Avi on Evan Hoffman

Ripping a DVD on Fedora Core 13

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 01:16:57 +0000

I thought this would be a pretty straightforward task. It was, though it took several minutes to track down the CSS library needed for decryption of the DVD. All I want to do is copy Talking Words Factory to my phone so my kid can watch it in the car if needed. It looked like Brasero was the tool for the job, but I got some error about needing a plugin for it to be able to decrypt it. I found libdvdcss here and after installing the RPM, everything worked. Now I just need to encode it with ffmpeg.

Ripping a DVD to iPhone or iPod-compatible m4v for free?

Tue, 04 May 2010 08:43:48 +0000

I was stuck somewhere the other day wishing I had the full movie “Cars” on my iPhone. Surprisingly, this is not something you can presently do through iTunes. After some searching I figured out an easy way to do it for free. The two programs you’ll need are good old DVD Decrypter and WinFF. Put DVD Decryptor in IFO mode and set it not to split the .vob files by size (so it rips them to one huge 6+ GB .vob file). Then drag the .vob file onto WinFF (making sure to use the proper preset for iPhone/iPod) and click “Convert.” It’ll take a while but it works. With my first attempt there seem to be some audio/video sync issues but I’ll play around with it.

One-click converting .avi to .mp4 for iPod or iPhone

Wed, 27 May 2009 22:06:42 +0000

I found a way to convert my camera’s .avi files to iPod and iPhone-compatible .mp4 files with minimal effort. The .mp4 files are also significantly smaller.