Good Old Chinwagging

Collecting and Processing Music Video Clips

This is the broad process for collecting and processing Video Clips for later playback as Music Videos in the house. When I talk Video Clips I am talking about individual songs from artists, so DVD of a concert would be broken into each song or track.

The issue we face is that we collect all he clips in different formats, different qualities and different sound volumes. The trick is ”’Normalize”’ these clips. My preferred method is to change my clips into a single type. I have not necessarily picked the absolutely best format as I have work with many different types of clips. The format I have selected for now is AVI with Xvid Codec for Video and MP3 sound at 224 MPS sound clips. This means that almost everything needs altering, the answer this is to automate as much as I can.

High Level Process

  • Find your original movie clip, this could be in a number of places and we will touch on these as I go through this. The major places are:
    • The Web Bit Torrent
    • The Web Social Network Sites (YouTube, Face Book etc)
    • Video Tapes
    • DVD’s
  • Convert or capture the Video in Xvid and sound in MP3 224
  • Run the output through the ”’Normalization Process”’ which will be described below.
  • Move the Video Clips to \Music Videos\Singles on the Backup Machine
  • Move the \Music Videos\Singles to the Mediagate \Music Videos\Singles
  • Update any Playlists as required and move them up as well see Creating Playlists below.

Getting Video Tracks

Ripping DVD

When ripping the Music DVD use DVDFab and the best method is to capture the whole DVD to the hard drive and then take the individual tracks from there. We do this to keep the DVD out of the DVD player for too long as these operations could take hours.

The Video Ripping tool we use is [http://www.dvdfab.com/ DVDFab] this will copy just about anything to just about anything.

There free tool for this is the Open Source product called ”’DVD Decrypter”’ which I haven’t evaluated. It can be found on [http://www.doom9.org/index.html?/software.htm www.doom9.org]This website is full of very useful information and tools for video converting.

Open the DVD once it has been ripped to the hard drive and set it on ”’Generic”’ on the left hand margin. Now select the ”’Title”’ you want to work with in the check box in the left pain. Then select the chapter in the ”’Advanced Title Settings”’ . Note select the chapters one at a time. This may take some detective work and a bit of fiddling but usually is easy enough.

Now press the ”’Next”’ button which will move you to business end of the processing. Here you click on the ”’Configure”’ button and set this up so the top left ”’Device”’ pull down box to VOB.

Change the ”’Filename”’ to one you can find the output in at a later date. Then press ”’OK”’

Now on the main panel ensure the ”’Target”’ file name is pointing to somewhere you can find later and then press ”’Start”’ It should only take a minute or so

Now you have a track with is in a basic VOB (MPEG2)format and it will need to be reduced in size to make it acceptable for digital media. To do this use ”’Video Converter Master”’

=== Capturing Streaming Video ===
For information on how to capture streaming video go to the following link.[http://forum.videohelp.com/topic270338.html How to capture Streaming Video] This sight points you at the site [http://keepvid.com/ Keep Vid] which works well. Save as MP4 files to get the best quality and then convert to Xvid as in MKV Format below

== Video Formats ==
There are a number of video formats and when getting extracting them from the various sources it can be difficult to determine which video format to use. See the [[Quick Guide to Video Format]] to get some idea on what formats are useful for what.

== Working with Music Videos ==
This section is for working with Music Videos stored on the Mediagate. These videos come from a number of sources and depending on the type of video they are orginonally they may need converting to a format Mediagate will work with.

==Converting Video Formats==
To enable any file to play,the player needs a [[Help:Short for coder-decoder or compressor-decompressor. It’s a method of making data smaller for storage or transmission, and then unpacking it again for playback|Codec]] to match that of the file it is trying to play.Codecs in the current line of Mediagate players are held within the Sigma Designs procesor chip inside your Mediagate unit.This is a HARDWARE item and codecs CANNOT be added to via means of a firmware update. So a number of formats do not play, however they can be converted to one that does.

To identify “Codecs” and other charactistics of a video stream there are a number of free utililities for more about these see [[Identifying Video and Audio Codecs]] The main tool we use is Video Converter Master as it converts pretty near any format into any format and we have a licence for it.

=== Normalising MP3 Audio in AVI Streams ===
When the sound is too loud or too soft in an AVI stream then they need to be adjusted. This process is fairly time consuming but very possible. For instructions on how to do this see the item [[Normalising MP3 Audio in AVI Streams]]

=== MKV Format ===
The .MKV file format [http://www.matroska.com Matroska]is really a “container” or “wrapper” for a file, that can hold different codecs , but over the last year or so this “container” usually houses the NEW H264 codec,that is mostly used with “rips” of HD-DVD or BLU-RAY discs.By its very nature the H264 codec needs a very good processor to decode it’s audio and video,so a new line of higher power processors will be needed to play these formats.

One thing to consider is that although the quality of .mkv files is extreamly good , the file sizes are many,many times larger than something like a Xvid version of the same movie.

=== Converting for Mediagate ===
We will be using Video Converter Master to do the conversion and the best settings for playing on the Mediagate are:

Codec = Xvid

Audio = MP3 -224 kbit

Aspect Ratio = “Maintain” or “Auto”

Bitrate = This depends on the file size you require – Higher bitrates = larger files.Lower bitrates = lower quality video.

=== Calculating the Size of a Video ===

Video (Average Bit Rate x length in seconds) + Audio (Audio Bit Rate x length in seconds) = bit rate in bits / 8 for size in bytes

== Creating Home Videos ==
There are a number of tools for creating home videos, we are using Cyberlink PowerDirector for the heavy lifting work and it handles most things such as editing, building DVD’s etc very well. The areas where there is a need for more help is for working with stills in video format.

Tools to do this are:
* PowerDirector Slideshow Wizard – [[Creating Home Videos]] * Microsoft Photo Story

== Creating Playlists ==
We are using the software [http://www.oddgravity.de Play List Creater]to create playlists of video files with the MediaGate. This is a free product and creates M3U and PLS style playlists. We are using M3U playlists as they are easy to edit with Note Pad. We are using Absolute adressing without specifying the disk drive letter which allows us to set up a shadow copy on the PC any old drive and simply copy that to the MediaGate.

== Device Related Information ==
This site has a good explaination of Ripping videos geared around the Creative Zen MP4 players. [http://www.anythingbutipod.com/archives/2006/03/zen-vision-m-dvd-ripping-guide.php Zen Vision]