About Me & My DVD Guides

About My Guides

Firstly, I’m not really an expert in either the Mpeg format or in DivX. Neither am I some kind of hacker or pirate in any sense of the word "Arrgh Jim Lad etc...". For a start I don’t have a wooden leg or a patch over one eye =o) I do not claim to have invented any of the major conversion methods. In fact, it would be hard for anyone to say they had invented them since all methods depend almost exclusively on the software and utilities that enthusiasts have produced for the purpose of both converting DVD's into another formats. I’m only explaining the things I have done so that you can try them.

It took me quite some time to learn how to do the DVD video conversions that I explain in my guides. When I started there wasn't really any websites on this subject like there are now. Most of the things I learnt I found out from discussions in IRC channels and by posting on Newgroups and HTML Forums. This was a time when DivX was not even known and everything was about making VCD's. There would have been no point using the DivX codecs if they existed anyway then, because so few had a computer with the needed CPU power to play one. It wasn't long before Flask Mpeg was in its first release stage and DVD2Mpeg Squeezer appeared. Both were basically total crud compared to what we use today! Flask couldn't do any sound or IFO parsing and the converted VCD were quite jerky and bad quality. Total Recorder was the greatest weapon for audio because it could record the sound out of absolutely anything. Once we had our movie and the audio it was usually necessary to stretch the audio to match the length to the video by using something like Cool Edit 96 - a very difficult process. Then the Xing Encoder was the favorite for multiplexing if you could get hold of it - yes, those were dark times for video conversion! Nowadays we are totally spoilt for choice, there are a million websites with full pictured tutorials giving us step by step guides on how to do just about everything! True, there is still no universal perfect method, but you really don't know how lucky you are.

I think I'm correct in saying that the Digital Digest guides were one of the first of the full pictured tutorial to appear. There were a few other text-only guides floating about but most were far too hard to understand. Most of the main guides you see here on this website were around a full year before the VCD guru websites such as the ever popular Doom9 even existed. Many of my later guides are also original and appeared here for the very first time, that is just in case you see copies of them floating around anywhere :). For example, the AVI cutting and Joining guides and MakeFilm guides were all exclusive to Digital Digest. The Subtitle ripping guides, Quality guides and Multimedia DivX guides were also completely original. It is possible that guides like them existed elsewhere, but to the very best of my knowledge not even similar guides had ever existed anywhere else before. All this is kind of an ego thing for me because I know the average person doesn't give two fu*ks about who did what first just as long as the method works! Its more so that people don't think I've just been copying from others.

Obviously my guides have gone through many changes as technology has advanced and new utilities have been created. My first DVD to DivX guide was the Mpeg2avi guide, but actually it now looks nothing like it did when I first made it. To name just a handful of the changes that have been updated since the DVD guides first appeared on Digital Digest: we do not need to use Ac3fix or Ac3CutFrames to repair defective audio from ac3dec conversions. We no longer need to use Total Recorder for our audio. New versions of VobDec appeared with GUI's such as CladDVD and Smartripper. Most multiangle or seamless branching DVD's do not need to be split by Vob ID with MpegUtils or VStrip and recombined with VobMerge to get the correct order anymore. Neither do we need to seperate the Ac3 audio from the Vob files to convert them to PCM. Flask has grown perhaps most of all, it has added audio support, then was added MP3 support and finally DVD Mode for IFO parsing for multiangle movie and subtitle support etc. Finally, we have the Flask Mpeg DeCSS program that can rip straight off of the CD in one shot! Of course the DeCSS is based on Vobdec and so is not illegal.

About Me

Not much to say really. I live in England. I'm in my early twenties. Tall, Dark, Handsom with a boyish grin etc...lol. Yes, I know what your thinking; he must be a short ugly looking basket =). I work as a traniee graphic artist in a small-time printing company. I consider myself a bit of an expert in Adobe Photoshop and photo retouching. I have a keen interest in video formats and compression. My first love has alway been art and at one time I used to sell oil and acrylic portraits on a regular basis. I'm a great fan of Simon Bisley, Boris Vallejo and many other of the great fantasy and science fiction artists.

I kind of joined up with Digital Digest because basically I wanted to put some guides on the internet somewhere to help people so they didn't need to spend as much time trying to get things working. At the time I wasn't too up on HTML and I also thought that if I created a website on a free webhost such as Xoom or Geocites it would just get lost in the huge mess we call the internet. I didn't believe anyone would read it because unless it appeared in the first two or three pages of an internet search engine no one would even know it existed. So I did a DVD search on the most popular search engines and had a look at what websites appeared. Digital Digest was up there with the best, looked really smart and already had a section on DVD conversion and related issues. So I made my first fully illustrated guide and sent it to them asking if they wanted to publish it - and the rest, as they say, is history...

Nick =^)