DVD to AMV???HOW

[wuzzupnshiat]

nice

ya i have a 1.6ghz computer wth only 256MB of ram. i've had for 4 years now. It runs good though.

[RoGuE_STreaK]

Hi wuzzupnshiat, probably a bit late, but here's what I've done. Only had my player a few days, and don't know the amv format inside out, so everyone feel free to correct me on anything.

I used the vob files I had ripped to harddrive for normal burning. Look for the first "big" file, like 0.99GB, then find the ifo file just before it.

I used FlaskMPEG (free) to then output an avi, by pointing to said ifo file. Not sure exactly what I did, but I somehow crop and letterbox it so I get the same aspect ratio but a SQUARE output (for 128x128), 480x480. I experimented a bit to get this figure, move the main timebar across so you get to a pic from the movie, then use the "video panel" to crop horizontally and add vertically, until you find something acceptable. 480x480 seemed acceptable to me, not too much cropped off the sides, and not so letterboxed as to be unwatchable on the "small screen".

Sound might be an issue. Both of the DVDs I tried (Cars and Kenny) gave extremely low sound levels. There's normalisation etc options in flaskMPEG, but I couldn't get it to work properly, so I just extracted the audio using VirtualDub, sent it to GoldWave, then experimented with volume boosts and compression etc until I got a decent level. Then changed the sound source in VirtualDub to the new wav file, and exported the avi ("Direct stream copy" on video).

Then just feed it to the amv converter. 1DVD => ~300MB! And perfectly watchable if you don't overdo the letterboxing.


A Q to those in the know: do you have to make the source square aspect? ie. will the converter stretch anything that's not in the right aspect ratio, or will it simply add blank space?
If the latter, does this cut down the file size, rather than feeding in blank black letterboxing?