How dare you? I’ve never demuxed in my life!
‘kin’ hell! I’ve had a long day.
“Bring over the DVD,” I said confidently. “I’ll rip it and get it online.” I have a Mac, you see, and Steve Jobs is always telling us how easy it is to use your Mac to work with your videos.
Apparently, though, importing video from DVD and uploading it—not even copy-protected Hollywood-owned DVDs, just one created by a friend—is not something any sane man should attempt.
I’ve spent a disgracefully large portion of this sunny, sunny Patriots1 Day fighting with decoders, demuxers, rippers, streamers, encoders, producers, transcoders, normalizers, and a DVD-ROM drive that doesn’t work. I’ve prodded blindly at acronyms I’d never heard of on options screens with 80 options. I’ve been told “Your Mac won’t do that. Go to apple.com and spend $20, and we might just let you.” I’ve transferred files from Mac to PC and back. I’ve been told “You might want to make your video viewable by people who haven’t got the latest bleeding-edge Real Player on their machines, but that’ll cost you $200”. And I’ve Googled constantly, only finding people with the same problems as me, but never solutions.
But at long last, I’ve gotten things (mostly) working, and can now proudly point you, the fine netizen who deems my little ‘blog worthy of their eyeballs, to Temporary Spy, the film I was involved in the making of last weekend.
(I also highly recommend adding the frighteningly earwormy theme from String of Pearls to your iPod. Perhaps sometime soon, Mr Cheever will share his brilliant synopsis of this sitcom that never was.)
1 Patriot’s? Patriots’?
