Hello, On Thu, 09 Aug 2012, Joe Zien wrote:

This may be off topic but I find this forum very helpful.

I have some old VCR tapes I want to transfer to DVD. I have a VCR/DVD combo recorder that I can dub VCR to DVD. How can you convert the DVD to *.avi files or Windows Media Player files so I can e-mail them to my family? I googled this and found an opensource Windows .exe program "handbrake" and "handbrake" in linux but couldn't get either to run.

Has anyone tranfered a DVD to *.avi or WMP files?

Some whole series. Simple answer: don't. .avi is b0rken by design. Use the Matroska (.mkv) container. And, for converting the DVD, handbrake is _just_ the tool. Works like a charm. What did not work? Have you installed all dependencies? Oh, and where did you get handbrake from? From Packman? -dnh -- No trees were destroyed in the sending of this message, however, a significant number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

Joe Zien writes:

Has anyone tranfered a DVD to *.avi or WMP files?

I use mencoder (part of mplayer) for that. You can do something like this: #+BEGIN_EXAMPLE mencoder dvd:// -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vpass=1 -oac copy -o /dev/null mencoder dvd:// -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:mbd=2:trell:vpass=2 \ -oac copy -o output.avi #+END_EXAMPLE where "track_num" is the track number you want to encode. For you it is most likely "1". You can find out the track number by playing the dvd with mplayer: #+BEGIN_EXAMPLE mplayer dvd:// #+END_EXAMPLE Just increase the "track_num" by 1 until you find the right one. Charles -- A Linux machine! because a 486 is a terrible thing to waste! (By jjs@wintermute.ucr.edu, Joe Sloan)