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Showing posts from August, 2009

Converting the family videos from raw DV format to MP4 with Handbrake.

Going on 3 years in the parenting saga, we have a bunch of MiniDV tapes yet to be imported and shared with the family. I refused to use the built-in windows software as it doesn't support the most common or open formats, making an automatic "Windows Media Encode" out of the question. Finally, I found a solution that is, at this moment, about 75% of the way through the latest MiniDV tape. Steps and 3-line windows script (batch file) are: Import the raw DV files from your camcorder to disk. This part should be the easiest and requires little cpu, but a lot of temporary disk space (about 60G/hr). Install Handbrake if you haven't already. On Windows, the GUI download option now includes the CLI (command line interface). You can test one-off compression while tweaking settings in a mostly-complete UI. Note: Some options in the CLI are not yet in the Windows GUI, such as the latest de-interlacing option which uses less cpu while producing far higher quality video. R