Here is a quick tutorial on how to extract audio and video, or both on a Macintosh computer. MpegStreamclip is a free program, small in size, but a great tool for extracting video from DVD's.
There is one thing however that many users might have problems with however, and that would be a plugin for Quicktime, an MPEG 2 plugin. If you already have Final Cut Pro installed on your system, you won't run into any problems, but otherwise you might have difficulty in having the OS recognize some video or be able to export that video to another format without this plugin which costs about $20 from Apple.
However, you might find now that you will be fine in what your attempting to do. Click here to download Mpeg Streamclip.
Okay, now suppose we have a DVD in the drive, and we want to open it up and extract something from it, when the DVD was authored, the video's were broken down into smaller files. So, If I open up a file, I'll have to preview it to see what it is, and it might be cut off and begin again in a subsequent file. Perhaps you'll know what I mean as you look through the screen captures listed below.
Open up the file.
In this case we have a DVD in the drive, we'll open it, where we find a VIDEO-TS folder, containing the contents of the DVD.
The .VOB files are video files. You'll have to browse through them to find what part of the video you're looking for. Something that might be a problem, is the fact that you may have one full video on the disk, yet here you see many of them. This is because the DVD Authoring automatically broke them up into smaller segments.
VTS_01_1.VOB for example will end, but continue immediately with the sequence
VTS_02_0.VOB One or more of these might also be menu items as well. You will have need of a video editor if you have a splice in what you want to capture so as to put the two pieces back together again. Hopefully, any part you want to extract, is all contained in one file, without being split on two files.
Remember this is not a DVD ripper, and should not be sought to be. However, if you rip a DVD, you can then take the whole file into this program as well. A good recommendation of Ripping DVD's for the Mac would be Handbrake, and DVD Extractor.
If you edit with Final Cut Pro, you have the same keyboard shortcuts. Hit the letter L to fast forward, hitting it up to 4 times speading up the playback. J, rewinds, in same fashion. K plays normal speed, hit the spacebar to pause. So, remember J,K,L
J = Rewind
K = Normal speed
L = Fast Foward
Space Bar = pause, play
Now, also as in Final Cut Pro, where you want to make an "in" point, hit the letter i on the keyboard, 'I" for In, and for the out point, hit the letter "O" for out point. This selects the segment you want to extract.
Here is the Out point. You can see the segment of video selected in the timeline, as it's a bit darker in color. Remember hit "O" for outpoint. and "I" for Inpoint, which selects the section you want.
As you can see, there are many options here, which is glorious. You can even extract the compressed video to take back in and re-edit in an editor, say in Final Cut Pro, by chooseing DV. In our case, we are looking to convert this for the web, compressed iPod format or mp4.
Once we have choosen the option mp4, we have many options as listed above. We'll make things simple, and just click iPod up on the top corner, this will set things up for the web uploading we might want for an iPod, or to upload to youtube. Once we click iPod, the settings are set as indicated below, with a 320 x 240 screen size.
Name the file and save it where you need. Obviously, as this screen shot misleads, it cannot be saved in the current location, the DVD.
Hopefully this is a help. If you have any feedback or things are not clear, please indicate and send me a message. admin at awakeandarise dot org, or more visually accurate:
