DVD to Mobile: Rip, Fix and Churn

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Recently I've wanted some decent video to play while I've been showing off my smart phone and all the cool things it can do with it. I lost my Simpsons video I had on it forever, so I figured I'd go out and look for a BitTorrent of some Movies or TV shows and convert it. I couldn't really find anything small enough - many of the .torrents are like 2GBs with entire seasons, instead of just one show.

So I finally thought - I'll just rip my Star Wars DVD I just got. Well, it looks like Lucas has made some extra special efforts to prevent ripping because all I got for an hour of effort was garbage. So I gave up and grabbed one of Alex's favorite DVDs - Finding Nemo. I followed the instructions here at PocketMovies.net and Nemo seemed to be able to be DeCSSed easily enough.

So then I converted the video to AVI, but because the sample rate for the audio is too high, you have to fix it first. So that took an hour or so to churn through that. Then I was ready to convert the semi-AVI (look at the site to see what I'm talking about) to MPEG video. That's still chugging in the background as I write this, though it seems to working okay. It'll be interesting to see how good it looks on my mobile when it's done in a *few hours*. If it looks like crap, I'll have to tweak the MPEG encoding settings and try again. Which will take another few hours.

The moral of this story? I'd gladly pay another $12.99 to save myself all this time and effort. Hollywood, are you listening?

-Russ

Later... The Nemo Vid came out great. But I was being very geeky about this whole process - I'm following essoteric instructions and looking up codecs like XviD, etc. I didn't bother to Google the words "DVD Ripper". I just tested DVDtoX.com's ripper and it works perfectly on the Star Wars DVD that was giving me a hassle before and though it still takes a lot of time (hours and hours) the whole process in general is much smoother. -R

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