The Indigestible

The most interesting questions come your way when you’re a graphics geek with 15 years’ experience in video, multimedia programming and web design.

We’ve got an internal voice-command messaging system that allows various people to be wirelessly contacted and communicated with. Called Vocera, I think the system is viewed as a bit of a Morton’s fork. It’s easier and much more information-rich than being paged, but at least as irritating as having a cellular phone that never stops ringing.

Vocera needs a little training, and to that end they supply a video; but the DVD itself is annoyingly limited. After all, it’s a DVD. How do you make it freely available to hundreds of people any time, anywhere, simultaneously if necessary?

Right. So here’s where I come in.

There are rippers out there, of course; but that is just too goddamn easy. Windows, remember? See, those rippers transcode to MP4. Well, Windows Media Player does not handle MP4, at least not natively, sort of like how a rhino does not handle a human baby with a great deal of grace or, indeed, survivability.

This discovery led to a whole series of steps, none of which involved too much heavy liquor use,* but many of which were unnecessary.

Thus, following is a description of how to convert a DVD video file to a video format that can be played back in Windows Media Player. Note that you do not have to follow all the steps I did. In fact, strictly speaking — and assuming you have VLC, a shweet open-source multiplatform video playback and transcode utility — you could skip straight to step 16.

But golly, what’s the fun in that?

Oh — I’m running Mac OSX 10.4.10, which significantly limited my range of transcode options.**

1. Copy the necessary VOB files from the DVD to your desktop.
2. Using VLC’s conversion wizard, try transcoding them to MP4.
3. Test playback in Windows Media Player on WinXP.
4. FAIL.
5. n = 1; fmt = [MPEG, AVI/DivX, AVI/XviD, MOV]; while n < = count(fmt) {goto 2 (fmt[n]); n++;}
6. FAIL.
7. Explore the many, many fine entries in the profanisaurus. Choose several suitable scatological terms. Employ them liberally.
8. Download ffmpegX and give it a try instead, using similar codecs plus Flash video.
9. FAIL.
10. Google for information on what the hell native formats WMP actually can play. Groan at the mongolidism involved in the fact that you’re limited to ASF, WMV and WMA and their permutations. Modern esoterica*** applied to AVIs or any MPEG transcode are FAIL.
11. Using the profanisaurus again, avail oneself of multiple creative terms referring to the act of maternal copulation. Suggest that the engineers in charge of coding WMP must be products of such an unholy union. Then remember they received their directives from On High. Wonder if Bill Gates is really all he’s cracked up to be. Decide he is not; fuck him. Decide not to, unless it might involve 250 KV and a liberal application of spikes. Yeah, oh yeah, you like that, scream, scream for me, you college drop-out punk-ass bottom bitch.
12. Resolve to stop putting so much Irish in your coffee. I mean, god damn, it should taste like Folger’s, not an oak-barrel’s dregs. Besides, the dreams are getting … disturbing. Even the ones that don’t involve Bill Gates dressed as that weird bald guy from the Six Flags commercials a few years ago, and anyway, what the hell was up with that?
13. Wonder if this is worth blogging about.
14. Naah.
15. Armed with a shocking understanding of how brutally-primitive WMP actually is, relaunch VLC.
16. Use the conversion wizard to transcode using WMV 1 format, saving as an ASF-encapsulated file.
17. WIN.

Here are screenshots of the two relevant pages from the VLC transcode wizard. These settings produced a Windows Media Player-friendly file that had begun life as a VOB from a DVD.

There are about 20 different transcode options that VLC will give you for the video. All of them work beautifully on OSX. Virtually all of them are teh puup on Windows. And — here’s the clincher — even the ones that will work on Windows won’t in WMP if you don’t go with absolute baseline, generic settings. For instance, trying to encode AVI with DivX and MP3 for the audio results in WMP thinking the video file is actually an MP3 music track, which makes it play it back in the WMP Visualizer.****

Setting the video transcode option to WMV 1 and selecting a rational bitrate is only the first part; the audio options are myriad as well. MP3 at a 64 KB bitrate is more than adequate for LAN-streaming video.

Don’t even bother with anything but ASF encapsulation. Windows will simply not handle any exotic formats.

The failure on both MP4 and Flash video (via ffmpegX) was quite disappointing; WMP is a stunningly limited player given the undeniable fact that many, many non-MS proprietary formats were available for use when they were coding the damned thing; and that, since then, even more have become widely available.

I feel quite confident that the Vista release of WMP will prove to be every bit as irritating in about three more years. And that, sure as shit in a thundermug, it’ll be in use by too many people to number.

With any luck, it’ll be able to handle DivX and MP4, at least.

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* I was on the clock.

** In much the same way that a person fluent in 30 languages nevertheless finds his communication options crippled when speaking to a monolingual, slightly retarded child.

*** Here, modern means anything invented after 2002.

**** Really.