Spaced Out :: 09 2012

Every so often I want to backup a DVD or portion of a DVD from a disc and need a simple solution to do it (ideally open source!). So it’s worth recapping the two stages needed:

1. Copy the files from the disc: they are encrypted so you need software that will decrypt them (and sometimes merge the multiple VOBs to a single file). You can do this with DVDShrink which helpfully runs portable. If you select the reauthor option then you can clip on the section you want to grab. If your disc is partially damaged this won’t work so another option is to install DVD43 which actually intercepts Windows file calls to the DVD player and then decrypts the files on the fly which means your software in step 2 should work

2. Author the files to your desired format. DVDShrink can compress the files for you or you can use something like MPEG Stream Clip to do the same thing. This would also allow you to demux if you just wanted the audio or video.

The good people at East Midlands Trains run an occasionally satisfactory service that I sometimes frequent. They offer free wifi which really must be a relatively “no cost” service for them to provide. For First Class passengers this is free probably because it provides some differentiation and excuse to charge the higher price tickets. Anyway (and thanks son!) their trains have mixed first/standard class seats which means, if you share the coach, you share the wifi. It works well, varies between fast and slow broadband speeds and operates in tunnels. All-in-all better than relying on mobile. It’d be interesting to know what the contention ratio is like and, in fact, what connection they use out on to the wired network. Useful tip of the week!

Nice article at the BBC on Open Dyslexic….openly accessible fonts (and associated software) to make screen reading easier for dyslexics. Very good.

I had recorded a short clip off the TV using my Humax box - once your Hummy is connected to a network, with UPnP switched on, it’s easy enough to copy standard definition recordings straight off the box on to your PC (see previous post). These come off as .TS files, but this time I had a load of aggro trying to archive them to XVID. Not sure why and VLC wasn’t playing the file either. Anyway, after a fair bit of head scratching this workflow seems pretty good:

1. Split (demux) the .TS in to constituent audio and video streams using ProjectX
2. Combine (mux) the streams in to an .MPG (using .MP2); use MPEGStreamClip
3. Transcode the file using Mencoder
4. Play using SM Player Portable

If you order an external hard disk drive (HDD) chances are it’ll come formatted using NTFS. That makes sense as it’s an up-to-date system, however it isn’t so easy to use when you want to switch between different OSs. For those that want to use FAT32, which is well supported, then they hit a wall in Windows as formatting only supports up to 30Gb. Well that’s an artificially imposed limit by Microsoft. Simply use FAT32 Format and it’ll do the job.

Nice