Posts tagged "Codecs"

Panasonic Lumix LX3

Last month my father bought a Panasonic Lumix LX3 digital photo camera. It's a really nice compact camera that shoots great looking pictures. Among its many features, it is also capable of saving pictures in RAW format instead of JPEG: unfortunately, the format used by Panasonic is RW2 and there's no official codec for 64bit operating systems.

Luckily, there is a complete codec pack that relies on the new Windows Imaging Component (WIC) system that was released with Windows Vista: the Fast Picture Viewer codec pack. The codec supports a whole bunch of RAW picture formats (including the Lumix's RW2) and since it is so well integrated with Windows, every modern application (Windows Explorer of course, but also the default picture viewer, Live Picture Gallery... and every .NET 3.5 based program) can use the codecs to load pictures.

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In a previous post I outlined the method I used to rip multichannel surround audio from my DVD-A collection. As was pointed out in the comments, the method works but isn't entirely correct.

As I discovered now, DVD-Audio discs usually contain both Video and Audio data. The audio data, which are the advertised high resolution 24 bit surround tracks, are located in the AUDIO_TS folder. For compatibility reasons (I guess), all DVDs also contain a standard VIDEO_TS folder that contains a normal DVD movie with compressed DTS sound. The video data is great if you want to playback the disc on a home theater (and show off your surround system, perhaps) or to access the bonus features.

But to get the full listening experience it is best to use the uncompressed PCM audio data. Here's an illustrated guide on how to rip the tracks.

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Assume you bought some expensive surround headphones and a special surround edition of a music album, on DVD-A (like Insurgentes by Steven Wilson, for instance). Listening to the high resolution 5.1 mix is a wonderful experience, way more immersive and pleasant than the standard stereo mix through cheap loudspeakers.

Unfortunately, the only problem is that you can't easily bring the music with you: even if you manage to bring the 5.1 headphones, you can't schlep a ton of DVDs even if you wanted. A week ago I finally found out how to rip the DTS audio data on a DVD-A disc to a digital file containing all 6 surround tracks. I'm now enjoying my collection of Porcupine Tree and No-Man records in full 5.1 greatness.

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In the previous post I went through how to rip a DVD and convert it to watch it on the iPod touch. This time I wanted to convert a simple AVI video to an MP4 file with H.264 encoding, while trying to keep the file as small as possible.

Most of free (and open-source) tools you can find online to convert videos from one format to the other are based on FFmpeg, an open-source command line program that can encode lots of video files to a huge set of other formats.

However, command-line tools are usually not known for their user-friendliness. Therefore I'd suggest you check out WinFF, a very simple GUI interface to FFmpeg that lets you pick some conversion options from a list of presets (or define your own presets) and batch encode a set of files using them.

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Since, as you may have read, I'm now a happy iPod Touch owner and this device has such great video capabilities (huge bright screen + support for advanced codecs with high compression rates), I decided to rip parts of my video library, converting them to the MP4 format, and load them on the iPod. (more...)