[mveg-9] Re: MVEG-9
- From: Colin Mckellar <blibblelibby@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: mveg-9@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 23 Nov 2002 09:22:19 +0800
Hi everyone, I am known as blibbler.
Sorry for taking so long to send this introduction, but I have just
been in the middle of some exams... they are all over (for another
year) so I am now very very happy.
My real name is Colin Mckellar. I was born in Canada, but I have lived
in Australia (WA) pretty much my whole life. I'm 21 (turning 22
shortly) and I study Maths, and Law.
I bought my G4 at the start of 2000. As it cost me about 2 years
earnings for me (at the time) I had an opinion that it should never be
allowed to rest... and I have probably let it have a total of about 1
months idle time in the last 3ish years (I also leave it on virtually
24/7)... In my quest to have it idle as little as possible, I initially
played around with Bryce 3d rendering (quite briefly), and a few other
CPU intensive programs. This was largely the reason why I initially
looked into DVD ripping.
My introduction to DVD ripping came when I was perusing the
comp.sys.mac.video (IIRC) newsgroup. Squished Squirrel Posted his
thoughts on mac DVD ripping. At the time, the only way to proceed was
to change the byte-code of MPEG2dec manually (the problem was the
version that was available did not combine the fields of the MPEG2...
so, each field was displayed separately, so, for progressive video, it
looked like every frame was being displayed twice (with minor changes).
I played around with DVD-riping/encoding a bit, but there were four
main problems:
1) the dvd ripping software only ripped one VOB at a time.. so you
could not extract the whole movie at once... Additionally, unless you
combined the MPEG2 files into one big MPEG2 file, you couldn't decode
the entire movie... and if you did, then the MPEG2 file was bigger than
2GB, so mpeg2dec wouldn't read it;
2) mpeg2dec was very very slow... it would *decode* at about 0.7fps on
my machine... it didn't do any scaling, and that was not including
encoding to another codec;
3) there was no free ac3 decoder... and the one that was available, did
not work well;
4) and there was no decent codec... Sorenson 2 was the best available,
but it was no better than MPEG2... so re-encoding a movie to fit onto a
CD was not realistic.
Anyway, things have changed dramatically since then (thank god). These
days I rip mainly for fun, and to pass the time. I spend most of my
time playing around with different codecs. Every time a new codec comes
out, I generally play around with it for a week or so, encode a few
movies and see how it compares. I actually paid 50USD for zygovideo pro
with the promise of a technically superior codec (wavelets are cool)...
however, it is useless for DVD ripping.
I have about 20 DVDs, yet I have encoded them all about 2-10 times
each, with different settings, codecs, etc.
I have made websites as an occupation in the past... and I have a
vague, continuing interest in HTML construction, and HTML
validation.... I don't have any experience with anything beyond
HTML+CSS+javascript, but if I can help with the construction of the
website, I am happy to help.
Colin aka blibbler.
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