Damn this is painful. I've got 3 DVDs with my TV appearances. I need to extract my segments, edit them together and add some captions and narration.
The desktop machine doesn't have a DVD player.
The backup machine has a DVD player/burner, but is woefully underpowered. Every time I try to rip files on it, it hangs.
My work laptop is a corporate XP lockdown model, so it won't even play a DVD, much less rip it.
So here's my kick-ass workflow:
1. Mount the backup box via SSH onto the desktop box.
2. Rip the VOB file directly to an MPG on the desktop. Now I've got a file, but can't edit it. Cinelerra, PiTivi, Kino, tried 'em all. None of them will play the file at real-time speed and keep the sound and video synced up.
3. So then I fire up WinSCP on the work laptop and copy the MPG file over. And it won't play at full speed. But I can ...
4. ... open the file in Movie Maker and export it as WMV. It takes about 40 minutes to convert a 6-minute clip, but after that it will play the WMV at full speed.
5. I can then import the WMV back into Movie Maker and do the editing and titles.
6. Then I can export as ... I don't know yet, MPG maybe?
7. Which I'll then have to copy back to the desktop box to ...
8. ... prepare the DVD image.
9. Then push the DVD image back onto the backup box, where I can finally ...
10. ... burn the DVD.
And all three boxes are within 2-3 G of full hard drives, so I'm having to delete intermediate files along the way.
Yes, I'm deleting what I can to make more room. Yes, I've tried every encoder combination to try to get a file that will play at full speed on both Linux and Windows boxes.