Sunday, September 02, 2007
DVD Wherever ...
This post leap frogs the two that were supposed to come first, but I want to save these links here instead of bookmarking them. Short summary: some simple software installs to make creating and playing back compressed copies of DVDs easier. Sorry, not all of the software is free.
AnyDVD: This program removes annoyances from DVDs and CDs. It can make your computer a nicer way to play DVDs than your DVD player by letting you skip past the "Please don't copy this DVD" advert, instead of making you watch it. It will also make all DVD disks look like they are not copy protected.
www.slysoft.com
Nero Recode 2: This is part of the current Nero suite, and lets you convert non-copy protected DVDs to either another DVD, or to a "Nero Digital" file, which is I think very close to a standard MP4 container file with one or more MP4 Video streams, AAC sound streams, and subtitle streams at a fraction of the size of the original DVD data. Other software can convert DVD to various formats based on the MP4 standard, but Nero Recode is simple to use and can preserve multiple proper discrete channel surround sound, optional subtitles, and DVD menus too. An obvious extra feature would be to Nero Digital files as input too, for example to convert to a lower resolution file with a simpler soundtrack, but I guess that Nero Vision might be able to do that:
www.nero.com
Nero 7 initially had a bad reputation for not working and slowing down your PC, and purpose of each of the 20 or so applications is not made clear. I've found the current version does what I want without harming my PC, although oddly, it's a long time since I've used it to burn a CD or DVD! One remaining annoyance: Nero Vision version 2 (From the original Nero 6 suite) is the only version that will create a smooth playing DVD from a dvr-ms file. Other versions up to and including the current version 4 release of Nero Vision produce stuttering output from these files on Windows XP and Windows Vista machines that I've tried them on.
Applications from the suite that I uninstalled include Nero Home and Nero MediaHome. Nero Home is a Media Center type app designed for remote control use, records TV in standard MPEG 2, and has flexible options for the tuner hardware I have; Nero MediaHome is yet another uPNP media server. I did install Nero Showtime, which is yet another media player, but one which understands the Nero Digital file format very well. But it has very limited response the the Media Center remote control, and there are other ways of viewing the Nero Digital files, so I only use it for testing. The first time I installed Nero 7 an annoying feature called Nero Scout was integrated with Explorer, and tried to index all my Media files. The latest install lets you deselect all of those features, which I recommend unless you will be using Nero Home as your primary media player. Nero Mobile appears to be for Windows Mobile devices only, so no good for my Symbian based Nokia phone.
The current Nero release from the download section of their website is 7.10.1.0. The included version of Nero Recode has a problem: if you create a Nero Digital file directly from a DVD disk using the 5.1 surround sound, then the LFE (the low frequency "subwoofer" channel of the sound track) is not converted, and replaced by a possibly loud continuous rumble. This will be fixed in the next version of the Nero 7 available from the website (assuming there is one, they are advertising version 8 at the moment.) In the meantime, replace your recode.exe with this file from their support site:
Recode_2_5_6_0_lfefix_20070807.zip
There are two Nero Digital variants, plain "Nero Digital", and "Nero Digital AVC" (AVC: Advanced Video Codec, which I think is MPEG 4 Part 10, if that means anything to you). Playback of either is possible in Windows Media Player (and so also in Media Center, if you have it) if you install the Haali Media Splitter
haali.cs.msu.ru
the FFDShow Direct Show codec wrapper
www.ffdshow.info
and possibly a subtitle extractor too (which I just copied to the Windows\System32 folder)
VSFilter.dll
The media splitter opens the MP4 container, FFDShow decodes the audio and video streams that are extracted, and the subtitle extractor does something with the subtitle stream. In my testing so far, the only way that I can get subtitles displayed is to select them via both the Haali and FFDShow system tray icon menus. (That is, I can't just select them in Media Player, becuase it can't see them.) Similarly, I had to use the media splitter menu to skip through chapters, I couldn't do that in Media Player or Media Center.
FFDShow lets you play almost all of the current video and audio media with a simple single installer, and very flexible unobtrusive configuration options. Using FFDShow I could play my Nero Digital files in Windows Media Player, select audio tracks, subtitles, and configure how I wanted the surround sound down-mixed and output. As an example, with FFDShow I was able to play an Xvid AVI file that the xvid decoder itself could not play!
I was pleasantly surprised that the first file I tried to encode with Nero Recode played on my mobile phone (Nokia N95, with the current v12 firmware). I'd luckily choosen the built in "Portable AVC" profile, with a single stereo downmix audio and no subtitles. A file in the "Standard AVC" profile with a multichannel soundtrack and subtitles didn't play. Disappointingly, I couldn't find a set of options that would create a file that my N800 will play.
However, to encode a DVD for my N800, the software HandBrake comes highly recommended, and looks easy to use from the screenshots on the website. Unfortunately, it takes DVDs as input, not Nero Digital (MP4) files, which might be inconvenient sometimes:
handbrake.m0k.org
