Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

The Giant Orange Man Baby is having a bad day.

When we show up, we win.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

… gradually, and then suddenly.

American History and Black History can not be separated.

Putin dreamed of ending NATO, and now it’s Finnish-ed.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

I desperately hope that, yet again, I am wrong.

Pelosi: “He either is stupid, or he thinks the rest of us are.” Why not both?

Washington Post’s Catch and Kill, not noticeably better than the Enquirer’s.

Cole, when it comes to calico cats, restraint is overrated.

If you cannot answer whether trump lost the 2020 election, you are unfit for office.

This country desperately needs a functioning Fourth Estate.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

“The defense has a certain level of trust in defendant that the government does not.”

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

A lot of Dems talk about what the media tells them to talk about. Not helpful.

Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.

You are here: Home / Science & Technology / Alright. Now for Vista

Reader Interactions

40Comments

  1. 1.

    Billy K(hrushchev)

    Oh, come on, John. You should know by now it’s not possible to actually do anything with Vista.

  2. 2.

    Punchy

    just have Tunch pound on yo keyboard a few times with his paws. you’ll get just as good a response from Vista than if u akshullie tried to download sumpin

  3. 3.

    infoshaman

    Use Vista to contact friends with Macs or Linux boxes and ask them to do the task. Or you could contact Jerry Seinfeld: He’s a Microsoft expert, and he’s got time on his hands.

  4. 4.

    Laura W

    John, when do the pre-debate Balloon Juice parties commence?
    I can’t stay up till 9 without large doses of snark and booze to keep me wired.

  5. 5.

    CIRCVS MAXIMVS MMVIII

    Oh, come on, John. You should know by now it’s not possible to actually do anything with Vista.

    This is true. I used to be an expert at organizing folders and files for my own purposes, now I can’t even find half of the files on my computer. ARGH!

    Vista sucks, unfortunately. And I’m stuck with it.

  6. 6.

    MikeL

    "I need something to rip and something to edit using Windows Vista."

    I don’t doubt that you believe this to be true – but you are wrong. You don’t need anything that needs Vista.
    Nothing at all.

  9. 9.

    The

    I’ve found that some discs just will not copy with handbrake. It just will not work. The same thing happens. You’re scanning source, it crashes, gives you the three choice option of report, restart or ignore, right? Try shutting down, leaving off for a couple minutes, starting fresh, putting in different disc. If that disc works, try the first disc again. If you get the same problem, it’s def. the disc.

    You may want to try something like DVD Decrypter at this point.

  11. 11.

    cleek

    edit with virtual dub (there are links in the last post).

    there are many apps out there to rip with. i use Xilisoft’s DVD Ripper (but it’s not free), but people in that last thread linked to plenty of free Windows DOD rippers.

  13. 13.

    KM

    You might want to try CamStudio – its a free program that records whatever is streaming on your computer. It’s pretty simple: http://camstudio.org/

    When you have what you want to record set up, you just click the record button on CamStudio and it opens a window that you then place over the video running on your computer and it records it. Then click the stop button and it exports it as an avi file that you can then upload directly to YouTube.

    You’ll probably have to mess around with the sound settings until you find the one that works, but it’s pretty simple. The quailty is not great, but it does the job.

    It’s also useful for grabbing things that are designed to prevent you from downloading them.

  15. 15.

    The Other Steve

    I honestly have never tried to do what you are doing. I’ll try it when I get home and see if it works.

    Is this a problem with copy protection, or something else?

  16. 16.

    tripletee (formerly tBone)

    For ripping: DVD Decrypter 3.5.4 (the last released version – Google it, I’m not vouching for any links)

    If that doesn’t work, AnyDVD.

    What did you use for editing on the Mac side?

  18. 18.

    Axe Diesel Palin

    Lots of folks recommended the free DVD Decryptor for Windows. http://www.dvd-wmv.com is a friendly UI in front of a bunch of free Windows tools (including DVD Decryptor).

    It is easy to use, you just don’t necessarily want to do the WMV encoding step because it takes a long time….

    I think you can skip that step and edit one of the intermediate files in Windows Movie Maker (which comes free with Windows).

  19. 19.

    J. Maynard Gelinas

    RE: Handbrake: It won’t rip the entire DVD – menus and all. It just converts the MPEG2/mp3 file to MP4/AAC (IIRC). Which is fine if your video editing software will accept that format.

    Mac The Ripper rips the entire DVD to a subdirectory, all ~7GB of it. From there Handbrake or ffmpegx can convert it for you, at much faster speed since you’re cross-coding from disk and not a DVD. Of course, you’ll still have to rip off the DVD anyway – so going MtR could wind up being a time waster if all you want is workable video.

    I like MtR 3. It will copy absolutely anything on DVD.

  20. 20.

    DrDave

    John:

    You may also want to download DVD43 which is a free decryption program that unlocks the protection coding on DVD’s. You start the program and it runs in the background with an icon on the taskbar. When you load a DVD in the drive, you see the icon change faces and when it is green and smiling, the disk is "open" so any ripping program can access its contents.

    I have never gotten Handbrake to work well on my PC using XP and do not have Vista but in cases where I wanted to burn or edit DVD’s on the PC, I usually have to rip the DVD on the Mac and then transfer the Video TS file over to the PC via network or flash drive.

  21. 21.

    michael

    you’ll hate me for this, but: go to http://www.mplayerhq.hu and get the windows binary of mplayer/mencoder. That allows you to rip parts out of a dvd nicely as soon as you’ve figured out the correct command. Also, you might want ffmpeg for a commandline converter-to-flv. But that’s probably not the kind of answer you were looking for.

  23. 23.

    The Other Steve

    I used DVD Decrypter and DVD shrink all the time. But I never try to bring the video into an editor. I’m just compressing it and writing it back out.

    I also have used dvd43, anydvd and such at times to get around certain "problems".

  24. 24.

    SamFromUtah

    I might as well just delete this f-ing post.

    Like you could have expected anything else…

    I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve had to point out that "Why would you want to do that?!?!?!!!1" isn’t actually tech support. As such.

  25. 25.

    Ty Lookwell

    AnyDVD to rip the DVD to your hard drive.

    VirtualDubMod to edit one of the resulting .VOB files which contains the video segment you want to post. Then, again with VirtualDubMod, save the edited video segment into the converted format you prefer.

    VirtualDubMod requires a little bit of learning, but is such a valuable tool that it is worth the time and effort. AnyDVD is super simple and straightforward.

  26. 26.

    Ty Lookwell

    I should add that enough people here are comfortable using VirtualDubMod that they could help with any editing/saving questions, I’m sure.

  27. 27.

    Cain

    you’ll hate me for this, but: go to http://www.mplayerhq.hu and get the windows binary of mplayer/mencoder. That allows you to rip parts out of a dvd nicely as soon as you’ve figured out the correct command. Also, you might want ffmpeg for a commandline converter-to-flv. But that’s probably not the kind of answer you were looking for.

    God no. The whole blog will be nothing about mplayer posts… people might confuse this blog as a tech one.

    cain

  29. 29.

    Cris v.3.1

    I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve had to point out that "Why would you want to do that??1" isn’t actually tech support. As such.

    or "install linux problem solved lol"

  32. 32.

    bvac

    Handbrake works fine for me in Vista. What do you mean the scan keeps failing? Try loading a .VOB file and take it from there. Use Virtual Dub for simple editing.

  36. 36.

    The Dangerman

    If all you are doing is ripping sound, why isn’t it identical to what you would use to record an analog recording (we used to call them LP’s)? All you have to do is run the sound out to your soundcard and then use any readily available sound editor? Indeed, Audacity MIGHT do it; I know Roxio does. Not that I’m a huge Roxio fan; there’s features (we used to call them bugs) with XP from here to there.

  38. 38.

    Jamie Jamison

    John, one kludgy work-around would be to rip the DVD on your Mac using FairMount

    http://www.metakine.com/products/fairmount/

    copy the resulting VIDEO_TS folder to your Vista system and then use Handbrake to convert the file to M4V or MP4. I’ve had problems on both the Macintosh and the PC with getting Handbrake to rip a DVD directly from the disc. My procedure now on the Macintosh is to use Fairmount to copy the DVD to my hard drive and then rip it with Handbrake. Unfortunately I don’t know of any good freeware ripping programs for Vista, but if you can find one Handbrake will do the rest for you and is the best program that I’ve worked with for the PC and the Macintosh.

    If you find a way to do this on Vista would you let us know? It would be handy knowledge to have.

    Thanks,

    Jamie

  39. 39.

    call_me_ishmael

    I just ripped something like this yesterday with freedvdripper

    Worked OK, although the divx codec it ripped the video clip to was a little to new for mplayer v9. I think you can set the output codec, though.

  40. 40.

    Faux

    On a Mac:
    Mac the Ripper 3 will rip most things, quicker than Fairmount. It is a simple select a folder and it rips. If it freezes or quits and asks you to reopen, just use Fairmount.

    Fairmount will rip the rest, but takes longer. After it gets done loading, you just pull the whole folder (or at least the VIDEO_TS folder) from the CD to a folder of your choosing.

    Handbrake isn’t really a ripper. It’s a converter that happens to be able to pull from the DVD. I don’t recommend it for ripping because it disc accesses your DVD drive far too much and causes extra wear for not any gain.

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