Converting a Home DVD to AVI - but not divx?

[sterankin]

My work has 3 dvds which they have made, about a couple of GB each. They want to put these on a shared drive for anyone to look at. Obviously it would be better to convert these DVDs to AVIs files.

I was going to do this at home, and use DVD2AVI or AutoGK - but I do not think I can convert to a Divx or Xvid AVI as the company will not have these codecs installed on any users machines. Is there a standard, Microsoft compliant AVI that will always play in media player? What software could I use to convert the DVD/VOB files to an AVI that can be easily watched without the need for additional codecs?


Many Thanks

[Baldrick]

Maybe convert to wmv instead, with for example AutoMKV or vob2mpg and then wmm.

[sterankin]

Thanks Baldrick, having a go here now...any ideas what sort of target file size I should aim for?

The original DVD is an hour long, Source resolution: 720x576.
Using AutoGK I am changing this to 640 width, I just put a custom target size of 400MB to see how that looked before I convert to WMV...Or maybe I should keep it bigger sice it was 3 Gig to begin with...

[redwudz]

400MB is probably a good guess. But you could try a short representative clip with a few different bitrates to see how it looks. Assuming it will be viewed on a computer monitor, you shouldn't need a high bitrate file. If you use Windows Movie Maker, try 'VHS quality'. That should give you about 470 MB/hour.

[sterankin]

Hmmm - I exported ok with AutoGK and changed the width to 640, output looked great. I tried to use Windows MM to convert to WMV, I selected VHS Quality, but half the video is green, as it tried to make the width up to 756 or something.

I cannot find a custom width seeting in Windows MM. Any other programs can be used to convert to WMV?

Thanks