Donde esta DVD2AVI???

That's my messed up Spanish for where can one find DVD2AVI??

go to www.google.com
and do a search on dvd2avi

here's one site:
http://www.afterdawn.com/software/video_software/dvd_rippers/dvd2avi.cfm

and another:
http://arbor.ee.ntu.edu.tw/~jackei/dvd2avi/

Does this app actually keep the audio in its original 6 channels?

I don't know of a way to get WAV files for all the channels. You can demux the AC3 5.1 track out of the VOB, rather than encode the WAV file. If you have tools for dealing with AC3, you could go from there. DVD2AVI also lets you do a "surround downmix" when encoding the WAV file.

SF's own "Soft Encode" can do this (if you can find a copy up for sale on e-bay etc) . It is no longer sold by SF but was about $1000 when it was available.

You can look at http://www.dvdrhelp.com/tools for ac3 tools.

You can convert the ac3 to 3 different .wav files and use them in vegas.

Udi

Just for my own edification, when is there a legitimate need to do this?

There is BeSweet that I've used and it works just fine. You have to excuse the documentation as it was written by a Russian. It does seem to do an aweful lot of processing but then converting ac3 to pcm is no simple task without screwing it up,

And it is FREE.

Spot,
we now have the wonderful Sony camera that records ac3 audio for one.
Secondly many people now have their video saved only on DVD.
I'll admit it's unlikely many consummers have there home movies recorded as anything other than stereo ac3 so you would have to question the legitimacy of having to decode out the six channels.

Just so you guys are aware:

BeSweet is a AC3 hack and does not implement full Dolby AC3 specs.
It is not licensed by Dolby.
It can cause audio problems on some DVD players.

Agreed, 2 channel AC3 needs to be editable due to these new cams.
I'm questioning the 5.1 rips. I can't see a legitimate reason to do this. maybe there is one. Otherwise, it's support of piracy. And that's something that I can't support in any format; hence why I rarely comment on the threads about VOB conversion, etc. I realize this may start a posting war, but there is simply no exuse or reason for piracy, which is really just a politically sweeter word than thief. I receive mails every week from someone asking me how to use Vegas for re-encoding DVD's that have been ripped. I actually had one guy in Germany tell me I should have included this crap in my book. As though I'm really interested in telling others how to steal.

Spot,
I'm firmly on your side on that one. Not that I have any time for the Hollywood moguls personally but that aside I cannot see how it makes any sense. I don't know about elsewhere but here I can buy a legit copy of the DVD so cheaply it just isn't worth my time and the cost of the media to make my own copy.

I have noticed though that we do seem blessed with very cheap DVDs in this country, maybe that is the way to stop piracy, just make it not worthwhile.

I just used dvd2avi to get the ac3 and then i used besweet with besweet gui and it gave me six .wav files. Pretty easy to use too. Thanks guys

I cannot see how it can cause problems in DVD players if you use it to go from ac3 to pcm.
To say that it is a hack is a bit silly, using that logic I guess DVDA is a hack as SoFo weren't a member of the DVD Forum.
Also as ac3 is an ouptut only format I doubt Dolby would ever licence any code to extract audio files from ac3. It's something that should never have to be done and whoever at Sony created a camera that records audio in that format should do the honorable thing.

I guess. DVD's here, on first release, are 20.00 (avg) while older disks run between 9.99 and 14.99. But, figure one guy can spend a couple hours ripping, couple hours rendering, then make unlimited copies to share with friends or sell at the swap meet/flea market, he's got it made. I went to the swap meet here in Utah about 2 months ago, there were pirated DVD's and pirated CD's, plus CD collections EVERYWHERE. I was amazed. I asked one of the vendors how he thought he could get away with it, and how he felt about ripping off artists with the collections that he was making. His response? "People do it every day, why shouldn't I make money doing it...?" Maybe it's the thrill, maybe it's the feeling of rebellion, of hurting "corporate America" or the feeling of flipping the finger to the laws of the land. I don't know, and I don't care. All I can say is for every one corporate exec that is harmed by this, there are literally hundreds if not thousands of others damaged by these actions.
I like the punishment meted out to the kid that sneaked razors, bleach, and clay onto a passenger jet recently. He's not allowed to fly for the rest of his life. Were it my world to rule, software, music, and video pirates would never be allowed access to a computer for the remainder of their lives. THAT would certainly make people think twice.

This might be a silly question but as I use Besweet and have got a license from Dolby Labrotories to use the logo on my DVD's, I thought the ac3 was Dolby 2 channel surround or something like it? I told Dolby Labs what I was using to create the ac3 and sent them a sample of it and they granted the license no chrage. This indicates to me that I have a legit Dolby sound from Besweet.

OK I now have a question. By the way I don't consider Besweet to be a hack
product eventhough it's free. I just have 2 speakers in the TV and my DVD player see the ac3 as Dolby 2.1 anyway the Dolby light comes on when I play a DVD with the besweet ac3.

"This might be a silly question but as I use Besweet and have got a license from Dolby Labrotories to use the logo on my DVD's, I thought the ac3 was Dolby 2 channel surround or something like it. I told Dolby Labs what I was using to create the ac3 and sent them a sample of it and they granted the license no chrage."

Don't know if it's silly or not - I can't find any question in there! :)

Richard Hunter

From my experiences in Asia, the guys at the swapmeet and village car boot sales are a drop in the ocean. I'd still suggest they are making a pretty marginal profit out of it and the guy doing it at home just to save the cost of buying one copy is actually ripping himself off.

It's the commerical operations in Asia that are pressing 10,000s of copies that are the real worry, not only onto DVD but onto VCD and much of the quality is woeful. When I was in Singapore the duty free shop at the airport seemed to be selling legit DVDs but they were double the price of the ones here so maybe in other parts of the world ripping stuff of makes more sense, if there's any sense to be made of it.

What I do find crazy though is how difficult it's become even if you want to do the right thing. Say I have a client who wants to use some of your music in their wedding video. You'd probably be flattered and we could work out some arrangement to everyone's mutual advantage. But say it was an old Beach Boys track, I could spend hours trying to work through the minefield of who owned which bit of the copyright. A simple change to the copyright laws could fix this. So long as for each copy made of the video the client purchases a CD then ultimately all the copyright owners still get a dollar out of it without the need to involve an army of lawyers. It seems such a simple solution to me, maybe there's some fatal flaw in the idea.

To get back to the original question of why would anyone need to demux ac3, I had a legit need to do this recently. Someone I do a bit of work for had purchased local rights to several DVDs but was only supplied the elemental files. Now the ac3 audio tracks had wierd file names which I eventually worked out included millisecond offsets from the start of the video. No doubt something like Scenarist can cope with this but not DVDA. So I had to rip them back to .wav, drop them into VV, moving them said number of milliseconds along the TL and re-render back to ac3. Hardly an elegant solution. Fortunately it was only karaoke music so I don't think anyone was too worried about the quality hit in the process.

Farss...in my case (anyway)...it is not a question of illegal copies.

I have a pretty impressive DVD collection that is growing in leaps and bounds (thanks to movie clubs where you can get the first 5 movies for $1 and buy x amount over the next year or so). We always finish early and then start all over.

So...that being said - I'm setting up all my multimedia for an 'on demand' system and have all my entertainment files (movies, vhs, audio, etc) on a server in my home network.

I have the system running through my sound system and plugged into the big screen - so I want all my DVDs on my server (versus the disc).

Doing this is legal and, at the very least, I should be able to 'back up' my DVDs for a 'just in case'. I have paid a pretty penny for the collection and wouldn't want anything to happen to the discs.

But most of all...I'm running out of storage space. I need to box up some of these damn DVDs ... but I still want access to them.

KnawhaImean!

:-)

I don't know how the law applies where you are but in tis country copyright measn exactly that, the right to copy. So you would have broken the law many times over.
You'd think it legitimate to make a backup copy as you are usually permitted in say the case of software but with music and video all you have bought is the right to play the music / video off that physical copy. If it becomes damaged / stolen or whatever as you've lost the physical object you loose the right to it.