.

I would like to do a similar thing with video; specifically, take a snippet of a DVD and convert it to mpeg or something similar.

Can anyone recommend anything? (Windows XP only.)

Thanks so much.

KR

[kozikowski]

A Ulead Video Studio program is packaged with everything you buy. If you buy a $3 video cable, there will be a copy of Video Studio at the bottom of the box. I bought a $19 PCI FireWire card for my PC this weekend and there was a Ulead CD in the bottom of the box.

However, that's not going to be your worst problem. What form are the videos in now and how are you planning on getting them into your computer? Video takes up a lot more room a lot faster than audio and the computer itself has to be faster. Video doesn't much like USB connections either for camera capture or external video hard drives. Capturing internet videos is quite an adventure on Windows machines.

This is where the Mac people take off down the road. Macs come with FireWire connections built in (plug your camcorder in and go) and iMovie is built into the iLife package for editing. Most Macs can burn DVDs with iDVD. Done.

Koz

[kozikowski]

Oh, and then there's the software to get around DVD Copy Protection and then the software to turn the embedded MPEG2 transport stream into actual video and audio.

But aside form that...

Koz

[Light and Sound]

Thanks Koz.

I have some DVDs, and I want to extract short snippets (10 sec to 3 minutes or so), and assemble the data into a "best of" compilation, or post said snippets to youtube.

Yes, I have heard of Macs video editing capabilities. Actually, I have heard lots of good about Macs in general. However, I really don't see one in my immediate future.

There must be something out there that will let me grab a segment of video and convert it, save it, burn it, etc.

KR

[kozikowski]

OK, so you don't have to worry about the Macrovision step, but where the sound on a music CD is a really close cousin to WAV file format and it's really easy to get back and forth, video on a DVD isn't anything like editable video and it has the sound multiplexed into the picture. MPEG2 (DVD, Broadcast TV, Satellite) only sends every sixteenth picture. The other fifteen are difference and compression frames and can't be cut.

The other thing that happens is when you get into editing, the show suddenly gets ten or more times larger. This is a nasty surprise to people hoping to cut a whole movie in their laptop.

Where are your original video masters? Ripping movie DVDs is only done as an absolute last resort because like MP3, there's intentional damage built in and it gets worse as you go.

Google is your friend.

Koz