Corruptive News Just news from a guy who moved from London to Bristol.

Veidt Hairspray

MKV to DVD

Hi,
Just wanted to write a quick post to say how impressed I was with DeVeDe running on Ubuntu.

Installation was easy:

Using the program was very simple. I had tried everything. Advice from many forums, Google, doom9 the lot but when it came to it I actually ended up using my vbox Ubuntu to do the job that the usually reliable AVS2DVD did not manage.
I would have preferred to use AVS2DVD as I am familiar with creating a DVD without menus using it.
DeVeDe put a menu on the front of the disc which I wanted to avoid but using DVDShrink in Windows 7 I just re-authored to take Title 2 and make a new ISO based on this.
I had tried everything and having used video tools since DivX was released ten years ago I went for VirtualDub, VituralDubMod, AvideMux and AVS2DVD. I think the job could be done with the right codec using VirtualDubMod but I really don’t want to start down an untested route without a good guide where someone else with more knowledge has come up with an answer.
Doom9 and forums suggested DVD2SVCD but although MKV is a community supported darling rival to MP4 I did find that hunting down codecs for the contents was not worth the effort. (Btw, yes we all know it’s a container format, not a codec – it just contains the encoded streams).
The mkv file I wanted to convert was 2.14 GB, 832 × 416 with H264 video 23.98fps with AAC 48000Hz audio. In short a challenge for any program to convert to MPEG2 and 720 × 576 especially when the encoding was being done in a virtual machine. A challege to maintain the aspect ratio especially. Looking around the web it’s full of flash videos where the original 4:3, 16:9, 16:10 dimensions are totally out of wack.
I get the impression that stuff will run on Windows 7 but there is some good stuff happening with GNU/Linux and OSX.
Honestly, I like portable apps for Windows. Anything that will run off a USB HDD/Key is ideal. If DeVeDe did this then great. AVS2DVD is not suitable IMO and I did try the zip version which Windows 7 struggled to run the fully installed version. So the closest I have is DeVeDe running within portable vbox.
Ideally this would run in a 64 bit version of Ubuntu but you need special processor extensions to do this. I enabled this in my old Toshiba U300 but to my dismay my new Dell Studio 1340 with and Intel Core 2 does not. Having said this the Dell did the encoding job within a few hours. When my expectation was for it to take maybe two or three times the length of the movie i.e 4 or 6 hours.

All this is a lot of effort for compatibility over quality. Having got a PS3 and a 32 inch 1080p TV I have become a real sucker for HD quality. Sky is a terrible culprit for really low bitrate over/encoded programs resulting in washed out colours, artefacts and horrible blocking. NTL/Virgin is not much better and having now got their HD V+ box there is a small improvement. I find that the HD BBC mp4 stuff is just amazing.
Once you watch something like the Yellowstone Summer/Winter documentaries in HD it’s very hard to got back to regular TV (Just bought my first Blu-ray off Amazon and I figured I’d make it a present as his PS3 is gathering dust).
Before get_iplayer development was shelved it was possible to play BBC HD stuff using a WDTV Live. I find that using the same Ubuntu install with the “get-iplayer” package installed it is now sometimes possible with a bit of resuming and prompting to download a 1280 × 720 file and watch it on multiple devices, e.g Laptop and TV.
Honestly this is a tad odd to do because the V+ box had BBC iplayer and the PS3 has iplayer support but the quality is not that gorgeous crisp HD and it shows.

I would love a DeVeDe where there were a few more advanced options and some more detail on what it is doing but the fact that it just works is more than enough to put me off squandering time on learning more about a tool that already works brilliantly.