At the beginning of the semester I spent a lot of time trying to get the video files into Final Cut Pro 5 for some editing. We decided that the speeches did not need to be edited so I am currently converting the DVD .VOB files into Mpeg (.mp4) files and then converting the files into flash video (.flv) for streaming from the server.
When I began converting video to flash (.flv) I was using Flash 8 Encoder. This was taking over 24 hours to convert an hour long video to flash.
This is my current method to convert the .vob files into flash video:
To convert the .vob files into .mp4 files I use Handbrake version 0.7.1, a open source video encoder that you can find more information about here: http://handbrake.fr/
To convert the .mp4 files into .flv files I am using ffmpegX version 0.0.9y. ffmpegX is a shareware video encoder that can convert many different video file types. The documentation says that ffmpegX can convert .vob files directly but I have not gotten this to work yet. More information can be found here: http://homepage.mac.com/major4/
I may also be converting the files into audio and video podcasts. To do this I first convert the .mp4 file into .aac format then import the .aac file into Audacity 1.3.3 (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/) to edit the file and convert it into .mp3 format.
For conversion into a video podcast I use iSquint (http://www.isquint.org/) to reduce the video size to better fit the video ipod format. I have done this for the Presidential Candidate series but not for any of the other speakers yet.
