I am trying to rip DVDs to a little MP3 player, which appears to be a Herculean task.
After much stuffing around with various utilities that did not work I used DVD Decriptor to disk, DVDx to an AVI file, and then the MP3 players' supplied converter to their magic format.
But then I stupidly uninstalled the many crap utilities that I had collected and DVDx stoped working. Does not produce .avi files.
"Failed to initialize video codec. Check export format (YUY2, RGB)."
Could still produce mpeg1 files (slowly) but tended to truncate the end (I pressed WHOLE). I suspect it had been using a good codec, and then after my clean up started using an internal or crappy one.
I tried reinstalling both DVDx and DivX a few times, and rebooting, to no avail. Uninstalling is always dubious, I suspect that I am in DLL hell.
Is there any way to tell what codecs are (thought to be) installed, and what is being used by what? regsrv32 does not have a query option.
I suspect that I need to reinstall windows, or use another computer to get DVDx working.
I am now playing with Auto Gordian Knot. It seems better packaged, but very slow and poor UI (no progress indicator). And no option to set output screen size.
The hours that I have wasted on this simple task is very frustrating. I have no idea how a non-technical user gets this done.
Thanks for that. I installed GSpot, saw its table, but difficult to interpret the results. Does not show path names. And their must be some sort of internal mapping from form a video format to the "FourCC" codes.
DVD Decryptor also reports bit errors on videos that play fine. I suspect a DRM measure.
No matter, the kids can just get used to watching videos with bits missing.
AutoGK produces files that the MP3 player's software cannot handle.
Frustraing that I had the DIVX route working perfectly and now it is gone forever.
In the output dialog above the Video Pass 1 button there is a dialog that is blank. Having installed the (free) XDiv codec choose it here. AVI started working again. Phew.
I suspect that in my clean up I had invalidated the codec that had been used. So it went blank/no codec untill I fixed it.
Going fast. We will see if we can actually use the output...
