I hate trying out all these free software just to get free software. It usually leaves a lot of mess in my computer even if I reinstall them… It also makes me susceptible to viruses and opening unsafe sites. But what can I say? Free is free. So I am recommending software that I’ve tried and I hope it will help somebody out there like me–one who doesn’t want to be bothered with all these jargon in video processing. I just want to preserve the videos I take from my Canon DC-100 with minimal loss in quality and I want to do it fast and simple.

DVD Ripper. VOB to AVI. VOB to MPG. My pick would be FreeDVDRipper. It can rip DVD movies and convert DVD VOB-files to VCD, SVCD, DivX, MPEG1, MPEG 2, MPEG4, AVI files. The interface is very simple and you can possibly do without tweaking the default settings to be able to get a good quality rip It rips DVDs at about a 1:1 ratio compared to the actual length of the video… Quite acceptable for me.  The alternative to FreeDVDRipper would be Freez DVD Ripper.  One of my mini-DVDs had an error in the first part so and FreeDVDRipper couldn’t deal with it.  It doesn’t have a chapter by chapter conversion.  I used Freez DVD Ripper to rip the DVD and skip the damaged chapters.  What prevents me from using it as a primary Ripper is that I get errors when I line up multiple chapters to rip at one time.  For it to work, I have to rip the chapters one by one. It is comparable to Free DVD Ripper in speed but has more limited fileoutputs (MPEG4,XVID,AVI).

VRO to VOB converter. I accidentally changed the settings in my videocam and had one DVD record a VRO file. Eeek. While my windows media player can play VRO, it’s not such a popular format to be used in simple video editing software like Windows Movie Maker. I like to put together my small video files so I really have to store them in popular formats so I searched for a VRO converter. SOme have suggested a combo of VCDgear and TMPGEnc–too complicated steps for me. SOme of the other names that came up were DVDJr. (I couldn’t find the download link to this… grrrr!) , DVDMovieAlbum, and DVDWorkshop. On searching google, what was prominent is the AVS video tool but it’s just a trial download… so no thanks. What I recommend is the one that can be found http://www2.mnx.jp/~dle871/ It’s a software in Japanese. It turns out guessing what buttons to press was much easier than the other suggested methods to convert VRO to VOB. To use this, open the exe in the zip file. Then there is no need to fill in the two text fields in the opening window. Just press button with a label ‘T’. There are two browse buttons. The one at the top is intuitively for picking the source file. The one at the bottom is for picking the destination directory. After choosing source and destination, press the button ‘G’. Then, you’re done! Cool. Check out the vob files in the destination directory. Cool

Hope this helps! Does anyone know a free tool that can do all of this in one application?