Movies....

[Asmo]

I recorded all that Pot Night on C4 too, transferred it to DVD ages ago!

Some of the adverts were on-theme as well - especially the POT noodle ones...

 

[Fzero]

seriously, there were Pot Noodle ads during those breaks? classic

 

[Kumaki]

I have some vhs taking up space but refuse to throw them out

Buy a DVD recorder and get to it or get a few external HDs and start copying them to that to deal with later, the old VCR won't last forever and parts will be hard to come by!

I wouldn't bother with movies though, you'll have the old aspect ratio, poor compressibility and sometimes macrovision protection will block your attempts, unless you also get a filter for that. Lot of work for little reward, when you'll probably find the DVD for less than the VHS blank cost you!


It can be fun finding old adverts in off-air recordings though, especially the toy and gadget ones from Christmas.

Yer probably right.  Maybe better to just buy the dang DVD's and sell the VHS tapes at a garage sale, to a used bookstore, or even give them to Goodwill...It isn't as if I'm really hard-up for money or anything.

 

[Fzero]

Aside from getting hold of one of those converter units like that ION one, you can hook up your VCR and record to AVI to playback on Pandora, if you've access to a Windows or Mac PC.

Check a little how to on Wired site:

http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Transfer_VHS_Tapes_to_DVD

 

[budweiser]

for movies I use  http://www.pocketdivxencoder.net/EN_index.htm with Home Cinema setting , Perfect full screen for the Pandora...Bud

 

[darkborn]

In the meantime, you can try some of those:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_films
http://www.straycinema.com/

There are more links I do not remember anymore, but there are *many* documentaries or "amateur" / fanmade movies like this that are very good and free of charge... probably not violating anybody's rights (EDIT: speaking of, "The Hunt for Gollum" was not a good example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunt_for_Gollum)
I did DL them by torrent, that is what I remember.

@Handbrake - alternative: I did great things with Avidemux , at Windows and Linux both.

Just for converting dvd to divx @Windows, I was using FairUse Wizard light (free). Light version had limitation of 700MB, but beside that it works great and was very easy to handle.
 

 

[elwing]

DVDFab's full version is not free - but if you only want the disc ripping (Decrypt) option (and in this case that's true) then that part works free.

You just use DVDFab to rip the dvd files to your hard disc ( I believe that the option is 'decrypt', it certainly used to be). When that's done you use AutoGK as described previously here and it should work flawlessly.

I use the "Copy" mode and select a destination folder on a harddisk, it fall back on dvddecrypter once the license is expired without having to say anything... I think I did not took notice of a "decrypt" mode directly, maybe they removed it? or I'm just blind? it makes some sense that they try to hide that mode as it it free and the only really useful thing you'll have problem to find free alternative..

 

[Asiyura]

So I ripped The Matrix once more with handbrake, I used the following config:
Picture Settings:
Decomb : default
Denoise : weak
Deblock : 5
 
Video:
used H.264 codec at a constant quality of 20 
 
Audio:
Took the French and English audio channels
Codec : AC3
Bitrate : 224 for the french and 128 for the english (choose those values because they looked nice )
 
Subtitle :
Took the French and English ones
Unchecked Burned In
 
Didn't change anything else.



There is room for improvement, but on the pandora screen, it's ok.

EDIT : looks like there are some artifacts when going fullscreen, it's because my video is at 720*XXX pixels, the upscaling to 800*XXX mess up the quality (horizontal and vertical "lines" appears, like a grid)… I've been told that by encoding to 400*XXX it may fix this problem, side bonus : smaller files