I always keep a smaller divx or xvid encode of dvds on hand on external hard disks. Easier if I still want to watch something without taking out the dvd. At the end of the Diamond DVD I had trouble getting it ripped right. Every so-and-so seconds the audio would glitch. Perhaps it’s the program I used, but I don’t understand since it did the rest correctly. Extra protection? Who knows. I just did it in a different way now, by using DVD2AVI with Decode/ Dolby Surround Downmix as explained in this guide.

Before that I installed graphedit again, registered a couple of filters. After that my mpg’s wouldn’t play anymore so I had to unregister all filters. >.< Thankfully I noticed it now instead of a week later because I wouldn’t be able to trace it back to the filter installation.

I geeked and I found it. The primary reason why I wasn’t able to get the audio stream was because DVD2AVI is no longer developed and pretty old. It’s successor is: dgmpgdec156. To make a long story short I managed to get an AAC file from the project save done on this tool based on the old DVD2AVI. AAC can be played by my winamp and thus it can be written to disk as WAV. Hence, I could encode the two together in virtualdub as usual. I will make an attempt to write this down at Solstice Productions tutorials.

I also found a good tip for mp4 conversion (freeware): mp4cam2avi.