Re: [tlug] Video Clips

[Josh Glover <jmglov@example.com>]

On 12/2/05, Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon <ronfaxon@example.com> wrote:

> I'm helping a friend put a site together and they (unfortunately) want
> some video clips on their site.  Any tips on what the most
> cross-platform compatible formats are?

I'd say one of the MPEG formats. MPEG-4 video with MPEG-3 audio, maybe?

> Also - I think they're going to give me a DVD with some stuff (with no
> copyright issues or copyguard AFAIK).  Is there something within the
> Linux world I can use to edit out a couple of clips of 20-25 seconds in
> length?  (Hopefully reading the data directly from the DVD drive in my
> Linux box and not relying on an external player, but I suppose the
> on-board video capabilities of my old 450MHz Dell are probably not up to
> the task?)

Is this a video DVD, or a data one? If it is the latter, you can just
copy the video files to your PC. If not, you have to get a little more
jiggy[1] wit' it.

Pull up the "The Quick-n-Dirty Guide to DVD Backup"[2] (what? you mean
you don't have qnd-guides.net bookmarked!?) and read the "Tools of the
Trade" section (http://www.qnd-guides.net/qnd-dvd-backup.html#tools),
then skip down the the section on dual-layer DVDs
(http://www.qnd-guides.net/qnd-dvd-backup.html#dual). Read down to
step  6 (actually, you may skip step 5, since we do not need to shrink
the video).

Now, do something like this:

vol="WINNIE_THE_FOO"; \
for i in `seq 1 4`; do \
  mplayer dvd://$i -dumpstream -dumpfile /scratch/ripdvd/${vol}-$i.vob && \
  tcextract -i /scratch/ripdvd/${vol}-${i}.vob -d 2 -x mpeg2
>/scratch/ripdvd/${vol}-${i}.m2v && \
  tcextract -i /scratch/ripdvd/${vol}-${i}.vob -d 2 -x ac3 -a 0 \
   >/scratch/ripdvd/${vol}-${i}.ac3 && \
  rm /scratch/ripdvd/${vol}-${i}.vob && \
  mplex -f 8 -v 1 -S 0 -o /scratch/shrinkdvd/${vol}-${i}.mpg \
   /scratch/ripdvd/${vol}-${i}.m2v /scratch/ripdvd/${vol}-${i}.ac3 && \
  rm /scratch/ripdvd/${vol}-${i}.m2v /scratch/ripdvd/${vol}-${i}.ac3;
done

OK, now you have MPEG files of the first four chapters on the DVD. Now
you can edit them with Kino[3] or some such. Your machine might be
slow at doing the editing, but it *should* be able to do it at last.

HTH,
Josh

[1] http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/index.pperl?date=20000222
[2] http://www.qnd-guides.net/qnd-dvd-backup.html
[3] http://www.kinodv.org/