Wide World of Women

[apologies: not babe related...] I have an instructional DVD that I'd like to extract bits of so I can just focus in on a few steps at a time. What's a good way to produce "clips" from the DVD. It isn't copy-protected so I have the VIDEO_TS files on my HD [and I even have permission from the producer of the tape to do all this, so it is legit! ] and I guess what I'd like to end up with .avi's or .mpg's or whatevers of selected portions of the DVD. The only app I have that'll view a DVD is "PowerDVD" that came with the drive. Thanks!!

I use a lossless mpeg-2 editor to edit the .VOB files if you want to keep it in original mpeg-2 format. I use VideRedoPlus and Womble mpeg-2 editor. Those aren't free. If the files are too big for your likes, you can compress it down with Virtual Dub, MediaCoder, HandBrake, or Super...all free.

With Virtual Dub you can also edit, but you have to use keyframes. You will always have to output as .avi though (no lossless output)with codec of your choosing.

I'm not sure what a keyframe is, but it sounds like VirtualDub will get me started. THANKS!

If you don't set cut points at key frames, you get audio lots of errors in output. It's like that for sure with AVI''s, but I'm not sure about mpeg-2. The shortcut keys for skipping through key frames are "shift" and "arrow." Learn the shortcut keys for the virtual dub, and you can zip through editing real quickly.

Also get your codec settings tweaked with a small output test file. Try a bunch of settings until you have the best quality for the file size you want. It's usually just the bitrate you need to adjust. Don't forget to compress audio or copy audio streams! Doing full processing mode with no audio compression makes huge files.

Quick followup: VirtualDub is a *VERY* cool program and works like a charm. It can apparently do a *ton* of fancy filtering and processing operations, but just using it to snip out clips works just fine. The advice about a codec is on point: I just did the naive thing and ran the program "out of the box" and a 25 second clip from a 250 meg .avi turned out to be a *750meg* .avi! [and one that I couldn't play at all on my PC!]. A little poking around and I opted for "Divx5.5" for compression and now all is well. THANKS!

Yeah don't do uncompressed!

Xvid is a good free codec as well.