Ripped DVD To WMV9 With VirtualDub

By Alan O (aka Hitthebongo)

www.hitthebongo.co.uk

A popular request on the movie maker forums is how to extract sections of a DVD for use in a MM2 (Movie Maker 2) project. While commercial solutions exist in abundance, there are also some free solutions that are worthy of consideration.This guide concerns itself with using the free and excellent Virtualdub-MPEG2 video editing application to achieve the goal of extracting and saving movie segments from a ripped DVD, and converting them to a useful MM2 friendly format. The settings I recommend are based on my own experimentation and should by no means be considered definitive or authoritative. They are simply settings that work for me and MIGHT work for you.

For those who don't mind a challenge and are prepared to work with an mpeg2 file directly on the timeline you might find my MPEG2's in MovieMaker 2 guide useful. Only for the adventurous !

A prerequisite for this guide is that the required DVD content be ripped to a users hard drive and then converted to an mpeg2 format. My DVD to MPEG2 guide suggests one method with links to other software alternatives ( Note - It is possible to import vob files directly in to virtualdub for editing, but there can be certain issues. In m,y experiments I have noticed that there can be audio sych problems. I would strongly recommend converting any source vob to mpeg2 first as it seems to largely bypass such problems. It typically only takes 10 minutes for a full movie with no loss in quality.)

 

First A Little Background

Because of the colossal file sizes associated with uncompressed video content , there is thriving market in compressed formats with small file sizes that don't skip to much on quality. The list of video and audio codecs used to encode and decode these movies is huge. A very popular container format to bottle up this content is avi which is of course characterized by files having the extension .avi . Virtualdub uses this container format for saved movies.

While Movie Maker 2 may be able to import and work with many of these different avi types, it is largely dependant on a users installed video/audio filters. Performance results may be mixed. A truly friendly type are those that are referred to as DV-AVI's. These lightly compressed file types are what minidv camcorders record to and what MM2 is able to save to straight out of the box. Because of the formats rigid structure and close ties to home movie making it should come as no surprise that the format is extremely well supported within Movie Maker 2.

Another file format that is often regarded as being MM2 friendly is the wmv format. MM2 makes big use of this format by encoding movies with wmv9 (fourcc name : WMV3) video and wma9 (fourcc name : WMA2) audio. Movies exported in this fashion are characterized by a .wmv extension such as mymovie .wmv

Depending on the Video For Windows (VFW) codecs installed on a PC, virtualdub is able to create an avi encoded to a format of different types. Because we are interested in MM2 friendly formats, we need to make sure that the avi is encoded as either a DV-AVI or wmv9 video. Virtualdub is capable of both depending on what VFW codecs are installed.

This guide will focus on how to save to an avi file encoded with wmv9 video and uncompressed pcm audio.

Getting Started

Firstly we need to set the video compression settings that Virtualdub will encode to.

Open Virtualdub by double clicking on the VirtualDub.exe launch icon located in the main Virtualdub contents folder. The capture below shows the Virtualdub main window with a movie clip already loaded

Once opened click on the tab marked Video and select Compression in the sub menu. You should now see some compression options like below .The options will vary from one system to another depending on what VFW codecs are installed.

 

 

You should select Microsoft Windows Media Video9 then click Configure. If for some reason you can not bring up the wmv9 config screen or Microsoft Windows Media Video9 does not appear in the drop down list then you probably need to install the Windows Media Video 9 VCM codec installation package available from the Microsoft download page or here. Once selected you should see this:

 

While the default config settings are OK for the encoder you will see from the above some of those settings I have marked that have an influence on the speed and quality of encoding. By clicking on the pre-processing tab it is possible to crop, resize and de-interlace a video (amongst other things). The save/load tab gives access to pre-defined selections via custom profiles. For this guide I have only made adjustments to the compression tab settings as shown above. Everything else I have left set to default. Once selections are made click and press OK

That is the video compression settings sorted. By default VirtualDub seems to encode created avi's with the exact same audio as was on the original source video as indicated by Source Audio being selected under the Audio tab. This means for example that, if the source movie was encoded with ac3 audio as might be the case with a vob/mpeg2 file , then the created avi will also contain the same ac3 audio stream. While a MM2 friendly format might be preferred, you may actually find that the original source audio is suitable for use within Movie Maker 2. Results will vary from one system set up to another depending on what codecs are installed.

If you wish to convert the audio however - read on:

To set Virtualdub to convert the audio stream click Audio then Full Processing Mode . Next , click on the Audio tab again and select Compression . You will hopefully get a window that looks like that below. Selecting Show all formats will reveal sub selections.

 

In my experiments I found that the <No Compression (PCM)> audio encoding option seemed to give hassle free results in both creating the avi , and for editing in MM2. Therefore, if using it, simply select and then hit OK.

Note -When decompressing AC3 audio streams like those found in vob/mpeg2 files, VirtualDub may require a decompressor to decode the stream as a pre-requisite. If you are greeted with the following error message, then that is most certainly the case



I have found that installing the AC-3 ACM Decompressor 1.31 seemed to work OK in my test results although I would recommend that users conduct their own research.

Once the video and audio compression settings have been set you are ready to drag the source video in to the the main preview window and to begin editing the required clips. To select just a portion of the video simply use the mark in and mark out buttons to select a series of frames that correspond to your selection. The buttons are shown below. A proper selection will be indicated by the selected frames on the indication bar at the bottom of the main virtualdub window turning blue.

Once the required portion is selected click File then Save as AVI. This begins the process of converting the selection to HOPEFULLY a Movie Maker 2 friendly format !

 

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Originally posted 24 April 2007...Last updated 26 April 2007