(no subject)

I think I'm just too fucking stupid to do this. *sigh*

I can make lovely, compressed .avi video files that really (本当に) play in WMP. They look great but they don't have subtitles (where did the subtitles go?). If I wanted to, I could certainly pair them up with some of that music the kids these days listen to. Limp something or other. I could make angsty videos about my highly-original pain which is, of course, unique to me and unlike anything the world has ever seen before. Ever. I mean it. *sob* NOBODY UNDERSTANDS ME!!!

*ahem* Damn, I'm glad I am not a teenager anymore. Once was enough.

Moving onward. I can make lovely .mp3 or .wav files that play in audio clients, which is nice to know for a couple of weeks ago's project. Yes, I can get audio out of a dvd. That's pretty darned cool, and they sound great to boot. So, you know, I've filed that under useful things I have learned, and all ain't for naught.

However, I am apparently too stupid to get the sound to synch with the video for love or money. This is too much work for what I want to do and I think something *else* was the problem initially. This is too many steps and too many softwares for what I want to do. Someone has built a better tool than these or I am not understanding how to use the tools at my disposal..

Hrm. I did upgrade the available codices in my wanderings. It's possible that there are now more, better choices available to me with DVDx (which is the only thing I've seen so far that admits there ARE subtitles and offers me the option of capturing the damned things). Once more into the breach...
*sigh*

Have I mentioned I need a bigger hard drive? I do.

(no subject)

It was a codec problem. I'm a dork.

With three programs and a codec, none of which costs money (I believe I've mentioned the appeal of "free" at least once already), it is possible to change DVDs into reasonable-sized .avi files.

1. DVD Decrypter (free) takes stuff off DVD and stuffs it on hard drive. Requires enormous amounts of hard drive (8 gig) and a goodly chunk of time (two or three hours). on my machine, which is a laptop not designed for this crap.

It is maybe possible to skip step 1 and run DVDx right from the DVD drive, but I didn't think of that until I was about halfway through step 1. Also, my machine doesn't do this sort of thing particularly happily, so smaller steps are easier for it.

2. DVDx (free) and an XviD codec (free) will slurp the huge files from step 1 and put them out in a monolithic .avi file. This takes a goodly chunk of time (six hours?) and somewhat less hard drive than step 1. The monolithic file I got was 963 MB for the first DVD of Weiss Kreuz, which contains episodes 1-5 at 640x480. (It's gorgeous. It has subtitles. It is just right, except for being about a gig. I want it in smaller pieces, but everything else is wonderful.)

Since Weiss is pretty low-budget stuff (most other anime contains more animation), I wouldn't bet on this as being some kind of standard. Just get another hard drive. You know you want to, anyway.

3. Like me, the folks playing along at home (not that there are any) probably want to split the giggish .avi file into reasonable, episode-sized hunks. My various wanderings in search of clue have convinced me that VirtualDub 1.5.10 (free) will do this if I read enough of the documentation to figure out how to make it work. Preliminary experiments show that it does, indeed, load up the entire file and proceed to let me do stuff to it without crashing. It's really quite amenable and I'm sure I'll like working with it once I... er... yes, yes, make with the reading of documentation instead of clicking on things to see what they do. (Don't worry. I made a backup of my unmodified .avi file so that once I screw up one, I have a backup. I am not going to play fast and loose with something that took six hours to get.)

Also, for everyone out there in tech support hell: I am living proof that some people in this world actually go out onto the internet with an I want to know how to... question and DO NOT immediately post a plea for handholding in some message board or other. Some of us actually give it the old college try, or several of the old college tries, before we beg shamelessly for help.