Converting MPEG-2 files - Part II (Ripping/Converting DVDs)

Welcome to the second part a three part series about MPEG-2 files. The first (issue #50) focused on converting standard MPEG-2 files to AVI's for importing into Movie Maker 2. We used a downloaded MPEG-2 file from the Prelinger Archives, and converted it into a DV-AVI using VDubMod with the Panasonic codec. In this issue we'll start with files on DVDs.

DVDs come from many sources and I'm still working toward my personal 'standard conversion procedure'. I selected discs from 4 different sources to see how they responded differently and similarly. The testing gets me a big step closer to where I'm hoping to be, maybe even all the way there.

Results were good, and the steps no longer use Movie Maker as the primary audio conversion utility, with its random crashing during it. Here are the 4 DVDs I used... with links to 10 second WMV snippets made by Movie Maker 2 from the converted files. They're low res snippets but give you some idea of the results.

the latest DVD I made... just last week using MyDVD 6.1 (the low quality/pixelization was from the original footage - digital8 shot in low light does that)

a mini-DVD disc recorded by my son on a Sony DCR-DVD200 camcorder (the camcorder that burns directly to a disc)

'Be Like Mike', a DVD made by a friend who does lots of great home video work... I don't know what software he used but I'd guess ULead

'Step into Liquid' - a professional commercial DVD which didn't successfully convert with the tools used. The video file created from it ended up with each frame looking like this

picture... the encrypted file precluded conversion.

I'm not taking the extra step in this newsletter to decrypt it, but I'll leave it in the sample group to see how it acts when you try to handle it like the others.

DVDs adhere to a standard file structure... which makes the first step easy, StepIntoLiquidFiles

finding the file on the disc. It's a VOB (video object) file in the Video_ts folder... the file names don't really tell you much, but it's easy to find the one you want by playing them. The file numbers are in the sequence they play on the disc.

The Video_ts folder of the 'Step into Liquid' disc has 182 files in it, about half of them vob's... but only a few are the main feature. The partial list of files at the right includes the 4 largest files, which are obviously the main segments of the movie. WinDVD

The files in the folder total 8.3 GB, so these 4 use about half of the disc space.

Double-click a vob file in the file browser and it'll open and play in your computer's default DVD player software.

Try importing a vob file into MM2 and you get an error message about it not being a supported file type. Vob files are MPEG-2, packaged to meet the standards for a DVD. VOB import Error

Some of the .vob files looked and sounded fine in MM1. But all had the thumbnail of a music file. Consistent with that, they went only to the audio track of the timeline.

This illustrates more the tightened controls of MM2 rather than MM1's ability to use .vob files.

MPEG-2 files have different extension names on computers than they do on DVDs. Rename a ..vob file to .mpg and Movie Maker and other software will try harder. In some cases it'll partially work, but in most cases it'll work just enough to get your hopes up, and then result in confusion and frustration. Up until now I'd been using Movie Maker to convert the audio track to a WMA file even though it crashed more often than not.

The renaming is important when it comes to ripping the video and audio files from it using TMPGEnc.

The MyDVD ..mpg came into MM2 as an audio clip and went to the timeline as if it was an audio file. It sounded good, so good that I'm confident I can save the MM2 movie as a WMA audio file. It's duration per the clip and timeline aligned with the DVD file.

The file from the Sony disc acted differently... it too came into MM2 acting like an audio file. But the duration (which was about 15 minutes on the disc), showed as about 2 seconds in the collection and on the timeline. Previewing the clip in the collection played fine. Previewing the timeline with the clip on it stopped after 2 seconds.

The 'Be Like Mike' file didn't import... got the message "...If you have already tried to download and install the codec, close and restart Windows Movie Maker, and then try to import the file again."

The 'Step into Liquid' file imported. When previewed in the collection I heard it but didn't see it. When I moved it to the project timeline, it went to the music/audio track, not the video track.

The properties of the imported 'Step into Liquid' file in MM2, shown above left, shows audio properties but has no info about the video.

The Bottom line about renaming from .vob to .mpg: 3 of the 4 imported, but none of them gave any indication of having a video track. The audio properties and the way it acted was different for each of the 3. Only the MyDVD file acted so well that it seemed as if the audio could have been ripped from the file using MM2 (I didn't try).

Someone e-mailed a much easier way to animate a map-route clip... using just 2 images instead of a big pack of 20 to 30 images that I used a while back in a Photo Story project.

Sure enough... works easy and well: use the same image twice, the first with no marking and the second with the fully marked route. Let's say it's going generally from left to right... set the transition between the two clips to a long duration (10 seconds or so) and the transition type to 'reveal right'. The story will show a nice smooth route marking rolling out. You can do it in Movie Maker also, as it has a 'reveal right' transition... no need to make a story first.

In issue #50 I asked what MPEG-2 decoders you have, and if any green lights or positive comments were indicated in the decoder utility. There were minimal responses and no-one reported a green light.

The new book about VirtualDub was published... here's a link to a press release. I'm looking forward to reading what the other authors wrote. It covers VirtualDub, VDubMod, and AVISynth... we'll be using VirtualDub in one of the conversion steps later in this newsletter.

We've seen it in the introduction, 4 discs with files that act differently. The vob files have the video and audio streams in them, one video and as many as 8 audio streams. Some programs require that you demux (separate the video and audio streams into separate files) before you import.

Here's a well written page about demuxing and remuxing ... demuxing separates the video and audio streams so you can work on them individually, and remuxing puts them back together into an MPEG-2 compliant file.

Even a demuxed MPEG-2 video file won't work in Movie Maker, nor will an extracted Dolby AC3 audio file. So for us, demuxing gets us separate video and audio files that need to be converted.

Everyone's computer system and software toolkit is different. I don't expect to be able to provide a standard procedure for everyone. But I do hope to help you understand the processes by illustrating it with my procedure, so you can more easily develop your own.

TMPGEnc+ v2.5 to demux the .mpg files to get MPEG-2 .m2v files with the video in them, and Dolby .ac3 files with the audio (the 3 that had Dolby .ac3 streams).

TMPGEnc+ v2.5 to extract the Linear PCM audio steam of one .mpg file directly to a WAV file.

TMPGEnc+ v2.5 to convert the .m2v videos that didn't need resizing to DV-AVI, using the Panasonic DV codec for compression.

VDubMod to resize the one file that needed it before rendering to DV-AVI with the Panasonic DV codec. It was the file from the Sony mini-DVD. It'll also do the rendering to the new DV-AVI file using the Panasonic DV codec.

BeSweet, an open source software package, to convert the Dolby .ac3 files to WAV. It's new to my toolbox this week.

That'll get video and audio files of the highest quality, and file types that work very well in Movie Maker.

I want to stop here and review current guidance about software needed to demux and then convert MPEG-2 video and Dolby audio files. We lucked out in issue #50 as the downloaded MPEG-2 file didn't have a Dolby audio steam. But 3 of the 4 DVDs I picked for this issue have .ac3 audio files, so it's time to find a better way to convert it, better than my hit and miss use of Movie Maker.

There are somewhat overlapping but different objectives between my website and DVDRHelp. Mine is focused on getting DVDs to source files for Movie Maker projects... theirs is more about open source software, the Divx codec and it's derivatives... ripping DVDs to get them into Divx encoded files, or to make backup discs, not how to make files that work in Movie Maker. The links and guides at DVDRHelp don't reference Movie Maker.

My 3 current website pages note 16 software apps that could be used in ripping and conversion steps. Some are my personal comments, but most are from posts on the newsgroup. It's interesting that only 2 of the 16 align with the conversion guides at DVDRHelp: DVD Decrypter and DVD2AVI.

I found 25 DVDRHelp Guides about converting MPEG-2 to AVI... just reading their titles showed how strongly they align with the Divx community. AVI to them means Divx encoded... to me it means something akin to DV-AVI. But there's a lot to learn from the guides... and apply it to our needs.

BeSweet to convert audio files, and the related Be Sweet GUI, a wizard interface to run BeSweet, which is a command-line utility.

We'll split the files into the two streams, the video and audio, and work on each separately... first the de-multiplexing. I'll start with the largest and the only one of the 4 test files apt to be protected, the one from 'Step into Liquid'.
de-mulitplex

I tried various tools... bbTools, a command line utility, then VDubMod, and settled into TMPGEnc for the demuxing.

From the main menu, use File > MPEG tools > Simple De-multiplex tab > select the file...

Press the Run button... for the largest file of the 4 vob files, the 1 GB+ 22 minute one from 'Step Into Liquid', the splitting took about 5 minutes to first make the video m2v file, and then another 2 minutes for the audio ac3 file. Demuxing isn't a rendering process... it's more of a splitting one, so it's pretty quick.

For 3 of the files, this simple de-multiplexing step resulted in two files from each of the vob's, an MPEG-2 m2v file with the video, and a Dolby ac3 file with the audio. The combined total sizes of the two files was the same as the single vob file.

The Simple De-multiplex didn't include the audio stream for the file from 'Be Like Mike'... so I moved over to the 'not-simple' De-multiplex tab shown below.

This window shows the streams inside the file... those automatically checked are the available ones. See the note at the bottom of the window, saying to double-click the one you want to save to a new file.

I double-clicked the checked audio stream 0x00 and saved it to a file, gave it a .WAV extension and it played great.

At this point I've separated (de-muxed) the combined files into separate video and audio files. Four MPEG-2 video files with .m2v extensions, three Dolby audio files with ..ac3 extensions, and one audio file with a .wav extension.

As long as I was in TMPGEnc, I stayed in it for the video. Open the m2v file in the main working window as the Video source.

From the main menu use File > Output to File > AVI file > uncheck audio as we don't have that stream > Video Setting for compression > Panasonic DV Codec.

The longest of the renderings took 45 minutes for a 7 minute video (the one from the MyDVD disc).

I didn't know until my final quality check that the converted file from the Sony mini-DVD wasn't complete. It was only the first 29 seconds of a 14-1/2 minute video... more later.

The file from the 'Step Into Liquid' disc converted but playback of the avi file showed it as a garbled set of colored blocks, as we saw in the intro... due to the encryption

Although TMPGEnc spun-out the ac3 files, it gives an error message if you try to import one, saying it's an unsupported file type.

TMPGEnc needs a special module to convert AC3 files. There is one, but it supports other versions of TMPGEnc, not mine.

I started with BeSweet and the BeSweet GUI/Wizard, and didn't need to look further. BeSweet is a command-line audio transcoding utility that converts audio files from one format to another, and with the BeSweet Wizard, the conversions went easy and well.

The downloaded files for the two software packages are small (2/3 MB total)... zip packages.

Make a folder on your hard drive named 'BeSweetWizard' and put the contents of the BeSweetGUIv0.6.zip into it.

Then make a sub-folder under it named 'BeSweet' and put the contents of the BeSweet1.4.zip package in it. It needs to be in that location for the wizard to find it.

Run the BeSweet GUI v0.6.exe file. When first opened, it gives you the choices at the left... I like Wizards, selected it and pressed GO.

On the first step drag (from your file manager/browser) each of the ac3 files you want to convert. I did one at a time, but the wizard lets you make a list of and run it as a batch process.

The next steps are to select the output type (WAV), the output mode (Wave-Stereo), an optional FRC Preset (None), and a look at the project settings... by default the new .wav file is placed in the same folder as the source ac3 file.

Press the GO button on the last step and in a couple minutes you'll have WAV files. I didn't run into any issues using BeSweet.

At this point I thought I had all of my converted files. Just one more step, a quality check in Movie Maker... the goal is good usable source files for movie projects.

The figure at the lower right shows the pair of files from the MyDVD disc on the timeline of Movie Maker 2... zoomed in all the way to see how aligned the ends of the video and audio files are.

Perfect!! That's what we're looking for. The project preview plays smoothly, and looks and sounds good.

Note that the video file shows no associated audio... we had opted to not include the audio in the saved DV-AVI file.

The 'Be Like Mike' set was close enough. The audio file was 0.13 seconds longer than the video. There was no lip-syncing to need precise alignment so I accepted the pair.

But the set from the Sony DVD flunked cold. The audio file was over 14-1/2 minutes in duration but the video was 29 seconds. The video obviously needed more work.

Checking the Sony disc vob file properties with the MPEG Tools of TMPGEnc showed it had pixel dimensions of 704x480. I hadn't noticed that before.

Our normal dimensions for DV-AVI files (NTSC), which the Panasonic DV codec needs in the input file, is 720x480.

I went to VDubMod and added the resize filter to the process to first resize the file before it goes to the Panasonic codec for rendering.

The rendering went fine and the check in Movie Maker 2 showed perfect complete files and alignment between the video and audio... over 14-1/2 minutes in duration.

I've learned that the Sony mini-DVDs use a slightly different standard size than DV-AVI files... looking at the standards for DVDs, the 704x480 size is included.

I learned a lot more about DVD specs, the types of files on them, and how better to rip and convert. It was another great exercise for me.

With today's computers and software, there are always many ways to achieve the same thing... we only need one, but one that we can trust to work consistently. Converting Dolby ac3 files had always been difficult for me; BeSweet appears to have resolved that. Here's a link to some spec info about the audio files on a DVD.

up to a maximum of 8 audio streams can be multiplexed into the same cell with a single video stream

NTSC - Dolby AC-3 and/or Linear PCM is mandatory, and MPEG-2 is optional
PAL - MPEG-2 audio and/or Linear PCM are mandatory, and Dolby AC-3 is optional

I learned about and tested BeSweet and it's related wizard. Two of the things I like about it are (1) the wizard makes it so easy to use, and (2) it's a self-contained package in that it comes with everything it needs to convert a Dolby AC3 file into a WAV that works great in MM2.

Many software packages, such as TMPGEnc and VirtualDub, don't come with codecs or add-ons needed to handle the AC3 files so common in DVDs.

There is an optional AC-3 add-on for TMPGEnc, but it doesn't work with my version.

VirtualDub doesn't install codecs by itself and does not provide any audio compression technology of its own. The audio conversion dialog allows for conversion between different PCM audio formats, including changes in sampling frequency, sample precision, and channels.

To check the BeSweet utility even more, I installed it on my old Dell laptop, which has no extra software, can't play DVDs, and doesn't have any of the extra codecs that my Toshiba has. It converted AC3 files fine... BeSweet is now a permanent item in my software toolbox.

I'll be revising the website page as intended... I'm not sure yet what I'll say, but it'll be along the lines of '... ripping video and audio files from DVDs for use in Movie Maker remains challenging....', combined with '... I don't have a recommended procedure, as every computer system and software toolbox is different, but here's how I'm currently doing it...'.

I look forward to comments and discussion about this and other newsletters on the forums at:

Windows Movie Makers.net

I'm involved in many things that support the users of Movie Maker and Photo Story, and adding more daily. Here's a list of what is available to the public. Some are free and others reasonably priced.

Movie Maker 2 - Do Amazing Things

(with its online companion on www.papajohn.org)

MaximumPC's winter 2005 quarterly special... had a 7 page tutorial 'Make a Killer Home Movie with Maker 2'. The special edition of the video that was made for it is now on my website as a file download.

Packt Publishing of Birmingham, U.K. issued the first book about VirtualDub. Virtual Dub

My contribution was the introductory chapter... I'm glad to be part of any effort that helps join the worlds of Movie Maker and open source software. We used VirtualDub again in this issue of the newsletter.

Movie Maker 2 and Photo Story 3 - www.papajohn.org - the site's 3 goals are: an online companion to the Do Amazing Things book, a detailed tutorial on PhotoStory 3, and helping you solve Movie Maker 2 problems.

Forums are open to all for viewing, but require registration of those who want to post. Moderators actively participate to ensure the forum discussions move forward and stay on track.

Newsgroups are wide open for all to view and post... moderation is collective by the participants.

Movie Maker 2/Photo Story newsletter. The annual subscription is $20 and the link to subscribe is on the main page of my Movie Maker website at:

#55 - May 28 - Civil War Project - part IV - continue building clips into a more complete movie project. Pickup where issue #51 left off.

#56 - May 21 - Converting MPEG-2 files for use in Movie Maker - Part III. This will pickup where issue #53 leaves off, and finish this 3 part series.

Older newsletters (more than 6 issues ago) are posted by Rob Morris to an Archive Site at his Windows Movie Makers website.

Transition Maker 2 (TM2) is a utility for the ultimate in making your own personal and custom transitions for Movie Maker 2. It's a joint product from Patrick Leabo, the programmer, and myself. Version 2 was released a week ago and I'm still working on updating the online tutorial.

I routinely beta test the Pixelan packages and think very highly of their people and products.

Managing your personal information is more of a challenge as hard drives get bigger and the internet more robust.

My personal database has been an ongoing project over many years, and is now available to others. Info is on the Managing > Personal Database page of my site, and in the database package itself.

To others it's $10. To order, use the button on the top of the Managing > Personal Database page.

An online gallery that fully aligns with the main priority of the website is the 'PapaJohn Expert Zone' at neptune.

Check it at N eptune and the Distributing > Neptune page of the website, where there's a developing tutorial about how to use the service.

The Portage, Michigan library added two new training sessions: Introduction to Movie Maker, and an Advanced Movie Maker Workshop. The initial sessions will be :

If you can't save a movie because your project has become too complex, e-mail a copy and I'll divide it into manageable sub-projects, and provide detailed instructions about how to render the parts and assemble them into your final movie. $49.95 - for details, see the sidebar on the Problem Solving > Can't Save a Movie page of www.papajohn.org

Movie Maker 2/Photo Story training and support services start at $50 per hour - send an email - PapaJohn@CharterMi.net and I'll help you determine your needs, and work with you to plan and implement them.

Wedding combo website/video packages - starting at $2,500 + travel expenses. See Jill-MarkWedding or the bottom branch of the Movie Maker 2 website for a sample of what you can expect for the online portion of the package.

About John 'PapaJohn' Buechler from Microsoft.com

John "PapaJohn" Buechler, of Kalamazoo, Mich., goes by PapaJohn online. An avid user of Movie Maker since its first release, and a regular supporter of the community of Movie Maker users, John received a 2003 MVP award from Microsoft for that support. In March 2003, he started a comprehensive website about Movie Maker 2 at www.PapaJohn.org. He maintains the website, writes books and articles, teaches, and provides support services - all for the community of Movie Maker 2 users. An engineer by formal education, John is a computer database and multimedia expert by business and personal experience. He co-authored the first book about Movie Maker 2 and is actively working on a second one. You can find his advice in the Windows XP Movie Maker newsgroup and in the Windows Movie Makers Forums.

This newsletter is republished with permission of John "PapaJohn" Buechler.
Please note that this is an archive of newsletters and some information may become outdated. PapaJohn, and the webmaster of this site, provides this information "AS IS" with no warranties.

Visit - PapaJohn's Movie Maker 2 and Photo Story 2 Newsletter Index

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