Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion FoLC Productions Video question

I was wondering where everyone gets the videos for the Mvids. I asked someone and she said she makes her own videos. I was just wondering if that's the case for everyone or if there's a site that has them for download.
Thanks!

By videos, do you mean the clips from the show that are used in the trailers and videos here? If so, I think most people here get them by ripping the DVDs and/or capturing them from VHS tapes. I know there are some people who download them from p2p programs like Limewire, but I've never had any luck doing that for Lois and Clark. There's definitely not one place that you can just download them all easily.

Hope that info helps.

~Anna

I believe Bitorrent has all the episodes to download. It takes forever though.

How do you "rip" the episodes from DVD onto a computer?

If you use a program like DVDShrink which is freeware (google it and it should take you there), you can select scenes in a DVD to rip. You'll need to get another program (I use DVDx or Virtual Dub) to convert it to either an avi or mpg format. (I prefer avi meself, just because I think it looks purdy!) you'll have to play around with the settings on the converter to get it to look right, but there's some tutorials you can find.

=D Hope that helped!

Can entire episodes and disks be ripped? I am looking to do this just for convenience sake, so that when I want to watch my favourite show I do not need to constanly switch dvd's.

Entire eps and disc can be ripped, if you have enough hard drive space. I've got about 40GB of Lois and Clark stuff on my computer, and most of it is episodes of the show that I use for vidding.

~Anna

Has anyone used DVDShrink? Is it user friendly and self-explanatory?

I've seen it in the past but never looked into it because I didn't want to download it without hearing feedback.

Thanks so much for your feedback!

Emrys

My husband uses DVDShrink. He finds it gives him few hassles and says it's easy enough to use for a beginner.

He also says if you go to VideoHelp.com you'll find a tutorial there on how to use DVDShrink if you hit any glitches.

LabRat

I (personally) think DVDShrink os one of the user-friendliest freeware DVD rippers out there. Of course I haven't used that many, but this is the one that gives me the least amount of hassle.

What is the difference between freeware and shareware?

Freeware is free - you don't pay for it and you get the full program for nothing. Shareware is free to try but you're supposed to pay if you continue to use it, and sometimes crippled in some way unless your register. For example, the first release of Doom was shareware - you could play the first nine levels but not the rest, and couldn't load maps other people had edited.

In this case, because DVDShrink can potentially be used to commit a criminal offence (DVD piracy), not charging for it is one way for the author(s) to limit their liability. But there are all sorts of other reasons to go the freeware route - see e.g. the hundreds of free programs from sourceforge.net, the Open Office consortium, some Linux releases, etc.

I've even gone freeware myself, with a couple of programs I wrote many years ago that started out as shareware but were eventually too much trouble to support. It was simpler to make them free for anyone that wanted to use them.

The Feds have been going after programs that are able to crack DVD copy protection. Both of the really popular ones, DVD Shrink and DVD Decrypter, are no longer supported or updated. In fact, as part of the settlement, DVD Decrypter's author lost his website domain. So don't set your programs to automatically look for updates. I've heard some people say that an update to DVD Decrypter may actually uninstall your program.

Yikes! Roger, thank you. I just checked my settings on Decrypter and changed it from the update mode.

Kathy

Interesting. Thanks all for the help!

Great! Thanks, everyone, so much!

I have one more question, though. I still have some VHS Lois & Clark eppies that I was hoping to import on to my computer. Well, I know how to get it off of a DVD (downloaded DVDShrink) but is there a way to get VHS material onto a DVD?
Thanks

VHS is an analog format, so the only way to get it onto your computer to start with is if you have video capture ability. That involves matching up inputs to outputs. If your VCR has S-Video, that would be the best signal, but that would only work if your computer can take S-Video input. Else, you'd have to fall back to composite video, which would give you a significantly worse picture.

Once you transfer the video tape to the computer, it'll likely be in .wmv or .avi format on a PC, in which case you'd then use DVD authoring software to create a DVD, assuming you want to play it back on a set-top DVD player. If you simply copy the video file to a DVD, the DVD would be merely a large "floppy" disk, readable only on another computer.

I use a Dazzle DVC90 to do this. You can get it at any computer type store like Best Buy or Circuit City, and IIRC the cost is around $80. With that and an audio/video cord (like the one that hooks your DVD player to your VCR), you can hook your VCR to your computer and capture using WMM.

This probably isn't the "best" way to do it, but it works for me and it's fairly low cost. I hope you get it working!

~Anna

I've also noticed quite a few medium-end video cards from nVidia and ATI come with video dongles that attach to a connector on the video card, itself, and allows you to do video capture. Check if your current video card has that ability. Some motherboards also have that capability built-in.

If you bought yourself a Windows Media Center PC, you're certain to have that ability.