Tag Archives: DVD

Try Lib-Ray: “Sintel” Lib-Ray PROTOTYPE v0.2

The following text comes from: http://www.archive.org/details/sintelLib-rayPrototypeV0.2:

‘The Sintel PROTOTYPE of the Lib-Ray free/open fixed media format for high-definition video without DRM or other “anti-features”. Since it is a prototype, it comes with no guarantees about stability or compatibility, but it is best viewed using Google’s Chromium web browser in full-screen mode on a system with a 1920×1080 “full HD” screen. Some features do not yet work even on this configuration, however, as they require elements of HTML5 that are not yet implemented. Because it’s a short movie, the ISO is relatively small (2.1 GB), and it will fit easily onto an inexpensive single-layer DVD-R disk”.

More details about the project are also available from the Lib-Ray site: http://lib-ray.org.

A new multimedia open-source standard to replace DVD and Blu-Ray DRM limitations: Lib-Ray

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At the beginning we astonished because the video quality on DVD was something of incredible. Then Blu-Ray destroyed all the standards we were used to enjoy while watching our movies. During last 7 years the home theatre industry has developed its standards in a geometric way but the DRM topics have increased our technical barrier between people who legitimately bought DVDs and Blu-Rays and the possibility of creating backup copies.

The war between DRM and hackers is absorbing. When a new standard of DRM has been developed we wait to know how much time will pass before someone can crack it. And it is only a matter of time because it is not technically possible to create the perfect barrier against multimedia supports when, by definition, the key to decrypt the files is somewhere in the disk or on the media player. During last years, the reverse engineering has increase the chances we have to deeply understand and rewrite proprietary software.

Lib-Ray is a “new” ambitious project to create a new open source multimedia standard which could be able to challenge DVD and Blu-Ray. The developers describe Lib-Ray as “multimedia website on a disk”. The manual you can download from Lib-Ray websites, describes in details all the structure you have to create on the disk for your files. Lib-Ray runs on java libraries and html5 structure and its framework is represented by Inkscape, Gimp, Audacity, xiph.org, Flac and code from Mozilla and Chromium.

In few words, you don’t need a specific hardware to run Lib-Ray disks but each computer with a Chromium browser and a bunch of open source software will be able to perfectly play your disks (as simple as genial!).

Last but not least, on the Lib-Ray website you will also find a Downloads page dedicated to dedicated manuals, libraries and one interesting template.

WinFF: the best mkv to avi converter for Ubuntu

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This week, in our Linux Page (in Spanish) we posted an essential manual about the best software to convert a video file from mkv to a more common (and readable) avi format. First of all we tried with a well known line program: ffmpeg but we had different problems and we did not succeed. For this reason we tried to install the specific libavcodec-unstripped-51 package but we were not able to convert our file. For our second test we installed avidemux but also in this case the mkv file resisted. Then we read in a post that VLC contains a powerful converter and we used it to transform the mkv file to avi. Unfortunately we succed only for the audio part of our file but we were not able to obtain a complete video file. Only during our last test we transform the mkv video to avi using WinFF. This program, based on ffmpeg, has a very clear graphical interface and it is very intuitive to use. After ten minutes of trials we were able to correct our settings and to start the file conversion. In the WinFF menu you can easily choose between many different video and audio formats (in our test we chose AVI) with a Device Preset setted to XviD in AVI (16:9) and decide the output folder you prefer. WinFF -does not work- if you do not insert the mandatory data in the below part of the menu. In our test we setted:
Video Settings
Video Bitrate = empty (null = we did not write anything)
Frame rate = 25
Video Size = 592 x 320
Aspect Ratio = 16:9
Audio Settings
Audio Bitrate = 118
Sample Rate = 48000
Audio Channels = 2
Additional Command Line Parameters (advanced)
null = we did not write anything
We recommend WinFF to all that people who are not very clever with line command programs and need to easily transform video files to a different formats!