making fair use copies of a commercial DVD? software?

[bigidiot]

Hi, I'm putting up a fan site dedicated to a film. It will include essays, interviews, etc. I have VHS and commercial DVD version of the film, and I'd like to put up video clips up as illustrations for the essay. This use easily falls within fair use. (I'm thinking 2 or 3 excerpts of a minute each).

(I might be able to get clearance from the video company if worse comes to worse).

My question is: what's the best way to create minute long videoclips from a commercial DVD? What commercial/GPL software is available to do this? Can anyone refer me to an article for starting out? I can do this on linux/windows.

If worse comes to worse, I could transfer VHS to avi, but the video quality is not that great. Also, I've never done it before, although I have a vid card with capture capability.

Thanks.

Robert www.idotprogrammer.com

[Gazorgan]

Very simple and all with freeware.

The real question is what is the ultimate video going to be?

DivX requires a codec to be installed, and isn't neccesarily Microsoft friendly (not to mention spyware). It can be very compact.

MPEG1/VCD is compatible with nearly everything, but is low quality and not very space saving (10 MB/minute).

WMV can be very small and great quality, but is an M$ only problem.

RM can be as good as DivX/WMV (all 3 are MPEG4 for the newest versions) but you need Real Player and all it's spyware.

Common codecs everyone has are offset by bigger files.

[Gritz]

Why not feed the output of your DVD Player or VHS Player to your capture card and put the entire thing on your hard drive using VirtualDubMod (and use DivX compression mode and smallest window possible to save space?) You can then clip the parts you want with VirtualDub using a "save as". Still ... the avi files will probably be too large for a website unless you convert them to "Flash" using Macromedia Flash. You might download the "Trial" version and make the conversion within that 30 day period. I'm not all that familiar with swf files so there may be more to it than that ...(like Publishing to an html page) but hey ... there might be some ideas here ....

[LanEvo7]

DivX requires a codec to be installed, and isn't neccesarily Microsoft friendly (not to mention spyware). It can be very compact.

The decoder for Divx is free and contains no spyware. Only the encoder contains spyware if you don't pay for it. If you are concerned with spyware, just buy it. Its quite inexpensive.

If you want a free decoder/encoder mpeg4 codec, Xvid is always an option. Its free, does not contain spyware, and I haven't really experienced any issues with it.


I think your best option is to go Xvid/Divx or MPEG1. Since your clips aren't that long, the files won't be to big.

[bigidiot]

Thanks for the interesting suggestions.

I have flash, but would prefer not to use that for compressing. (Still I was thinking of adding animation to the site...).

I was more worried about the capturing part than the encoding part.

Probably mpeg4 codecs are what I want (not so much for this project but because I have other things to do, so I might as well figure it out).

Any recommendations on DVD to avi tools? (I realize it's dependent on what codec you're going with.
https://www.videohelp.com/tools?section=30#30

I can look through the tools on this list, but I was wondering. How long does it take to convert an entire DVD to avi using a moderately powerful machine (athlon 1.1, 768 RAM)?

Thanks.

Robert www.idiotprogrammer.com