Avidemux 2.5 http://avidemux.sourceforge.net/
If you take lots of home videos in .MOV format, you might like this handy little program that allows you to delete unwanted segments of your video easily. All you need to do is to view your video, mark a point A and a point B on the video and select Cut from the Edit menu, and the segment between A and B will disappear. Its scroll button allows you to move frame by frame along your video file enabling you to make the selection of the unwanted segment with precision.
This program is also great for taking out advertisements on recorded programs, or extracting segments that you want to incorporate into other videos.
It will edit almost every video format including MOV files which many editors cannot handle, and will save it in its original file type or an alternative such as AVI or MPEG. It is freeware.
Movavi Video Editor Free Edition
Works almost the same way. You mark the beginning of a segment that you do not want, then mark the end of this segment, and cut it away using the cut tool.
If you do want the segment, instead of cutting it away, you can split the video file at selected spots and delete the portions that you do not want.
But this handy little program seems to be no longer available. I downloaded it once but subsequently could not find either the original an updated version of this program.
AVI trimmer http://www.solveigmm.com/?Products&id=AVITrimmer
is another small and free program that will remove segments that you do not want but it will not read .mov files. It works fine with most of the other video formats.
Pinnacle's Video Spin http://www.videospin.com/Redesign/
Wanted a payment for the enhancement to read .MOV files.
Jahplayer http://www.jahshaka.org/
could not read .MOV files
Advanced Video Editing http://softwaredepo.com/v-editing.html
Did not work for me. This software converts video frames to image files. Also it did not read .MOV files.
Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Online conversion Midi files to MP3
I was looking for a midi to mp3 converter and chanced upon this online service at
www.hamienet.com/midi2mp3 which I found to be very good.
I had a video that I wanted to put up on Facebook that needed music accompaniment. At first I selected an mp3 of a very popular song to accompany the video -- big mistake because Facebook rejected the video due to potential copyright issues.
The alternative was a midi version of the same song and this I found on www.lockergnome.com/midi/ .
I imported the video into Magix Movie Editor, and tried to replace the MP3 that accompanied the video with the midi, but it was not recognised as an audio file. I then tried Nero with the same result. I did some research and discovered that midi files are not audio files, something that I had not realised. So I needed to covert the midi into an MP3
A search of the internet turned up several converters. Most of these converters seemed to be shareware -- I was not willing to pay because I only wanted this facility for 2 tunes -- and the setup seemed to be quite difficult. After trying several, I decided on this free online service which turned out to be very simple to use.
www.hamienet.com/midi2mp3 which I found to be very good.
I had a video that I wanted to put up on Facebook that needed music accompaniment. At first I selected an mp3 of a very popular song to accompany the video -- big mistake because Facebook rejected the video due to potential copyright issues.
The alternative was a midi version of the same song and this I found on www.lockergnome.com/midi/ .
I imported the video into Magix Movie Editor, and tried to replace the MP3 that accompanied the video with the midi, but it was not recognised as an audio file. I then tried Nero with the same result. I did some research and discovered that midi files are not audio files, something that I had not realised. So I needed to covert the midi into an MP3
A search of the internet turned up several converters. Most of these converters seemed to be shareware -- I was not willing to pay because I only wanted this facility for 2 tunes -- and the setup seemed to be quite difficult. After trying several, I decided on this free online service which turned out to be very simple to use.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
NTFS and FAT32
Learned a few new lessons this week. I bought a 300 gig portable hard drive for my MP3 music and photo files. I spent some time tranferring files from my computer to this handy drive and was delighted when I could see the photos and hear the MP3 files on this disk simply by plugging it into the USB port of my new Philips DVD player.
One week of enjoyment. Then I tried adding some more music files and one of these was corrupted and so the inevitable happened....my Philips DVD player refused to recognise the portable drive. My computer could read the drive but not the DVD player. I removed the offending file, but the result was the same...the portable drive was not recogised by the player.
So I decided to reformat the drive and recopy all the data to it. That done, I tested it on the computer and things looked fine--the MP3 files could play and the photos were OK. I then plugged it into the Philips and, what the heck, the drive was not recognised.
I searched the internet for a solution. Simple it was. Philips DVD players do not recognise drives formated in NTFS which was the default when I reformated it on my Vista computer. I had to format the portable drive in FAT32 which was the original file system when I bought it. FAT32 is the logical choice for vendors who want their portable drives to be compatible with OSs other than Vista.
Formating in FAT32 is not easy because Vista does not have this option. It has an option called exFAT. This was the option I chose and after about 7 hours of reformating work the disk was ready. But try as I would, nothing could be written on this disk as it was now "protected" . By what? I could not find out.
Going to the internet once again, I found the solution. Use the command prompt and type FORMAT /FS:FAT32 X: (X being the drive letter). And so it began, another 6 hours of reformating.....
....then the drive stopped the procedure completely and became once again unreadable. Did I have to reformat the drive in NTFS and forgo the pleasure of listening to my MP3 files via my Philips? A search of the internet told me that Linux machines do FAT32 and so did XP. But these I did not have. Once again I searched the internet and found the solution in SwissKnife a free utility programme that does formatting and partitioning of drives easily.
After a quick download and installation, SwissKnife reformated the portable drive in the FAT32. A transfer of MP3 from the main computer to the portable drive and sweet music from my sound system via the Philips.
One week of enjoyment. Then I tried adding some more music files and one of these was corrupted and so the inevitable happened....my Philips DVD player refused to recognise the portable drive. My computer could read the drive but not the DVD player. I removed the offending file, but the result was the same...the portable drive was not recogised by the player.
So I decided to reformat the drive and recopy all the data to it. That done, I tested it on the computer and things looked fine--the MP3 files could play and the photos were OK. I then plugged it into the Philips and, what the heck, the drive was not recognised.
I searched the internet for a solution. Simple it was. Philips DVD players do not recognise drives formated in NTFS which was the default when I reformated it on my Vista computer. I had to format the portable drive in FAT32 which was the original file system when I bought it. FAT32 is the logical choice for vendors who want their portable drives to be compatible with OSs other than Vista.
Formating in FAT32 is not easy because Vista does not have this option. It has an option called exFAT. This was the option I chose and after about 7 hours of reformating work the disk was ready. But try as I would, nothing could be written on this disk as it was now "protected" . By what? I could not find out.
Going to the internet once again, I found the solution. Use the command prompt and type FORMAT /FS:FAT32 X: (X being the drive letter). And so it began, another 6 hours of reformating.....
....then the drive stopped the procedure completely and became once again unreadable. Did I have to reformat the drive in NTFS and forgo the pleasure of listening to my MP3 files via my Philips? A search of the internet told me that Linux machines do FAT32 and so did XP. But these I did not have. Once again I searched the internet and found the solution in SwissKnife a free utility programme that does formatting and partitioning of drives easily.
After a quick download and installation, SwissKnife reformated the portable drive in the FAT32. A transfer of MP3 from the main computer to the portable drive and sweet music from my sound system via the Philips.
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Making 2 VCDs into one DVD
Fed-up with having to remove the first and insert the second VCD of a very popular Disney movie that my grandchildren loved, I decided to combine the two VCDs into one DVD.
Well I read that VCD files have the extension .DAT and that you needed to rename this to .mpg before you could proceed further since most DVD burning programs did not recognise .dat as a video file. I tried renaming the two .DAT files that I extracted from each of the VCDs I wanted to combine into one DVD, but my Windows Vista would not allow me to do this and the renamed files looked like this filename.mpg.dat. This meant it was still a .dat file even after the renaming. Scouring the net I discovered that you had to use tools to change how Windows Explorer displayed file names. For some reason or other Windows Explorer by default hides the extension names when displaying contents of folders (at least it did on my machine), and I had to change this before I could effect any change of extension names. How to do so? Click on "Computer" then left click on "Organise" and go to the option "Folder and Search Options" then go to "View" and unclick the option that says "Hide extensions for known file types". Now you will see file names with extensions and these can be renamed easily.
The next step was simple: import the two .mpg files into a DVD burning program -- the one I used was Magix Goya BurnR which I got when I purchased the wonderful Magix Movie Edit Pro 12 for $50 at Challenger last year -- and burn your DVD just as you would your home movies. Just make sure that you burn the files in the correct order and this you can do by giving them the same file name except for the numerals 1 and 2 for example mymovie1 and mymovie2.
Well I read that VCD files have the extension .DAT and that you needed to rename this to .mpg before you could proceed further since most DVD burning programs did not recognise .dat as a video file. I tried renaming the two .DAT files that I extracted from each of the VCDs I wanted to combine into one DVD, but my Windows Vista would not allow me to do this and the renamed files looked like this filename.mpg.dat. This meant it was still a .dat file even after the renaming. Scouring the net I discovered that you had to use tools to change how Windows Explorer displayed file names. For some reason or other Windows Explorer by default hides the extension names when displaying contents of folders (at least it did on my machine), and I had to change this before I could effect any change of extension names. How to do so? Click on "Computer" then left click on "Organise" and go to the option "Folder and Search Options" then go to "View" and unclick the option that says "Hide extensions for known file types". Now you will see file names with extensions and these can be renamed easily.
The next step was simple: import the two .mpg files into a DVD burning program -- the one I used was Magix Goya BurnR which I got when I purchased the wonderful Magix Movie Edit Pro 12 for $50 at Challenger last year -- and burn your DVD just as you would your home movies. Just make sure that you burn the files in the correct order and this you can do by giving them the same file name except for the numerals 1 and 2 for example mymovie1 and mymovie2.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Canon iP4680 Printer
Having lots of fun with this printer. It cost $199 and its attraction is that it prints on CDs and DVDs directly. Printing on CDs and DVDs is as easy as printing on paper or photographs and the result is very good. The colour reproduction is close to the original in terms of sharpness and colour -- I would say about 85% accuracy. I suppose if I had a better scanner I would be getting something close to 95% accuracy. The only thing is that on original CDs and DVDs the printing covers almost the whole of the DVD surface but when printing my own using this printer, there is a larger non-printed inner circle. And this is primarily because the DVD blanks I buy at retail outlets have this larger non-printable inner circle. It seems that there are hub printable CDs and DVDs out there but so far I have not come across these in Challenger where I do my shopping -- mainly to enjoy the discounts as a member.
Disk with printable hub
Disk with non-printable hub
While printable CD and DVD blanks are easily available they come at a slightly higher cost than normal blanks. The Maxell DVD -R printables cost me $24 whereas the non-printables cost $20 for a cakebox of 50. I hear that in Australia I would be paying something like AU$17 for 50 printables.
Monday, May 4, 2009
PDF Files
Been playing around with PDF files this week. Mainly because I have this internet fax service that will fax out only files that are in PDF format. I have no problems with creating text documents and then saving them as PDF files because OpenOffice, that wonderful free software that emulates Microsoft Office, can convert or export text files to PDF with one click. The problem I had was with graphics. When I scanned a page as PDF to retain all the layout and positioning of the orginal graphics the resultant file was enormous... as big as 4 meg. Now, my Internet fax service will not allow me to fax out PDF documents that large, so I had a problem.
The software I used to scan and save graphics as a PDF file was software that came with my Epson which I bought several years ago. Rather than search for newer or updated versions of the software, what I did was to save the graphics as a JPG and then import into a OpenOffice document and save it as a PDF file which was very much smaller than the one created directly from the scanner. This I could fax out.
While researching on the Internet some solutions that other users employed, I chanced upon several interesting free online services that others were using to convert to PDF or from PDF to editable text. Many users were doing the latter because unlike DOC files or TXT files PDF files cannot be edited nor can one incorporate portions of it into text files.
If you are converting text files to PDF files or vice versa there is a free online service at http://www.pdfonline.com/convert-pdf/ which I tried with success. When converting text files to PDF the online software converts and emails you the link to your converted file. Fast and reliable. When converting PDF files to text (RTF) files the conversion is done online and there is no email for you to open. Why the procedures differ I cannot tell.
The software I used to scan and save graphics as a PDF file was software that came with my Epson which I bought several years ago. Rather than search for newer or updated versions of the software, what I did was to save the graphics as a JPG and then import into a OpenOffice document and save it as a PDF file which was very much smaller than the one created directly from the scanner. This I could fax out.
While researching on the Internet some solutions that other users employed, I chanced upon several interesting free online services that others were using to convert to PDF or from PDF to editable text. Many users were doing the latter because unlike DOC files or TXT files PDF files cannot be edited nor can one incorporate portions of it into text files.
If you are converting text files to PDF files or vice versa there is a free online service at http://www.pdfonline.com/convert-pdf/ which I tried with success. When converting text files to PDF the online software converts and emails you the link to your converted file. Fast and reliable. When converting PDF files to text (RTF) files the conversion is done online and there is no email for you to open. Why the procedures differ I cannot tell.
Another useful site is http://www.pdftoword.com/. This has an online service to convert PDF files to editable text files as well as a download for converting text to PDF files. I tried this and found it easy to use, reliable and fast.
The third service I tried was youconvertit.com. (http://youconvertit.com/convertfiles.aspx) Which claims to be able to do a variety of conversions -- from one format to another but I seem to have very little success with this one. For some reason or other it was fraught with error messages. Perhaps it is the configuration of my browsers or my computer that is the problem because there seem to be many testimonials extolling its virtues.
The last service I tried the one provided by http://www.zamzar.com/. This seemed to be a very popular site judging from the many mentions of it on forums. It worked OK for me but it sure took a long time for the files to be converted. Perhaps because it is popular, demand for its services is high and thus the delay.
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