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Acronyms are going to be your ‘stock and trade’ if you want to understand the digital video space…

This is going to be my 3 (5?, 15? :-P) minute guide to various tasks I generally need and the software (some free) one needs to do them…

OK, rushing right along…

If you have:

• an original DVD you want to ‘squish’ and backup to a DVD-R (4.7GB) you need DVDShrink
• an AVI (DivX, XviD etc usually sourced from Internet, a friend, or wherever) which you want convert onto a DVD to give to someone who only has a standard DVD player you need ConvertXtoDVD (ok, not free, this one will set you back £30 but is the simplest tool in its class)
• a DVB class recording (ala MPEG-2) which is full of ‘ads’ and needs ‘cleaning up’ take a look at VideoRedo (a rather clever, albeit not free, bit of software which can guess ad-cutting out of a MPEG-2 source)
• a DVB class recording you want to turn into an AVI (an hour of MPEG-2 is about 2GB, an hour of good quality AVI is about 700MB…) have a look at the AutoGK toolkit page
• a DVB class recording you want on a DVD-R for standard DVD players – ConvertXtoDVD again

Ah, and after you’ve done all that, have the video file(s) in a format you want, and want to ‘burn it’ to CD/DVD, try out CDBurnerXP. It’s not perfect, but it is free, and will manage most straight-forward CD/DVD burning jobs…

Last but not least – media players – over M$ media player ‘bloatware’ and ‘I’ll get back to you right after I’ve failed downloading yet another video codec’ messages yet? – try GOM Player or VLC Media Player instead. Both very good (and free) primary media players, each with their own strength.