As you may recall, I wrote a column or two earlier on the subject of DVD authoring. In my case, I am copying my old VHS and Hi8 analog tapes to DVDs. I am having a lot of fun doing it, and perhaps some of my enthusiasm showed because I received a number of calls about it.
But one call was a bit more of a challenge. Describing the odyssey that the client and I went through might be informative to you.
The client in question wanted to convert old 8mm moving picture film to DVD. Once on DVD, he intended to edit them - adding background audio (there was no audio on the 8mm films), voice-overs, cutting out bad clips, etc. In starting that process, he discovered an excellent service called YesVideo (www.yesvideo.com). YesVideo will take almost any photo or movie format (including 8mm tapes and slides) and generate a viewable DVD. It works like this:
If you go to the YesVideo website, you can look up the name of a local business where you can drop off your stuff (their term is a "mail-in kit"). Many photo dealers, drug stores and some Wal-Marts are doing it. There are two vendors right here in the Southport area. You drop your stuff off just like you were dropping off 35mm film to be developed. It takes about 2-3 weeks to process.
The only major difference between YesVideo and regular 35mm processing is that they call you personally after your stuff is received to confirm your order and their fee. Before running up hundreds of dollars in service, they want to be sure! In my client's case, he got about 3.5 hours of film copied to 4 DVDs for about $460. Not cheap, but to preserve those priceless old memories, it's worth it.
But, now the fun began. For those of you not familiar with DVD file formats, the video files in a DVD are usually encoded in MPEG2 format. There are also control files on the DVD that identify menus, chapters, etc. The actual MPEG video data files use the file extension .VOB (Video OBject). It would seem straightforward to import the VOB files directly into the client's video editing program (Pinnacle Studio 9). But, Studio doesn't read VOB files. At this point, my client considered taking analog video output from a DVD player and running that into a video capture device, but I thought that the quality of this would be poor. So, we sought a better way.
In my research, I found that a .VOB file is essentially an MPEG (.mpg) file. I read that just copying and renaming the .vob to .mpg would do the job. In experiments, this appeared to be so. But the YesVideo files seem to have a non-standard format, and couldn't be successfully read by Studio.
I then looked on the Internet for a VOB to MPEG conversion program. This is where I got stuck. The problem is that commercial DVDs use a VOB format that is encoded for copy protection reasons. Bypassing that conversion is tantamount to being able to copy DVDs, and programs doing that are rapidly disappearing from the marketplace due to legal pressures from the film industry. It is also probably why Studio doesn't read them. In this case, copying (or converting) the files would be perfectly legal, since they were of course my client's property. But the legal fears have caused the programmers to duck and cover.
Well, to make a long story not too much longer, I did find a commercial program that would do the conversion. My client is now happily editing away. I also sent an email to YesVideo to ask if they would support generating raw MPEG files, and am awaiting an answer.
But the moral of the story is that big brother is watching. Soon, PC DVD reading and writing hardware will contain hardware copyright controls. Even if you want to back up a DVD for your own personal use, you are going to be out of luck.
But if you want to take your old films and slides and get them to a playable DVD, the YesVideo service can do the job.
(Bob Seidel is a local computer consultant in the Southport / Oak Island area. You can visit his website at www.bobseidel.com or e-mail him at bsc@bobseidel.com).