GKauten Consultingv1.2

Have you ever wanted to take your home made DVDs and upload them to YouTube, or some other video sharing site, but couldn’t figure out how to go from that massive DVD format into a usable web format? Well in order to do this, you need to first convert the DVD content into a usable format. There are of course several different formats you could use such as MWV, AVI, MP4, and so on. But the question is, how do you get the content from your DVD into one of these formats that you need? Enter the realm of conversion software. If you have ever done a search on Google, or your search engine of choice, then chances are you were bombarded with 30+ different software websites, countless forum board discussions, and several UseNet type groups all discussing how to go about doing this. More than enough to throw the average user into a state of panic and search overload.

There are usually several free methods available when you want to convert from one format to another, but the problem with free software is you really have no idea what sort of quality will result or if it will actually do what it claims to. Often times several of these programs are built from the same threads you see on the forums about installing 12 different codecs, 4 different software programs, and ultimately converting your movie 6 or 7 different times before it ends up in the format you wanted. This can be a relatively neat thing if you want to save some money, but at the same time you may find yourself wasting a lot of time and ultimately walking away with a greatly reduced quality of video. Sometimes though depending on the format you start with, and the format you want to convert to, there will be that one lovely piece of software you can download for free which does exactly what you want. The only downside is you more or less have to hit the requirements dead on or else you won’t end up with much.

I personally was one of those people who would much rather go the free route, download all sorts of codecs and applications, all in an attempt to convert my DVDs and other video files from one format to another. In retrospect though, I did spend a fair amount of time ripping my hair out when things wouldn’t work, or worse, when the video worked perfectly the audio would all of the sudden disappear. This of course was when I was using a Windows XP machine where audio and video manipulation software is available all over the place. Once I upgraded to a Vista machine, the same support just wasn’t there anymore and I eventually had to give up after failing several times over to find a process that worked. Though the reduced stress from not messing with the problem anymore has been rather nice. Until recently that is when a client came to me with a special needs case.

Every once in a while I will have a client who will have an advertising video, or public appearance type of video that they want to convert over and upload to social networking and media share sites. Most of the time they come in a relatively usable format already and I just need to clean it up a bit, maybe split it out into a few different parts to reduce overall file size, etc… This time however the movie had been published off to a home made DVD by the person who recorded the event. There are of course several software suites available that will let you rip a DVD to your computer. If you have ever looked at a DVD file system before though you will notice videos come in VOB and IFO formats… Not exactly something you just load up into Windows Media Player or iTunes and walk away happy. You need something to take those files and convert them out to a usable format, and in my case, the Windows Media format WMV.

After playing around with a few different trial versions of conversion software I settled on the Xilisfot DVD to WMV Coverter 5. The price was a little more than I would have liked to have paid coming in at $29.99 but when compared to the price of others, it was relatively competitive. What ultimately sold me on their software was how friendly it was to use. Right out of the box you can start converting movies over without having to set up and special settings or downloading supporting codecs. For the more experienced user you can quickly adjust and fine tune other settings such as audio and video output qualities, video size, audio channels, and file split. The interface makes everything quite simple so there is no rocket science involved to get the results you want. Overall the application was under 10 MB to download, I made my purchase with PayPal very easily, and had my software license in my inbox almost immediately before PayPal had even loaded my receipt page. Anyways, here is a little bit more information from their website:

Company: Xilisoft Corporation

Website: http://www.xilisoft.com

About: Xilisoft is an award-winning supplier in video and audio converting software field. Our product portfolio ranges from video tools, audio tools, DVD tools, iPod tools and mobile tools, etc. The products are available worldwide in English, Japanese, German, French, Italian and Chinese, on both Microsoft Windows and Apple’s Mac OS X platforms. Furthermore, Xilisoft has also built up an efficient marketing network, which has attracted more than ten million users.