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Often times, companies that wish to stream their media are given video from a production company on a DVD. This is a great multi-purpose archival format, because the disc is high capacity, and therefore can store high-quality video. Until recently, DVD video was difficult to extract and convert into video files. If you’ve ever looked inside the DVD on your computer, you would have noticed all sorts of VOB, IFO, and BUP files. This is a confusing mess of files, and it takes specialized software to convert this data into streaming video.

One way to convert the audio and video on a DVD to WMV format is to capture the content using an analog capture device. You can connect the audio and video analog outputs of a DVD player to a video capture card on your computer, and then use Windows Media Encoder to encode the video to a file. But this requires a video capture card, and is a subject for another time.

If you want to convert digitally, you have a plethora of DVD extraction utilities for both Windows and Mac users.

Windows users:
DVDx, available on SourceForge.net. This program is able to convert DVDs directly to Windows Media Format, as well as AVI, MPEG. and WM9.

Once you have created an AVI or WMV file from the DVD, you can use the free Windows Media Encoder
to prepare the file for web streaming.

To configure Windows Media Encoder 9 Series to encode a file

1. On the toolbar, click New Session. The New Session Wizard starts.