Foo - Uploading dvd to website for viewing?

I know it can be done, but I'm not sure how. My brother has a website, and he has this dvd and he wants to get the video up on the website- I'm thinking he can somehow get the dvd format converted to a .wav, then he can save it in realplayer or something. How and with what software is where I am clueless.

Any ideas?

Koffee

.wav is a sound format. Compressed video is tough. You really have to be careful in selecting an encoding format, framerate, frame size, color depth, etc to get the best results. Can you describe what type of stuff is in this video? (Fast action requires different optimizations from slow panning of pieces of art, which in turn might be different from a video of a math lecture.) It might help us throw around some possibilites. And how long a video are we talking about?

http://www.videohelp.com/tools

Depending on how much quality you want your looking at around 700mb per two hours for video encoded using xvid or any of the mpeg4 formats with mp3 audio, that would yield about 3/4th dvd quality with a resolution of around 512:384 or so. You can go smaller, TV quality or VHS equivalent resolution and you can almost cut that in half. Your looking at some time to upload something like that, and his bandwidth for downloads will possibly be something to consider, unless its a small clip. Small clips arent much of an issue, bigger ones, a torrent file might be a wise choice, depends on site traffic.

Several ways to go here, lots of tools to choose from. For windows, gui4ffmpeg does a decent and quick job, and its freeware. Id rip it onto the hard drive with something like dvddecrypter and then re-encode it to suit your needs. jschen is correct, this get complicated to explain pretty quick, but it isnt too difficult to do actually. I do video encoding constantly, mostly for a court reporting agency I haul stuff for, they cant keep up with all the VHS and DVD's they have to make.

basic process is rip to hard drive, encode to something suitable, take a look and see if you like it. Choose a format thats widely used, xvid is pretty universal these days, but you may want a windows media or other format, thats up to you. I dont think you will have a hard time here finding help :)

koffee, you didn't drown in the flood!:)

*sigh*

I knew this would be out of my comfort zone. I'll copy and paste all this and send it to my brother, though. I'm really hoping he can figure this out quickly.

The video is of an interview. I think it may be 15 min or so.

Koffee

koffee, you didn't drown in the flood!:)

:roflmao:

If it's just an interview, one has to ask just how important the visuals are. And if there are important visuals, would a few slides/pictures suffice rather than having video the whole way through? Video files, even when compressed, are FAR larger than audio files. If it's going to be video, there had better be a REALLY good reason.

That said, if you insist on video, there's a few things you can do. If it's an interview, you probably can accept a pretty small size for the video screen. You probably can reduce the frame rate to 12 or 15 fps. You probably can be perfectly happy with 16-bit color. You probably can tolerate quite a bit of compression. Not sure what's available for PC at what price (I use a Mac), but with modern codecs, if you accept the above compromises, video isn't too hard to manage and the files can be very reasonably sized.

Also, what's the target audience? Can you assume everyone's using a high speed connection and your server has sufficient network bandwidth to handle the max number of concurrent downloaders you expect to encounter? If not, you have to consider practical limits to file size, either because your visitors won't be well equipped or because you expect a huge number of visitors. One professor of mine used to post some huge, very high quality video files. But he could safely assume that 95+% of the downloads were from within the university's LAN, so transfer rates were a non-issue. Imagine trying to post several clips every few days on BF, each one in the 100-300 MB range. Whatever server those clips were hosted on would quickly become overwhelmed. (Admittedly, nowadays, with better codecs, the files would be much MUCH smaller. And the network connections would be much faster.)

By the way, if bandwidth isn't an issue and having visitors download 100+ MB is acceptable, even high resolution video is doable with stunningly high quality. The Star Wars I trailer (at the largest size) on Apple's website way back when was only about 7 MB/min. (Admittedly, licensing the full Sorenson codec wasn't cheap. But some cheap modern codecs are even better.) So the limitations aren't particularly stringent. You just have to define both what's necessary (what does the visitor absolutely require) and what's acceptable (what can the host server and the visitor both tolerate technologically). And then it's pretty easy to find a happy solution within those bounds.

This site has all the info you need to convert a DVD to a smaller format. The forums are also quite good.

http://www.doom9.org

Video can be compressed with the latest H264 codec with decent quality at 3mb/minute. So that 15-minute video would end up being 45mb. Actually if it was something that originally came off a TV broadcast, you can even crunch it down to 2mb/minute without too much of a loss in quality due to the original source being such low resolution.

That http://www.videohelp.com/tools site has all the software and step-by-step guides you need. A really handy tool is FFMPEG, with lots of options and fine-control over the compression. But it's a command-line UNIX tool and can get pretty complicated, but it does give some of the best quality for the smallest file-size I've ever seen. :)


ffmpeg can be and has been compiled for windows using cygwin, see my post above

as far as h264, I would imagine a more common video codec would be appropriate

For a solution that just works out of the box without nerds recompiling and instaling cygwin there is
Windows Media Encoder and Windows Movie Maker - both are free. WME has to be downloaded. I think there are SVCD helper programs for ripping the movie off of a dvd if WME doesn't do it.

gui4ffmpeg comes precompiled and ready to run, and its freeware, and also quite a bit faster than WME

Ok... I'm looking for something that's downloadable like imtoo.com to covert the dvd to the mp3 format so I can upload onto the website. It looks like imtoo just takes too long for them to get me the license registration. I need something like... tomorrow morning. Anyone have an idea where I can go and pay and get the download NOW if I pay for it NOW?

Thanks!

Koffee

http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail/DVD_Decrypter/1011845169/1
that will rip the dvd onto your hard drive, and give you the VOB's, which are video object files

http://www.videohelp.com/tools?tool=gui4ffmpeg
that will allow you to convert it to mpeg4 with mp3 audio--default when you select mpeg4 in the drop down list is 320x240 resolution @ 900kbits/sec---decent for web use, but you can enter your own, try and see how you like the default settings,

click open and select the file you want, the VOB file in this case from dvddecrypter
select NTSC in the format tab for north america
then save, enter a name for the end result video file
then hit "generate", then click "encode", and wait for it to do its thing

both are freeware

If you have to add the video by HTML, and you just use a simple code? Becuase I am unsure of what you are tryin to do.

I am unsure of what I am tryin to do also. I just know we have a dvd that we want to put on a website so people can view.

*sigh*

I am unsure of what I am tryin to do also. I just know we have a dvd that we want to put on a website so people can view.

*sigh*
Did you check out the link to http://www.doom9.org ? The WHOLE SITE is about converting dvds to other formats. It's newbie friendly. I think what you want in dvd to .avi, xvid is a good choice of codec. Now go and read that site!