A whole lot of rueing

phik gave me a good laugh this morning with his post, I never get those 5 hours of my life back. I vaguely remember seeing some exchanges between him and vlad in irc last night while checking the computer between episodes of Zatoichi. The scrollback log seemed to go on forever so I glazed over and left them to it.

There’s an interesting clue in the above paragraph that an astute reader might wonder about. How was I watching Zatoichi? One would assume I was watching it on DVD, but no! I was watching it played from my PowerBook through an S-Video cable to my television (in full, anamorphic widescreen, albeit an interlaced one) with audio going out through my aging Emagic (they don’t exist anymore!) USB audio device. Why all the cables? Because there is No Easy Way to make this video file into a DVD.

I too have been burned by the promise of cheap software.

Don’t get me wrong, iDVD can make a great-looking DVD of imported video from, say, a firewire camera or your cell phone. It’ll even do proper 16:9 widescreen encoding now. But do not try to get it to, say, convert a divx/xvid-encoded video. It’ll do it, but it’ll take all night to do the transcoding. Even Roxio’s Toast, which is a great product, will put your movies on disc, but only in the most basic of fashions.

I think the lesson phik has learned from all of this is that Apple wants to sell you more software. I have wrestled with the thought of purchasing DVD Studio Express and then, while going through this exercise, have upsold myself to the DVD Studio Pro (more plugins!) and from there to the big box, Final Cut Studio because, hey, I’m gonna need all that stuff eventually, right?

Wrong.

Movies come in from the internet in all shapes and sizes. Generally in different codecs. Going back to Zatoichi, there is no drag-and-drop solution to get it onto a DVD (and then laydown chapter markers). The audio track for a bunch of these movies is ogg-vorbis-encoded and that basically screws me for any “pro” software (and playback software, for that matter). I could separate out the audio, recode it to something sensible then merge back the audio and video tracks and put them onto a disc, but having been down this road a few times, I am betting that there would be sync issues and that I would ultimately fail to create a playable disc after having coastered a half-dozen DVDs. At least they’re cheap enough to experiment with.

The decent ffmpegx front-end to a whole slew of open source encoder/decoder/transcoder software is not decent enough to actually get what I want done with a single drag and drop operation. It always involves fiddling, tweaking and clicking and then usually a few coasters. Feel free to give it a try and see if it works for you. I’m not smart enough to use this software to produce a 16:9 anamorphic widescreen dvd though.

Lastly, since we’re talking about simple transcoding software, there is a great piece of free gear that will let you transcode a movie to an xvid/mpeg4 and it does it very well with minimal fussing. Handbrake. I love this software. I just wish there were a “reverse” handbrake that would let me go in the other direction and end up with a shiny DVD to play in my nice Pioneer player.

Instead, until that day comes, I will continue to use my powerbook and a whole bunch of cables. Trust me, it’s easier this way.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Computing, Entertainment, Software, Video