Da Vinci Planet » video

Copy DVD To iPod Using Freeware

Da Vinci — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 02:18:56 +0000

You finally caved and got the first season of 24 or Lost on DVD. Now youâ€™re hooked and you would use every opportunity to watch it. Then you realize: â€œHey, my iPod! Itâ€™s perfect for traveling and for the gym, but how can I copy my DVDs to my iPod?!â€? . So you do some Googling, but you discover that there are hundreds of solutions out there and, worse, that copying DVDs has become a money making scheme! Besides that, nobody tells you that there are two big technical problems with copying or converting DVDs:

1) Most commercial DVDs are encrypted for copy protection;
2) There are many encoding variables (bitrates, aspect ratios etc.).

It isn’t publicized, but commercial DVDs are normally copy protected with encryption technology (including region codes) and most commercial DVD copy software does not allow users to copy protected DVDs. Without going into the legalities suggested in #1 above or the complexities suggested in #2 above, here is a free solution to copy DVD to iPod. It’s really very easy, but the first time will take a few minutes longer.

Step 1: Decrypt DVD using DVD43

1) Download and install DVD43. AnyDVD (http://www.slysoft.com/en/anydvd.html) is another option, but itâ€™s not free.

2) After downloading and installing DVD43 you will need to reboot your computer. DVD43 runs as a service so you do not need to do anything to enable the decryption besides watching the yellow smiley face … turn into a little devil … and then turn to a green smiley face when you insert the DVD you want to copy.

Step 2: Rip DVD to iPod mp4 format using Handbrake

1) Download and install Handbrake (Windows GUI version)

2) In the Source section:

* Click on Browse and select the TS_VIDEO folder in your DVD drive.
* Select the Read Video button.
* Select OK.
* Select the View Data button. This will return all the titles on the DVD.
* Select the title you want to copy and click the Select Title button.
* Optional: Select DVD Chapters.
Take note of the Aspect Ratio value shown at the bottom of the Source section. Example: 1.78

3) In the Destination section:

* Click on Destination and browse to the folder where you want to save the movie. Enter a File name and select mp4 as the Save movie type.
* For Encoder, select .H.264 (iPod)
* For Audio Encoder, select AAC.
* For Height/Width, select the option that matched the aspect ratio that you noted in Step 1:

For 1.33:1: 320 x 240
For 1.78:1: 368 x 208
For 2.35:1: 384 x 160

4) In the bottom section:

* Leave Picture Settings, Audio Settings, H.264 and Query Editor as is.
* Video Settings: Enter 768 into the Video BitRate text box and leave everything else default.
* Optional: Set number of processors under Advanced Settings.
* Finally, hit the Encode Video button at the bottom.
* Hit OK on the start encoding message. A command line window will open the ripping process will start.

Step 3: Copy your mp4(s) to your iPod

Use iTunes to copy your mp4(s) to your iPod in the usual way.

Additional information

Handbrake is really a CLI (command line) tool and the GUI that is used in this post, really just builds and executes the command line instruction. In the GUI you can see the resulting command line instruction by selecting the “Query Editor” tab and hitting Generate Query Now. Now, you can go further and use this “query” to script batch copying by copying it into a .bat file (note that you will need to replace hbtest.exe in the query with hbcli.exe for it to work).

There are other free solutions like the ones below, but they seem to me to be more cumbersome. For example DVD Decryptor is a powerful DVD decryption program, but DVD43 does it on the fly. Anyway, here are other solutions you could try:
* Lifehacker.com – Alpha Geek: Copy DVDs to your iPod [using DVD Decryptor and Videora iPod Converter]
* All Things Marked – HOWTO: Convert movies to iPod format [for free] [using 3GP Converter]

Web 2.0 Explained in Video

Da Vinci — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 16:20:15 +0000

A picture says a thousand words and so I guess a video says a thousand pictures This video plays with words and really does explain Web 2.0 faster than words or pictures can do alone. It’s a mini lecture on social computing: The evolution of the Web into Web 2.0 and how Web 2.0, the “Machine”, is us and how it is using us to grow. It demonstrates how user generated content, tagging, blogs, and wikis have revolutionized the Web and that we need to rethink how we do things. The video moves very fast, but it’s worth watching twice.

WordPress 2.1

Da Vinci — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 03:32:46 +0000

I upgraded to WordPress 2.1 today, mostly motivated by the editor updates. The upgrade itself was painless and all of the plugins seem to be working fine. The only problem was that embedded YouTube videos didn’t work. This was a good opportunity to test the new editor and I was able to fix the videos by getting the embed code from YouTube and replacing the code in the posts using the new “code” view of the editor. The new editor is a bit better than the old one, but I like the improved image handling. The autosave is also great. Here are some of the key features

Autosave makes sure you never lose a post again.

New tabbed editor allows you to switch between WYSIWYG and code editing instantly while writing a post.

Completely redone visual editor also now includes spell checking.

You can set any â€œpageâ€? to be the front page of your site, and put the latest posts somewhere else, making it much easier to use WordPress as a content management system.

Much more efficient database code, faster than previous versions. Domas Mituzas from MySQL went over all our queries with a fine-toothed comb.

More AJAX to make custom fields, moderation, deletions, and more all faster. My favorite is the comments page, which new lets you approve or unapprove things instantly.

The upload manager lets you easily manage all your uploads pictures, video, and audio.

A new version of the Akismet plugin is bundled.

Have fun upgrading!