Announcements Three

[andrewducker]

1) I have been slowly weaning myself off of giving unprompted advice, and have decided to cut it out entirely as of now. This was prompted by hearing the following Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it's worth. when ginjabadja posted the sunscreen song. I won't manage, of course. But you now all have an excuse to shout "Shut Up!" when I try to give you pointless advice that you could have worked out by yourself if you wanted to. If you're somehow young enough to not have heard The Sunscreen Song then I recommend you follow that link.

2) I have a Buffalo Terastation Pro II. It is lovely, worked instantly as soon as I plugged it in, easy to manage, and is currently being filled up with mp3s. Well, it was, until I realised that while my WiFi connection is fine for browsing the web it's not up to transferring gigabytes of files about. So I'll be moving things about tomorrow when I have a long cable handy.

3) Now I have the space I'm encoding a few DVDs to AVI so I can stream them to the TV. I'm currently using Auto Gordian Knot to do it - seems to work ok, but is it the best app to do it with?

Comments

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

If you're somehow young enough to not have heard The Sunscreen Song then I recommend you follow that link.

Shut up!

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, got a load of DVDs taken down using DVD Shrink - but that still means 4Gb a throw (and my GreatBigDisc [Seagate external 400] ) is now pretty full). So if you come up with a good DVD solution, do let me know.

[terminalmalaise.livejournal.com]

FairUse Wizard works pretty well and can use Xvid, Divx or x264 to encode.

Guide.

[johnbobshaun.livejournal.com]

Heck, if you've got the space, just convert your DVDs to ISOs.

[andrewducker]

I have 650GB of storage now, so that's an option. I'd rather that a DVD was 400MB rather than 4Gig though.

[dreema.livejournal.com]

i used to do a lot of processing of dvds to get them down to about 700 meg or so, using divx encoding, but it was a long, non-automated process, using smart ripper to get the data off the disc, then flask mpeg to encode it in divx, with an mp3 soundtrack. The ripping used to take no time at all, the processing used to take about 8 hours...

Not really done it for a long time, but also not seen an elegant all in one solution either

[terminalmalaise.livejournal.com]

Basically this is the process I've used with FairUse Wizard:

-Rip a few DVDs to my hard drive using DVD Decrypter or similar program (to an ISO image, which FU needs to work from): 10-25 minutes each usually + a lot of temporary disk space, 7-8gb each for most movies.
-Run through the wizard with each, queuing them up: maybe 5-10 minutes, including the time it takes for the program index the disc.
-Wait till I'm about to go to bed, then run the processing overnight.
-Wake up to find them all done.

Actually that last depends on settings and cpu speed--my 2.6ghz P4 can typically encode to a 700mb Divx or Xvid avi at max quality settings in maybe 4 hours. Encoding is done multithreaded, so dual and quad core cpus will cut this time down significantly.