PDAs forum: Resizing movies

I use Virtual Dub. It may not be your cup of tea since you have to learn how to run it. I don't offer lessons on it but it's what I use and the price is free.

There is one issue and that you have a .VOB file which is a DVD encoded file. You may have to convert that to AVI first. I think I looked up VOB2AVI on google.com for a tool last time.

Bob

Heres one way of doing it:

A VOB file is a container file which will hold a video track, one or more audio tracks, and possibly some subtitles track. From the VOB file you want to extract the video file and the chosen audio file. If you still have the original disk, you can rip out the MPEG-2 video file and the AC3 audio file directly from the disk. Something like SmartRipper would work for this. If you just want to work with the VOB file thats already on your hard drive, the TMPG mpeg encoder has a built in splitter, although Im sure theres others if you Google around.

To play it back on a PDA, youll probably want to convert that AC3 audio track to something like a stereo MP3 file. Use the program BeSweet to make the MP3 file.

The regular version of VirtualDub wont work (it cant decode MPEG-2 video), but VirtualDubMod will. Import the MPEG-2 file, resize it (and any other filters that you may wish to apply), apply inverse telecine, compress it using your favorite video codec (something like DivX or Xvid would be good choices if youre using a player that supports them, if you want to encode the video into Windows Media, try Googling for wmv9VCM), and specify that MP3 file that was made in the last step as your audio stream.

Depending on how long the movie is and how fast your computer is, let it run for a few hours and you should have a move for your PDA.

Remember though, there are many ways of doing it, and above is just one (and free) way. Doom9.org offers some guides to DVD ripping, try reading though them for some ideas. Ripping a movie to your computer isnt very different than ripping one for your PDA, its just smaller and you have to make sure the movie doesnt become too complex for the PDA to handle.