I finally tracked down a copy of O Fat White Woman, mentioned earlier. Sooooo good. You have to see this. The story centers on the sadistic ex-military headmaster of Upton Grange, a boy's school where teachers "rap the occasional knuckle." Yeah no kidding! Since part of the action involves a student suffering from injury-induced double vision, there's lots of neat camerawork and pitch shifting to conjure up his disoriented state. Another cool sequence involves the students declining Latin verbs in chorus, which one gets the sense Delia Derbyshire took back to the studio to tweak the voices just so. The "fat white woman" in question is also quite a creation, surrounded as she is by fuschias and cucumber sandwiches. The color pink is very important here. The show's title derives from this poem by Frances Cornford, the granddaughter of Charles Darwin.
I would love to post a clip or two on Youtube, but I'm afraid I just don't have the technical know-how. Anybody have any advice for a Mac user trying to convert DVD to Youtube? Snapz?
My recommendation - download MacTheRipper, this will get your DVD into uncompressed files on your desktop - a 1.5 hour film for example will be about 6-7gb. Next download Handbrake, a fine piece of software for compressing files to be watched on mobile devices. When you first open it it'll ask for your source file which should be the DVD files you extracted. Click the presets sidebar and choose the iPhone & iPod Touch setting and choose start. It'll take a little while depending on your computer, but should get you there. Hope that helps, but give me a shout if you're unsure of anything.
ReplyDeleteATB, Colin from Hard Format.
In my experience I think you just need Handbrake do decode the DVD to a .mov file to your hard drive. Handbreak requires some decoders that come with VLC so you will need that too.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Colin and Nick. I'll give it a try. My hard drive is pretty much maxed out, so I probably won't have room to rip full movies before compressing them down. Is there a way to just rip 5 minutes from a DVD without doing the whole thing? Another problem is that my disc drive/DVD player hasn't been working too well lately. Time to get a new computer. Looks like the dream may have to wait for a while folks =(
ReplyDeleteI think what you want is Fairmount - this allows you to mount an encrypted DVD in exactly the same way you can mount an unprotected one.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.metakine.com/products/fairmount/
Once you've done that, you can use anything (Handbrake, VLC, ffmpegX) that can handle the MPEG2 format used by DVDs, to extract just the few minutes that you want and convert them into MPEG4 or some other YouTube friendly form (iMovie makes it easy to upload an edited film to YouTube).
Another option is buying the 'official' MPEG2 decoder for Quicktime from Apple which adds MPEG2 support to any program that uses Quicktime underneath. I think this is included in Final Cut Express. Only worthwhile if you're going to be doing a lot of video editing and want to cut out having to convert video with Freeware before importing to iMovie.
Handbreak let's you rip on a chapter by chapter basis, and you can select the file format and compression ratio on the fly. So even if you only have 1 gig available you should be able to get something.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Nick. Will give a try. Hopefully there will be more toys and less tech in future posts.
ReplyDeleteEleventhvolume - has the simplest method.
ReplyDeletehandbrake will rip a dvd to .avi or .mp4 unattended (thanks lovefilm.com)
You only need to copy the whole dvd to your hard drive through mac the ripper if it carries a version of macrovision encryption than handbrake doesn't already handle.
ps.i'd love a copy of this, so i'm gonna search torrent, then emule
:-)
you can download a VHS rip of this from a torrent site called:
ReplyDeletewww.thebox.bz
its members only, so you have to sign up ect..but it does suggest that there is a version 'out there'.
please delete this post if it contravenes any posting rules.
Hi there. I used to be a member of The Box but I seem to have been booted off (maybe my upload ratio wasn't any good). I'll give handbrake a try but this will likely take a while as I'm swamped with work right now. Anyway, thanks for stopping by!
ReplyDelete