Backing up Commercial DVDs

The US copyright law allows us to make a backup of our commercial DVDs that we legally own, but unfortunately, the existing DVD burning software such as NERO refuses to reproduce this copy-protected media. If you have a DVD player and CD burner in your PC, this article provides a solution to exercise your legal rights back up your DVD movies for safekeeping and archival purposes.

The Solution

Convert them to compressed data (DIVX) movies or similar format.

This method results in only being able to view the movie (in general) on your PC, unless you have a DVD player that supports DIVX formats, or can connect a PC to your television screen. Within the next few years, we will continue to see a convergence between personal computers and televisions. Many of the newer digital flat-panel television screens now provide you with a standard 15 pin D-sub VGA connector with which you can attach a computer equipped with a DVD player.

Another benefit of this back-up method is that it provides a means of starting a total-home multimedia collection where you don’t have to actually find any given DVD – you can just pick it from a list on your computer and play the movie, anywhere in the house where we have a wirelessly connected computer. Watch a movie on your laptop, from anywhere, for example. The down side is you won’t get the previews or other features of the DVD, unless you specifically elect to back those up too (see below).

Install and open the program called DVD Master Backup (a free, open-source download at this link: http://www.brothersoft.com/dvd_video/dvd/dvd_master_backup_42177.html

After a small donation nag screen, you get this:

My DVD drive is E:, yours may be a different letter. Most commonly this would be D:

Title number: You have to examine the contents of your commercial DVD under “My Computer” or Windows Explorer to find out which movie is the main feature. Most DVDs will have a directory called VIDEO_TS in which you will find the actual movie files. With the DVD I just saved, THE MACHINIST, I noticed that most of the larger files (greater than 1 million KB) started with VTS_03. The other files in there were presumably out-takes, previews, and other stuff. So I picked Title number 3. I opted for the NTSC standard.

I created and used a directory called C:\DVDBackup as my data drive. I made this available on our home network so that anyone can pick up the movies. Under AVI filename, enter the name of the motion picture DVD you are backing up. I used THE_MACHINIST in this case.

Click “GO.” It will take about 35 to 50 minutes or more to decode and crunch each DVD to a file. The program will read the files on the DVD and then go through a number of translations (automatic) and the resulting movie will be packaged under a /divx directory. This can be burned to a DVD as plain data (i.e., no worries about copy protection).

Each movie will take up from 400 to 500mb (estimate about ½ of a gigabyte on average). Of course you could always use Nero to burn these DIVX files to an ordinary data DVD for safekeeping and to free up the space on the hard disk drive. Nero will make data DVDs, but on’t copy protected DVDs to their native (commercial) format.

Copying Commercial DVDs to DVD blank media

Don’t be fooled by these programs! They can copy DVD to DVD, but in very many cases, the DVD you want to copy is protected and cannot be read by this software! I am sure glad I found out about this before shelling out $39.99 to $59.99 for any of these programs!

Mike Moore

PDF Extraction / Conversion

I don't often review commercial products, but here's a niche that simply has not been filled (at least on the Windows platform) in the Open Source community: PDF conversion programs.

There are plenty of packages out there that convert format X (word, text, autocad) to PDF files, in part because that's usually the direction of conversion we're going, and also of the abominably expensive nature of the native Adobe products that would like to find their way to your desktop and into your wallet for this process. But going in the other direction, PDF to text, Word, or Rich Text, is just not something we do very often. When you do find yourself with a need to do this, the privilege is going to cost you from $25 to $100.

Thanks to my special relationship to these vendor's customers, I've been able to borrow the various software for purposes of taking a look at it. The "winner" of this stand off will be awarded with something I rarely employ - real money for software.

Now, why would you want to deconstruct a PDF file into its component text and graphics so you can read it with something else? After all, PDF was created with the express purpose of having an open platform that can read documents in their native configurations without having to buy the corresponding software. There are at least two reasons I can think of.

First, one may wish to convert a PDF file to something else when the authors of that document wish to artificially fix the document's information so that it cannot be changed or filled out, if it's a form. Similarly, authors of PDF files have various other restrictions that can be embedded into PDFs that might prevent one from saving or even printing the form out. Therefore, in some cases it's handy to convert the document into something that you actually can manipulate, save and transmit electronically. A perfect example of this is a PDF file that is made of an Excel table. By design, Excel output should be interactive, but it usually is not when distributed as a PDF. If we could find some utility to extract the table and put it back into an Excel form that would be a real solution.

Secondly, you may have occasion to view a PDF file on an incompatible device - say, an electronic book, a PDA, a cell phone, or even a game device such as the Sony PSP. All manner of devices are becoming reading tools these days, and they don't all support PDF. It was this latter reason that found me on the road to converting PDF to something else - almost anything else would do. As most of you know, I am a fan of JPT (just plain text), and that is usually the format I go for when I have a choice. It is a flexible as it can be, because there is no device that can't display text in one form or another.

I've had my eye on a new Sony E-book PRS-500, which actually can view PDFs, but the e-book I am using now, the REB1000 (made by RCA and Gemstar and now out of production), cannot. I want to bequeath this old standby reader to my son, but many of the titles I'd like to put on that machine are in PDF format, and need to be converted to text or DOC format, then subsequently converted to the .RB standard for the REB1000.

A couple of disclaimers are in order, before I go into this comparison. There is one Open Source product that may help you convert from PDF to text, and that is Ghostscript and its graphical front-end, Ghostview. Ghostscript and its viewer companion Ghostview provide the same PDF reading capability as Adobe's free PDF reader, which is now in version 8. When this product was in version 6, Adobe had added so much crap to the reader that it loaded only with difficulty on older machines, and I was advocating the use of Ghostscript as a replacement for the Adobe product at that time. Even now, Adobe Reader wants to phone home and update itself at an alarming rate, and software that does this, in my opinion, is tempting to bad people. Every time your computer ventures out to the internet intent upon downloading executable code, that process is fraught with opportunity for those people that would harm your computer just for kicks. Ghostscript does not do a great job rendering complex PDFs, but it works well enough and I use it in computing environments that absolutely have to remain stable and where I don't want the processing bandwidth to be interrupted by vendors that feel you "just gotta have" their latest update.

Anyway, Ghostscript and Ghostview do have the capability of extracting plain text from a PDF document. So if your document is plain, unformatted text, these two free programs might be just what you need and you would avoid the cost and hassle of having one more utility program to deal with.

If you have more complex forms, such as spreadsheets, photos, and GIF files in your PDF, you need something more powerful to deal with them, and that is what this comparative review is about.

Note that if your original PDF file contains an image of text, as in someone simply taking a book and scanning it to a JPEG image, virtually nothing is going to be converted. For this case, you would need Optical Character Recognition(OCR) software to get the images of each letter translated into actual text. So if you get the warning on any of these programs that says "No text was converted." That means there was no text in your original PDF - if it shows up as text it must be images of text instead of actual text. Perhaps someday soon we'll do a review of OCR software. If you own a scanner or multi-function printer, you may already have OCR software on your computer.

I reviewed these programs to convert PDF to other formats:

PDF Grabber 4.0 (Euro 32.77)

ABC Amber PDF ($12.95 or free with the purchase of their text converter software, $24.95)

Solid Converter PDF ($49.99 or $99.99 for the PRO version, which converts to more formats, including extracting tables to Excel)

PDF to Word v1.2 ($39.95)

SmartPDF Converter ($39.90 +$9.80 per year for support & maintenance)

Abbyy PDF Transformer ($99.99)

Each of these has a semi-functional demo version that can be downloaded to try for free, though some of them require that you give up an e-mail address for the privilege. Some of the vendors, I suspect, are rather lax about documenting the features of the program that do not work in the trial copy. For example I took the Solid Converter PDF product for a spin and it seemed to work better then many of these, but it would not save the converted file - citing an error about how I may not have permissions on the target drive. If this is a means of crippling the trial version so that I'll pay for the right to use it, fine, but I would like to know this up front because these error messages will be reported as errors in critical reviews.

I start with the least expensive, ABC Amber PDF, now in version 2.04. This software provider has dozens of different software products for conversions, and if you buy the one called ABC Amber Text converter, they throw in the PDF converter free. The text converter is $24.95.
This utility defaults to only converting one page, so you have to remember to set it to convert every page. It does fine for text, but does not have a lot of options for lining up other elements like JPegs and charts. It progressed reasonably fast, converting 498 pages of one PDF in about 1 and 1/2 minutes. There is a handy log file that shows by default at the bottom of the screen that tells you what it's doing.

ABC Amber's interface looks as if it's going to let you convert to up to 40 or more formats, but that's a little misleading because you have to have Microsoft's conversion pack installed to get to most of those formats, but it does do a great job of extracting text from a PDF. The input file size was just over 800kb and the output RTF (Word) file was over 2 megabytes. I've noticed inflation of file size to be a problem in general with PDF extraction software. I did notice that Microsoft Word had trouble loading the finished file, but WordPad opened it fine and the formatting looked good.

PDF Grabber had a professional interface with many conversion options, particular as it relates to formatting the results most like the original. It was slower however, converting 133 page file in about 6 minutes. By default, the resulting converted file is saved to a directory in My Documents, which can be a little disorienting. It would be better if the default save directory was the same as the import directory. The trial version places "X" at random locations in the converted file until you pay for the program. Before exiting the program, there is a confusing screen that asks about whether you want to include the fonts it could not find. I think it's asking if it's okay to replace unknown fonts in the original with similar windows fonts, but I'm not sure.

Looks like a good buy for the money though.

In spite of it's name, PDF2WORD actually only allows transitioning a PDF to its RTF conversion, which is best viewed in Microsoft WordPad, but it does convert faithfully, including images. For the $40 price tag though, I don't see a lot of features here. A log file to see what has been done and what is left to do, for example. This one initially through out a lot of weird error messages too, but maybe I was using PDFs that were not 6.0 compatible.

SmartPDF Converter Pro does not allow you to save your converted file but I guess that is the reason this is trial software. They should say that in the documentation though, not let me discover it as an error. I also found this one too expensive for what it can do.

Abbyy PDF Transformer, like other Abbyy products lay out a bunch of icons on the desktop that I didn't ask for. Sorry guys, that automatically disqualifies you. Some of these products offer to turn your converted PDFs from WORD or some other format back into PDFs. I couldn't really figure out how this was a feature. There are so many free applications that make PDFs, I didn't think this was a plus.

That leaves SolidConverterPDF. This one, I think might be the winner. Rather than complain and crap out when it encounters fonts in the PDF for which it has no match, it simply replaces them with Arial. There are more formatting options to get your finished document to look like the original, and it will convert tables by default. And it writes to the .DOC final format without having Microsoft Word installed. There is also real time logging of what it's doing so you know what happened if it doesn't work. My only complaint is it's a little slow, and it won't write the finished file and yields an error message. If this is the software complaining it's not registered, then you should tell me that, don't just jury rig the program to fail because it looks like an error in the program.

Michael Moore

Videodownloader

Every once in a while, I encounter an internet video so stunning and poignant, I really want to share with anyone who would appreciate. For some reason, kids doing amazing things fall into this category. Take for example this YouTube video of a nine year old playing Hugo's Impromptu in C-sharp minor.

On YouTube and all other video meccas, you can share the link, but it's difficult or impossible to download an actual movie file. This is the difference between streaming media and multimedia files like Mpegs, AVI's and other video formats. From the standpoint of the video web page like YouTube or MySpace, they have more control over the media (as if they deserve any) if they reserve the right to stream it only from their site. It's all about click revenue; the more they can get people coming back to the site, the more their advertising links are worth.

Streaming links point to server-side RealMedia(.rm), RealVideo (.ram) and other types of links that yield the final product a little at a time, like sipping pine sap through a thin straw. There is no "download" button that gets you a full file.

If you were able to simply package up the entire media into one large video file, you could share that without any requirement that the viewer return to the site from which it was sprung. You might be tempted to cry foul from a copyright standpoint, until you realize that the big video sites do not hold a copyright on the videos they house. They are much more like libraries than bookstores.

You can actually capture streaming video into a file, but up until now you had to pay for the privilege by purchasing software. Now comes the open source software VideoDownloader
in the v0.3 alpha release. Note that if you have an outbound firewall, you will have to give permission to VideoDownloader to access the streaming site. Here's a shot of the VD in action:

Just key or paste in the streaming site URL and click "Download," and the VideoDownloader goes to work collecting the stream into a file type of your choice.

Since I've been doing far too much raving in here lately, I have to pan something. I'll pick on the name. I would have liked to have seen a snazzier name, but I guess Open Source is not about marketing, not in the usual sense any way. Here's a couple of names to consider for the innovators of this great utility:

DreamStream
RealCapture
Got Stream?
YouToo (MeToo, MeTube)
"I don't want to and you can't make me"
MyTube
Clean Catch

Mike

Rigid Chips v1.2

I got this link from the Make Blog
entry of Make Magazine fame. Not much in the way of support buzz on the download link site, perhaps because the originators of this great simulator are Japanese.

What we have here is a scripting language that compiles to rigid body constructs that move in a virtual world according to physical constraints, such as gravity, wind resistance and wheel torque that can be toggled on and off as the viewer sees fit. The screen capture above is the default rigid chips vehicle. Without even reading anything, I learned quickly how to control the vehicle using the arrow keys. To give you an idea of how modular this system is, here is the text code that describes this vehicle and the operating environment in which it is immersed:

//BasicCar
Val
{
Brake(default=0,min=0,max=80,step=80)
HBrake(default=0,min=0,max=100,step=100)
Handle(default=0,min=-20,max=20,step=5)
Engine(default=0,min=-2500,max=2500,step=2500)
}
Key
{
0:Engine(step=-500)
1:Engine(step=500)
2:Handle(step=-0.5)
3:Handle(step=0.5)
7:Brake(step=30),HBrake(step=20)
8:HBrake(step=20)
}
Body {
Core(){
N:Chip(){
N:Rudder(angle=Handle){
W:Frame(){
W:Wheel(angle=90,brake=Brake){
}
}
E:Frame(){
E:Wheel(angle=90,brake=Brake){
}
}
}
}

---------------------0(you get the idea)0----------

From that I guess you can imagine there are some pretty wild vehicles, including a four wheel drive truck and a bike that steers using a balancing stick figure. There's also an airplane with a jet pack controlled by the A and Z keys.

Rigid Chips appears to be a great learning tool suited for an engineering class, but it's a whole lot of fun to play with too. Pressing the '1' key suspends gravity, which makes your collection of chips behave solely on the basis of wind and centripetal forces of its spinning wheels, or from the jet pack included with some of the vehicles.

F8 through F12 control a dizzying array of viewpoints. What a fun tool!

RigidChips is for Windows computers and requires Direct X version 8.0 or later.

Translated from the source's Wiki:

In Rigid Chips, various objects can be freely produced by combining parts, and setting the script to them.
Moreover, it is also possible to do various play by using the produced object by setting the script (Without using it according to circumstances). The multi play can be also possible, and it play by the network by two or more people.

Hoping to find more scripts and racetracks, I did find a Rigid Chips "laboratory" site, but you need to view it (assuming you can't read Japanese) as a Google translation, here. The site where apparently a networking version of the RigidChips environment can be downloaded is here.

It's a little frustrating wading through the translated pages, but there does appear to be a lot more models out there than the default scripts that come with the 1.2 release. Possibly I'm not using the right build, but there definitely are different track layouts. Put everything in the /data directory and have fun!

Mike

Timidity++ 2.13.2

My search for a free, quality MIDI player has found a mark!

I've been looking for a MIDI player that combines the ability to read Musical Instrument Digital Interface files and play them back using high quality sampled instruments for years. I don't really know how this free application slipped through the cracks, but it sounds like a million bucks!

Up until now most MIDI clients used the sound card's codecs to output wave music and the result was sometimes okay, but usually tinny and sounding like a video game from 1985. I was nearly to the point of investing in a really expensive sound card, but I knew that an off the shelf sound card that has the capability to sample and digitize sounds should be able to make MIDI sound like real music. The magic is in software, not hardware.

Timidity is very different than your standard MIDI client, and ads some neat bells and whistles for those of you who understand mixing and sampling. Try it, I guarantee you will be pleasantly surprised.

Here's a screen shot.




By default, this sets itself up through OLE to read files that end in .MID automatically, so you can double click on a MIDI file and expect it to play. You can also direct the program to an entire folder of MIDI files and it will play them one by one, or randomly.

As with many open source projects, there are ports to other operating systems besides Windows XP, including Linux and Windows 95. Splendid work!

But it would be slighting this package to describe Timidity as a MIDI client. From the web site:

TiMidity++ is a software synthesizer. It can play MIDI files by converting them into PCM waveform data; give it a MIDI data along with digital instrument data files, then it synthesizes them in real-time, and plays. It can not only play sounds, but also can save the generated waveforms into hard disks as various audio file formats.

TiMidity++ is free software, distributed under the terms of GNU general public license.

While on the subject of MIDI, for serious collectors of MIDI files, shy away from so-called "free" MIDI web sites. They are not, and if they are, you generally don't want what goes along with agreeing to whatever they want you to agree to (most likely spam or adware).

Use a Usenet News client such as XNEWS, and check out the newsgroup alt.binaries.sounds.midi. Of course the only drawback to plundering usenet is you end up with a great deal of everything, and not necessarily the piece you are looking for.

I need a "Midi Sorter."

Enjoy!

Mike

Scrutico to extract icon images

Awhile back I reviewed PhotoFiltre, a free photo editor from Antonio Da Cruz that is, by the way, available in a simply amazing number of languages. While these apps are not open source, they are free, and that's nice!

The same outfit gives us Scrutico, which scans a directory for icon files, or executable files that contain embedded icons. The program also allows the operator to extract embedded icons as Windows .ico files, which I understand to be, effectively, small and low resolution bitmap (BMP) files.

There are a host of utilities out there to help us create icons, but Scrutico unveils so many icon images that I had no idea were on my computer, that I would hesitate to go to the trouble of creating new icons.

Scrutico does not require installation, does not apparently write anything to the Windows Registry, and can be run from a USB drive. It's downside is that the program's interface is in French. This was not a drawback for me since the little utilities tool bar contained fairly descriptive pictographs, and Scrutico is so simple in operation it's a snap, even in French.

Here is a screen shot of the icon images it found embedded in .EXE files in my c:\windows directory:



Allow me to translate:

Dossier de recherche: "File of research" This would be the directory that Scrutico searches for icon images.

Fichiers: "Files" This is actually one of four different file extensions for files that icon images can reside in - EXE, DLL, ICO and ICL.

Limite, I assume, is the limit beyond which Scrutico will stop looking for icon files.

The button is the "go" button. It starts Scrutico to work, and the utility works blindingly fast, finding a list of icons embedded in EXE files, as specified.

The button is what you press when you want to export (extract) the image and turn it into an actual icon (ico) file. Some of them, of course, may already be in this form, in which case the extraction process is really just a file copy operation. Note that this button is grayed out and not usable until you select one or more of the images to export. Hold your Ctrl key down as you click on the images if you want to extract more than one at a time. Then when you do the extraction, and standard explorer window pops up that allows you to direct where you want the newly minted icons to go. Give the icon an expressive name, then click "Save" and your done!

Now, what would I use all these icons for anyway? Right now I can only think of one use - older games that for whatever reason have not been assigned an icon, and come out looking like this on your desktop: , which is not very inspiring!

Searching the world far and wide for you, I remain....

Mike Moore

PS: Merci Antonio!

Batch converting of graphics files

Open Source and Freeware mantra: If there's a need for something, there's gotta be something out there to do it, given enough time.

Enough time has passed for Easy Graphic Converter from Etrusoft.com to mature to version 1.2.0

Running on any flavor of Windows starting with Windows 95, this image converter does the job quickly and without fuss, and is completely free with no nags to buy anything else. If you have a need to convert entire directories of graphics files from one format to another, with an optional renaming and resizing, this is a free non-spyware app that will perform quickly and silently with very little learning curve.

Etrusoft is also famous for a shareware screen capture program, a screen saver maker and a Camtasia-like quick screen recorder.

I have had a four-CD collection of Science Fiction images for years, but they were all in .BMP format, which is way too bulky and not the best image format for creating icons and illustrating e-mails. I wanted them converted to JPG or some graphics format that is easier to handle.

Since Easy Graphic Converter has an option to point to an input source directory as well as individual files, I didn't even have to select the files within each subdirectory. Here's a shot of the Options screen for this excellent utility:

Easy Graphics Converter tore through this directory full of BMP files in about 6 seconds, converting them to JPG format.



All for now!

Mike Moore