Helpful Hints » Audio/Video

Converting DVD9 to DVD5 with DVD Shrink

pycckuu — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:49:16 +0000

Very tiny and great application for converting from DVD9 to DVD5 is DVD Shrink, this is my personal favorite. It doesn't always help you to achieve the best quality, but it is the fastest method mdash; that's for sure!

After opening DVD Shrink click on Open Files (if you have DVD content on your hard drive, choose VIDEO_TS folder) or Open Disc (if you have DVD disc inserted in your drive).

Then press Backup! In Target Device choose where you want DVD Shrink to save your backup. But the most important is Quality Settings → i would recommend you to check both check boxes and choose Sharp (default).

That's it just it - DVD Shrink will do the job in two passes!

Playing youtube videos, even if youtube.com is blocked

pycckuu — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 16:45:43 +0000

There is a hint, which will allow you to play Youtube videos even if it is blocked at your workplace. All you need is a Youtube link and gmail.com is available open chat with anyone from your contacts and paste youtube link. For full screen click Pop-out and resize window. Bingo, what a surprise — video just works fine.

Some of you may tell that you knew about it, but for example at my work youtube.com is blocked and my colleague was always using sites like youddl.com to download videos from youtube.com, when i suggested him this easy solution.

Playing .mov files without QuickTime player

pycckuu — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 21:19:13 +0000

Never wandered why should you install QuickTime player every time after windows install to play .mov files? It was always a NO for me.

If you are not a fan of a QuickTime player, but still want to open .mov file on your windows machine, install a tiny player Media Player Classic or a K-Lite Codec pack. If you install K-Lite codec pack you can play .mov files with your basic Windows Media Player. That's it!

K-Lite Codec pack will also allow you to play .flv files too with the ordinary Windows Media Player.

Extracting audio track from a video file

pycckuu — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 15:54:16 +0000

If you have a video file, and want to extract audio from it separately, i suggest this method:
You will need a VirtualDub (no installation required). After opening video file, go to File → Save WAV. That's it, you have a .wav audio file extracted!

This method still doesn't work with .wmv files though!