Die, Pus Monkeys!

There are few things more thoroughly screwed up than video on Windows. The endless range of differing, pointless, and poorly designed containers and codecs, and the endless bugginess of the programs themselves, makes it agonising to do anything serious with video created by someone else. You find one program that works, and stick with it - and then you get a file from someone else created with their program that works, and suddenly your program crashes mid-way or corrupts the video or the audio drifts out of sync or it just plain refuses to open the file.

All I was trying to accomplish today was to convert the opening credits of Hand Maid May into a good-quality AVI file. I have at least a dozen programs that purport to do this, but not one of them produced respectable results. Two of them crashed repeatedly, and one would not even recognise the straight-off-the-DVD MPEG-2 file.

To the rescue: VirtualDubMod. I use VirtualDub for all my AVI editing, because while it is not even slightly fancy, it actually does what you tell it to. But it only handles AVI files. VirtualDubMod is a modified version of VirtualDub (which makes sense) that can also cope with Ogg and Matroska and MPEG files. What is not immediately obvious (because it doesn't show up anywhere) is that it can just as easily read the VOB files you find on a DVD.

A little bit of tweaking of the DivX 6.11 codec (never needed to de-interlace the video before) and viola! There are still some compression artifacts, so I'm going to have one more shot at it and then upload whichever version looks best.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:35 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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