For the Love of My Country

Here's a little < 3mb program that will convert MOV files to AVI or MP4. It doesn't do an amazing job and you'll lose some quality, but if you desperately need to change your file format, this will do the trick for you.

Labels: convert, video

update - 13Dec09: Ignore the "percentage complete" shown in the taskbar - it seems to be broken, so when it displays aprox. 20% completed, the whole movie will in fact have been ripped...

You want to extract video from a DVD - I've always used this shoddy little program, DVD to AVI Converter which is shareware and only lets you rip 3 minutes at a time. However I've found another program which does a really good job, it's called DVDX. It's a free download with no strings attached. The GUI isn't all that flash, but essentially you don't need to worry too much about the input settings, take a look instead at the output settings. AVI with the XviD MPEG-4 Codec seems to be the best to rip to, as it gives a 640x360 resolution with good enough quality audio and video. The only real drawback is it takes ages - about an hour per DVD to back up. Still it results in a very compressed file, usually between 400mb - 800mb for a typical movie.

It will let you make output into chunks of your size preference, i.e. under 700mb if you wanted to burn to 2 CDs, but nobody cares about this these days. I accidently used this setting, resulting in two AVI files for one movie. Found this great free program, VirtualDub (which probably does a whole heap more stuff) - is very intuitive and lets you join AVI files together. Absolutely free - and here's a good quick tutorial for joining AVI files with VirtualDub so you don't stuff up first time round.

Labels: dvd, video

How do you get a div, image, or text to sit at the bottom of the webpage, no matter what the size of your viewer's browser window or resolution? http://ryanfait.com/sticky-footer/ has the answer, and it involves a pretty straight-forward hack. Essentially what it does is, you put all your content inside one div, "wrapper" - apart from the content you want in your footer. The "wrapper" div is given a negative bottom margin of the exact height of your footer. And of course your footer sits underneath with that specified height. That's the trick. You can't use position:absolute or fixed, and you can't float:bottom. You need to just get a handle on this nifty little bit of code and then you'll be away and laughing.

Check out their code and then do it yourself, just modify your existing divs...

Labels: css, html