Archive for October, 2010

Add DVD to PowerPoint for presentation

Want to show part of the DVD video on PowerPoint for your presentation? Want to show part of the DVD video, but there is no DVD hardware player in the meeting place?

If you want to add specific segments of DVD video to PowerPoint or present a chapter on your PowerPoint to show as an example, a DVD ripper will work to meet your needs. Pavtube DVD Ripper certainly helps you add DVD to PowerPoint with the chapters and segments you want for your presentation.

Microsoft PowerPoint supports many kinds of video file formats, such as AVI, WMV, and MPG. However, it does not support DVD VOB file. This guide shows you the way to rip DVD to AVI, WMV with trimming the video to the length you want to present on your PowerPoint. The steps can be separated into two sections to rip DVD video to PowerPoint:
Part1. Convert DVD to WMV, MPG or AVI with Pavtube DVD Ripper.
Part2. Add video to your PowerPoint.

Part1. Convert DVD to AVI, WMV, or MPG with Pavtube DVD Ripper.
You shall download and install Pavtube DVD Ripper, if you want to follow the steps below.
1. Launch Pavtube DVD Ripper.

2. Load the entire DVD or certain title you want.

To load the entire DVD, you just need to click on the “DVD Rom ” or DVD Folderbutton. If you know certain title with the IFO file, you may click the “IFO File ” button to browse the right one for you.

3. Choose MPG, AVI, or WMV as output format.

Microsoft PowerPoint supports the following video formats:
ASF, ASX, WPL, WM, WMX, WMD, WMZ, AVI, DVR-MS, MPEG, MPG, MPE, M1V, MP2, MPV2, MP2V, MPA, WMV, WVX
With Pavtube DVD Ripper, you can choose the output formats: AVI, MPG, and WMV as the source for PowerPoint.

4. Trim the video length under the “Trim” tab.
Select the chapter or title which contains the segment you want, and click the “Customize” button to trim the video with the exact duration under the “Trim” tab.

Drag the slide bar or enter the exact time to set the duration you want to display on your PowerPoint.

5. Start conversion.
Check the box of the title or chapter before clicking to start conversion. The files with name on Destination File column will be converted.

Check the box for opening output folder after conversion. After a while, you can find the output file. Then you can add the video(s) to your PowerPoint.

Part2. Add video to your PowerPoint.
1. Open the PowerPoint file, within which you want to add the video.
2. Click on a slide, which you want to display the video, and then choose Insert > Object.
3. Choose “Windows Media Player” as the object type in the pop-up “Insert Object” window.

4. Right-click on the player widget, and choose “Properties”.
5. Enter the right path of the output video for the “URL” option.

Then you can show the DVD video on PowerPoint with small file size.

You may also use either Blu-Ray Ripper or Blu-Ray Video Converter Ultimate to rip DVD for slideshow presentation.

How to copy TiVo shows to a DVD on Windows 7?

The 4th generation TiVo Premiere XL now records up to 150 hours of HD programming, which frees users from the issue of insufficient storage memory. However, you may still wanna copy TiVo to hard drive for enjoying the shows more freely on PC, or burning favorite TiVo series to DVDs. The freeware TiVo Desktop lets you transfer shows from TiVo box to your PC. If you pay $24,95 to TiVo corp., they will help you upgrade the software to TiVo Desktop Plus, which is capable of converting TiVo shows to portable devices. But to be frankly, the software does not support these devices well. The TiVo company knows clearly about it, and they offer you another solution, the Roxio Creater 2010. This software costs you $69.99 (for TiVo users), and is more powerful. It helps you convert TiVo files to iPod, iPhone and PSP, and more important, burn TiVo shows to DVD. Sounds a nice choice? Well, that’s not we’re talking about. In this guide I’d like to introduce to you a more economical way to copy TiVo to DVD, which costs you $35 only (the DVD burner is excluded, of course).

Software you’ll need:
TiVo Desktop for the PC (freeware)
Pavtube Video Converter (shareware, $35.00)
Windows DVD Maker (freeware)

Part 1. Transfer TiVo recordings to PC with TiVo Desktop
If you record a show on your TiVo box, you can easily play it back on your PC or laptop. I believe it is an everyday thing for most TiVo users. And there are instructions by TiVo’s official site:
Transferring TiVo shows to your PC
Transfer times vary, but may be as long as the show’s duration to complete the transfer, so you have to be patient when the software is copying TiVo to PC.

Part 2. Convert TiVo to DVD Movie Maker compatible formats with Pavtube Video Converter.
The Pavtube Video Converter is much more than a TiVo to DVD Converter. It converts TiVo shows to iPod, iPod Touch, iPod Nano, iPhone 3G, iPhone 4, iPad, PSP, Gphone, Droid, Nokia, Samsung smart phones, Zune, Xbox, PS3 and media formats like *.avi, *.mpg, *.vob, *.mkv, *.wmv, *.dv, *.mov, *.mp3, *.m4a, *.wav, *.ogg, *.ac3, etc and handles with TV recordings of other formats *.ts, *.tp, *.trp files. When converting TiVo with Pavtube Video Converter, there are multiple choices. To retain original HD quality, you can ‘Directly Copy’ TiVo shows to MPEG/MPEG-TS files; to save storage, you can shrink the TiVo recordings by choosing a common SD video format; to burn CD album, you can extract audios from TiVo files; to cut the commercials, you can ‘trim’ the ads out; to eliminate the black edges, you can ‘crop’ the image and remain the part you like. Feel like giving it a shoot with the trial version of Pavtube Video Converter? Now let’s focus on the process of converting TiVo to DVD. By the way, the trial version gives videos with a ‘Pavtube’ logo on the screen.

You can clone TiVo to DVD as simple or as complex as you want.
Step 1. Input Media Access Key.
Launch Pavtube Video Converter, Click on the “Option” button, switch to TiVo tab, and enter your Media Access Key. Click “OK” to confirm.

Step 2: Import TiVo files for copying TiVo to DVD.
Now click “Add” to import all .tivo files, or you may drag and drop the *.tivo files to the window of TiVo to DVD Converter.

Step 3: Select an output format for burning TiVo shows to DVD in Windows DVD Maker.
Click on the pull down menu of “Format” to select output format. If you do not want to loss any quality, please select Copy-> Directly Copy so that the TiVo Converter will decrypt the shows to *.mpg or *.ts files. Nowadays the shows are normally HD 1920*1080 videos, which is too good to burn on a standard DVD. My advice is, compressing the HD TiVo shows so as to fit DVD 5/ DVD 9.

As I will copy TiVo to DVD with Windows DVD Maker, let’s take a look at the types of files which can be burned with Windows DVD Maker:

Video files: *.asf, *.avi, *.dvr-ms, *.m1v, *.mp2v, *.mpe, *.mpeg, *.mpg, *.mpv2, *.wm, and *.wmv.
Audio files: *.aif, *.aifc, *.aiff, *.asf, *.au, *.mp2, *.mp3, *.mpa, *.snd, *.wav, and *.wma.
Picture files: *.bmp, *.dib, *.emf, *.gif, *.jfif, *.jpe, *.jpeg, *.jpg, *.png, *.tif, *.tiff, and *.wmf.

I used to select Common Video-> MPEG-2 Video(*.mpg), and then click “Settings” button to adjust audio and video parameters. The following picture shows detailed settings:

You may change the video “Size” to 960*540 provided that your source video is 16:9 and you don’t want outstretched image. If you’d like to keep Dolby Digital 5.1 sound, you got to change the Audio Codec to “ac3” and Channels to “5.1 Channels”. Other optional formats are *.asf, *.avi, *.wmv. The TiVo Converter displays the estimated file size and other information in the textbox. If you find the file size very huge, just set a smaller value in Video Bitrate box.

Step 4: Start converting TiVo for burning DVD.
Click “Convert” button and the TiVo converter will generate videos that are compatible with Windows DVD Maker. After conversion you can click the “Open” button next to output path to find converted recordings.

Additional tips– edit the TiVo recordings to keep proper length and size.
As I said, you can make the TiVo to DVD conversion as simple or as complex as you want. To cut off black edges, trim out unwanted ads, add watermark, replace audio, you may click on “Edit” button to enter editing window of TiVo to DVD Converter.

I. Cut unwanted black edges
Switch to Crop tab to cut unwanted edges. You can crop the video by adjusting the crop frame (drag the green dotted green square frame to circle the part you want to retain) or setting values (Left, Top, Width and Height) of crop area.

II. Trim out bothering commercial ads
Under ‘Trim’ tab you are allowed to cut out unwanted part of selected clip. To trim the video, simply type in desired time value in ‘Start’ and ‘End’ box and click ‘Set’ button. Or you can click left square bracket and right square bracket to set start and end time when playing the video.

Part 3. Copying TiVo to DVD with Windows DVD Maker.
After conversion you can burn the converted videos with Windows DVD Maker now:
Step 1. Click the “Start” button and select “Windows DVD Maker” to run the program, then click the “Add items” button from the top menu and browse to the folder were the movies you want to burn are located. By default, they should be found in the “Videos” folder.
Step 2. Select the videos you want to burn and type the “Disc title”. Also, you may select the order in which the movies will be saved on DVD. To do that, select a movie and press the “Up” or “Down” button to change its order.

Step 3. If you want to, you can click the “Options” button and set things like the burning speed, the aspect ratio, the video format or you can choose if the DVD will have a menu or not. After you finished making the settings you want, click the “OK” button and then “Next”.

Step 4. At this step you can create a custom DVD menu or you can select a predefined one. To select a predefined menu, scroll the “Menu Styles” list and select the one you like most. You can customize it by pressing the “Customize Menu” button and making the settings you want. Also, you can change the menu text by clicking the “Menu text” button and typing the text you want for each button.

Step 5. When you have finished making all the customizations, click the “Burn” button.
First, Windows DVD Maker will encode the movie in the appropriate format and then it will burn it on DVD. Usually, the encoding process takes much more time than the burning so you have to patient.

Now we have finished copying TiVo to DVD! Hope this guide helps.

How to import MTS/M2TS AVCHD files to iMovie for editing?

Since iMovie’08, Apple has announced that it works with many tapeless camcorders that record to flash memory, HDD, or DVD media, including camcorders using MPEG-2 (standard definition) and AVCHD (high definition) formats. With the release of iMovie’09, it expands supported camcorder formats to MPEG-2 (standard definition), AVCHD (high definition) as well as MPEG-4 and H.264 formats. However, at the same time, Apple also remind users that due to the wide range of media types, and the different ways manufacturers store video on these media types, not all tapeless camcorders are compatible with iMovie ‘08 and iMovie’09. AVCHD camcorders are among this range. AVCHD format (.mts, m2ts) has been a headache to some Mac users for not a short time, especially for people who are in use of an old PowerPC, because AVCHD format can only be supported by iMovie with an Intel-based Core Duo processor or better.

Fortunately, more and more video converters are designed to help Mac users solve this problem, Pavtube MTS/M2TS Converter for Mac is one of them which performances very well. No matter what version of iMovie you are in use, and what Mac system you are working on, it will assist you to import your MTS/M2TS AVCHD files to iMovie for editing smoothly. Now please follow its step-by-step instruction as you like.

First of you, free download Pavtube MTS/M2TS Converter for Mac here, and then install and run it. Notice that there are two versions, both PowerPC and Intel, pay attention to choose the right one to download.

Step 1: Load MTS/M2TS files, select iMovie workable format

You can directly drag and drop MTS and M2TS file to this program or you can click “Add” button to import files. After that choose an iMovie supported format to convert. You can choose MP4 or MOV, and here I select MOV for instance.

Suppose you’d like to combine all the added files to be a single file, so that you can import them to iMovie for editing once only. In that case, please tick the checkbox of “Merge into one file” to realize it. Also, if you do not want the save path set by default to store the output files, you can click “Browse” button to look for and specify a destination folder.

Step 2: Adjust video and audio parameter

This program allows users to set advanced settings, that is to say, you can insert your preferred options to items in the interface below, including bit rate, frame rate, sample rate, channels, etc. The output file size will be enlarged if you adjust the figures to be larger, also the file quality will be improved at the same time. On the contrary, if you adjust the values to be smaller, the output file size will be decreased, but accompanying with inferior output quality.

Step 3: Convert

After the above two steps are done, you can click “Convert” button to start conversion. And the generated files for iMovie can be got via press “Open” button.
Tips:

1. The program adopts advanced audio and video sync technology, and never lets your video and audio go in separate way.

2. This program optimizes its conversion speed with multi-thread technology, so that you can convert MTS/M2TS AVCHD files 1.5 or 2 times faster than other similar programs.

3. Its trim and crop functions allow you to select the proper time length for MTS/M2TS videos, as well as cut off any unwanted areas. Its original video and output video preview windows will also be convenient for you to edit.

4. It Provides users with simple gauss blur effect, which is very useful to recorded files, since it can eliminate the noise of recorded videos. If you like, you can also add other special effects including simple laplacian sharpen, gray, flip color, invert, aged film, etc. to your video files.

5. It allows users to add various watermarks, such as text watermark, image watermark, GIF animation watermark and video watermark.