I’m a sucker for a good movie trilogy… Star Wars, Godfather, Back to the Future, Pirates of the Carribean, Bourne, The Matrix (well, not so much the last two)… Especially Lord of the Rings. I own them all on DVD (multiple times as I double dipped for the extended versions of Fellowship of the Ring and Two Towers before I moved to America) so while I have 3 movies sitting in our vastly reduced DVD library (damn you Netflix and TiVo) I still made a point to watch the HD versions on TNT this weekend. Unfortunately we think out TiVo has a bad cablecard as it keeps resetting it’s self at irregular intervals, so recording a 3¾ hour is a bit like Russian Roulette until we can get it sorted out. Plus you have commercials to fast forward, and TNT’s on-screen graphics overlays… But I digress…
So after dealing with Fellowship, and getting halfway through the Two Towers, I gave up and now I’m starting to rip the extended DVDs of them for viewing soon. Why not just watch them you ask? Glad you asked… They are from the UK, therefore they are DVD Region 2, so no play, and even if they were Region free, the PlayStation3 doesn’t output a PAL signal as I found out with a few region free DVD’s I have. So rip I must or buy new ones (which I’m tempted to do) or wait and see if the mythical Blu Ray versions ever come out.
So for those following at home, here’s the things I do for an “easy” life…
- Insert DVD (duh!) also if you have 2 DVD drives in your desktop this helps a lot as you can have one permanently set to Region 2
- Use AnyDVD to rip to Hard Drive removing nasty things like region coding and the likes
- Use Handbrake to convert .vob to .mp4 or (for the easy life) .avi
- Use VirtualDub to join the two .avi files (2 discs you see)
- Burn to a data DVD and put that in PS3
- Done!
Reasonable simple, but as an XviD avi, you lose the 5.1 surround and alternate commentaries, or at least I’m yet to find a way that works. As an m4v I could use the AC3 direct sound to get surround sound/alternate commentaries, but it takes forever to transcode, especially if you want to upscale it to 720 for faux-HD, plus I’m yet to find a route to join 2 m4v files that works well enough to do this particular task with it…
This is the kind of thought process that takes up my Sundays, but rarely do I get the time to act upon it…