Claire’s Random Thoughts

I cheated and opened my Christmas present a few days earlier. It was just too tempting to open after it came in the mail and I knew exactly what it was. I’m just wondering, where did the custom of wrapping presents and waiting impatiently to open them come from? If you spend money on something, wouldn’t you get your money worth most if you use whatever you bought as soon as possible?

Anyway, I got a Creative Vision W.

It seems pretty good, but it wasn’t as compatible as I had hoped. Apparently, it can play all mpeg formats, motion jpegs, divx versions 4 and 5, and xvid. Even though the box and manual claim xvid can be played, the video player won’t let me play the Densha Otoko episodes I downloaded from this site. By the way, it’s a pretty funny series. It’s about a nerdy guy who everybody hates who gets together with a really pretty woman.

I’ve gotten into DVD backups in the more compact divx format, since I want to put my movies on my portable player. If anyone is interested, then here’s how you do it: Please note that this process takes hours, but I have managed to find 100% free (and legal) programs to do it (of course this is not legal if you don’t own the DVD that you are ripping).

The first step is to use cladDVD to dump the entire disc on your hard drive to one video file. CladDvd is one of the only free programs that I have found that could rip the full DVD. It’s not even a trial, it’s completely free. This program is very easy to use. Simply run it with the DVd in the drive and click rip! This will not take too long, but please note that the file will be a few GB in size, about the same size as your DVD disc.

The next step is to use Dr. Divx to convert to a more compact file. Open up the giant file that you got from CladDvd in the Input Files area. I recommend that you constrain the file size to 700 mb, because the quality of those files is still excellent, but the size is only about 10% of the original. Not too shabby, is it? The converting to divx step takes up the most time, especially if you have a slow computer. I’m not sure exactly how long mine took for a movie, because I just left my computer on overnight to do it, but it should take at least a couple hours if you have a fast computer.

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