05-05-2003, 04:45 PM

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-macosx.html

Wonderful little toy, either watch a DVD or VCD on screen (looks better than DVD player imo) or stream it to an MPEG or AVI file whilst you get on with other stuff.

It also has loads of other options although it is Mac OSX only.

I have managed using this beauty to read old Philips CDI video discs (yeah they were porn ) and rip them to AVI for later fiddling with iMovie, I've never found any app that could even read the bloody discs before now (although the copy protected (i.e non-porn) ones are still causing heartache as the low level Darwin disc reading code bombs out after a few seconds, they must have played around with the disc format in some way).

Reading DVDs, decoding and writing them to HD in real time seems to be a might too processor intensive for my iMac though, for best results use a tool like mencoder to rip them to HD in VOB format first then let VLC loose on the copied files.

I have also downloaded and built the source code for VLC (so it can be done ) and I will attempt to integrate some of it with my proposed Cocoa front end for transcode (which is a more fully featured MPEG stream converter).

Hopefully I will end up with a one-button-press (the Mac holy grail?) DVD segment to DV for iMovie tool. If I do I'll bring it here first if anyone is interested in such a thing.

My idea is to allow the user to play a DVD in a normal window and let the user mark the start and end points of the segment they want then copy that to HD as a digital video stream (i.e the same thing you would import from a DV camera). Then you can just import it into iMovie or Final Cut to edit it. Sound cool or what?

Hopefully there will be no need to **** around with command line options or even multiple tick-in-the-box menus or any of that ****, just select the quality of output you want and away you go.

Of course if anyone knows of a free product that already does this then let me know about it and I'll save myself a heap of work.

Amen-Moses

05-05-2003, 05:18 PM

ive been using VLC for a yr or so now.. great stuff. 0.5.3 is great. it has problems with some .avi's and doesnt play all .asf's but its better than trying to find a bunch of codecs for quicktime

05-05-2003, 05:25 PM

yeah ive been using it for about that long 2, its a nice little app, changing alot.

05-05-2003, 05:29 PM

Could we have a PD/Freeware forum?

Maybe we could build up a list of useful apps and utilities that people use along with hints and tips on how to get the most out of them?

Amen-Moses

05-05-2003, 09:18 PM

I suggest starting a thread in OSX applications.

05-06-2003, 10:39 AM

Yes, this would belong in the OSX Apps forum. We already have a lot of forums, which need to be consolidated. If you start a thread, and it gets enough attention we can sticky it to the top.