DVD to "something I can put on a website"

[barophobia]

Hello,

I've read through the Convert guides (well, not all of them, but I looked for a guide to answer my question(s) with no luck) and searched through the forums a bit with no luck.

I have a client with a DVD video that they'd like to put on their site.

I have no software to do anything like that. I would prefer to get the video into a Flash player but I DO NOT have $600-700 to buy Flash. Not only do I not have Flash available I don't have any program to rip the DVD to my PC.

So if I can't afford Flash what are my other options? I could use Quicktime but I still don't know what to buy.

My budget has a limit of about $200. I've got WinXP by the way.

Any help would be great!

Thank you!
Chris.

[guns1inger]

DVD Decrypter to rip the DVD to your HDD : cost : $free
Vob2MPG to extract the video and audio from the DVD structure : cost : $free

So far, so good.

As to the next steps, it really depends on what you want to achieve.

Do you want the video streaming or non-streaming ?
Do you want something the users can easily watch off-line, or only on-line ?

You could use Windows Media Video. The WMV Encoder is free from Microsoft. Reasonable size, reasonable quality (on par with similar sized flash movies) and streaming.

Otherwise there are a few FLV encoders that don't require flash and may fit inside your budget.

[Eyedoctor2]

Free FLV encoder: http://www.rivavx.com/?encoder

More info: http://www.rivavx.com/index.php?encoderhelp&L=3

[barophobia]

As to the next steps, it really depends on what you want to achieve.

Do you want the video streaming or non-streaming ?
Do you want something the users can easily watch off-line, or only on-line ?

Thanks for the program tips!

From the research I did on Quicktime, I don't want to do streaming. I want to do progressive download. That leads me to some questions I couldn't get answers to while researching.

1. Does progressive download require a "streaming server"? (Whatever that means.)
OR
2. Does progressive download require a certain kind of encoding?
OR
3. Does progressive download require a specific object/embed tag setup?

I already have a .mpg file from my client that they got from the business that recorded the video. This file is 70MB and seems to only play once the entire file is downloaded to the client's computer. This is not a good thing because it takes way too long.

Overall, what I want to achieve is progressive download. Whether it be QT, Flash, or WMV. Doesn't really matter I guess except that I prefer Flash. Flash seem to be more cross platform compatible.


Thanks again!

[barophobia]

Hello,

So I tried using DVD Decrypter on one of my own DVDs and it worked fine. Then used VOB2MPG and that worked fine EXCEPT for the fact that it didn't convert one of the VOBs. The one that is the actual movie. (And YES this is just an experiment. I didn't use my client's DVD because I do not have it yet. I'm merely testing on my own.)

Even though the VOB file is over 1GB, when VOB2MPG processes it it only creates one file that is a little over 1MB. Called VTS_06.mpg.

Could this be because of some kind of copy protection?

If so, I won't worry about it. If not, I need to figure out what happened.


Thanks,
Chris.

[mixxerr]

I have done something like this before. I used Swishvideo2 .
http://www.swishzone.com/index.php?area=products&product=video

you can also go to Google and do a search for "video to flash" , or something similar to that.

[Baldrick]

Dvd decrypter should remove the encryption if it is commercial dvd. or is it a home recorded dvd? Then you don't have to use dvd decrypter at all.

You can use super and open the main vob and convert directly to flash video.

I use Flash Professional or on2 video encoder for my flash encodings.