Before you read ahead, consider GravityLab Multimedia’s streaming media encoding services. We take the complexity out of creating streaming media for an affordable price.

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.
2. On the Wizard tab, click Convert a file.
3. On the File Selection screen, type both the file that you want to convert (the source file) and the file that you want to create (the output file).
4. On the Content Distribution screen, click Web server (progressive download). When you click Web server (progressive download), only those encoding options that pertain to encoding files for Web servers are displayed.
5. On the Encoding Options screen, select how you want to encode your audio and video from the lists, and then click to select the appropriate bit rate check box.
6. On the next two screens, type display information and review your settings.
7. After you quit the wizard, click Start Encoding.

Now the video should be ready to upload to your account!

Mac Users:
Check out this list of video software for OS X: http://www.pure-mac.com/video.html

1. Insert the DVD into your computer
2. Extract the video from the disk using Cinematize. This highly recommended program extracts DVD into Quicktime DV format which can then easily be encoded into a streaming file
3. Use one of the following to export your video:
   • For best results, use Apple’s Compressor (bundled with Final Cut Studio). Its algorithms produce high-quality, low-filesize video in Quicktime and Windows Media format
   • Quicktime Pro is a low-cost option for converting videos, but filesize is typically larger and quality isn’t as top-notch. But it does the job. From the menu bar, choose File > Export, then on the Export drop-down menu, select “Movie to Quicktime Movie”, then for the drop-down below that, (Use:) select “Streaming - Medium”.
   • Quicktime Pro for .wmv files: You will need a plug-in called Flip4Mac. Then export video using Quicktime Pro’s “Movie to Windows Media” option.