Stardate 20040129.1824

(Captain's log): I have been trying to figure out how to create something and can't make it work. I have gotten fed up with the tool I was trying to use, and it is clear I need to find something better.

The problem is converting video off DVDs and creating AVI files encoded using MPEG4. I was using Vidomi Encoder version 0.469. The problem is that I want to convert part of one of my anime DVDs and I want to use the Japanese soundtrack (i.e. the second one, not the first) and include English subtitles, yielding a file which can be played without requiring a proprietary playback program. I can't make that work using Vidomi.

The first tool I ever used for this was FlaskMPEG version 0594. It did permit me to select a small section of a VOB file, but it was really way too limited. For one thing, it could not convert a video segment that straddled the boundary between VOB files. It also did not permit me to select several non-contiguous segments that would be concatenated together. And it also crashed each time I actually did a conversion. (Later versions improved some aspects of it but didn't really give it all the features I wanted.)

So I started using Vidomi, and in many ways it was a major improvement. It lets me work with more than one VOB at a time, and I can designate noncontiguous segments of video to be concatenated together. Video segments can straddle VOB file boundaries. It has an interactive mode which permits me to see the video and to step forward and backward in order to choose the exact frame where each segment begins and ends. However, there are other aspects of it which are mildly annoying, and I've never really been totally satisfied with it.

As a video codec, I have DiVXPro 5.1.1 installed, and it seems to work really well. I haven't yet mastered two-pass encoding, but I've figured out settings for one-pass encoding that I think are quite acceptable for my particular purposes.

Where I'm running into problems is with complex audio encoding. In Vidomi, if you convert the "first" audio track only, then there's a simplified audio setup procedure.

Unfortunately, that includes the English dub, sound track #1. I'm trying to create "subbed" clips, not "dubbed" ones. The Japanese sound track is #2; and in Vidomi when you want to do anything fancy it forces you to use an entirely different menu to set it up. But in this other mode with Vidomi, I can't make the audio work consistently. Instead of the right sound, on playback I usually get a kind of warbling, which is what happens with a modern codec if the decode isn't interpreting the stored data the way the encoder meant it.

Worse, it doesn't behave consistently. There have been cases where I set up a conversion, stored the settings, did a conversion where the audio was fine, and then loaded those settings and tried it again and got crap the second time. (There are many reasons why this might have happened, none of which are germane.)

Here's what I want to do: I have a DVD which contains three half-hour episodes of an anime series which comprise a single story arc. Those three episodes cover all or part of three different VOB files. I want to select out the core of each and concatenate them together, leaving out the opening and closing credits from each episode. I want to encode the video into MPEG4 using DiVXPro 5.1.1. I want to select only the Japanese sound track (#2 on the DVD) and include the second subtitle channel, with the whole result being stored in a single AVI file.

There has to be a reasonable tool out there for Windows which does this. (Vidomi is supposed to be able to do it, but I can't make it work.) I might even be willing to pay for something, but for the moment I'm still hoping to find something free. Here are the features I require:

Ability to designate multiple noncontiguous video segments concatenated in a single output file
Interactive video selection, permitting me to designate the exact starting and ending frame of each video segment by stepping forward and backward. (Vidomi permits me to step forward by fields and backward by keyframes; that's acceptable)
Compatible with DiVXPro 5.1.1 video codec
Able to include an audio track other than the first one
Able to include subtitles
Able to process more than one VOB file as part of a single conversion
No adware or spyware or trojanware or whosisware

I would like to be able to encode multiple audio tracks and multiple subtitle tracks in a single output file, but that's not essential. And it would be nice if setting it up and using it didn't involve black magic.

On the other hand, I don't really care too much if it includes decryption. That would certainly be convenient, but it isn't very important if it does not. I have another tool which does that, which I was already using with Vidomi in some cases. Given that I don't do very much of this kind of thing, the extra step is not that great a burden.

I always cringe a bit when I make a post like this asking for advice, because every time in the past that I've done so, at least three letters out of four end up proffering advice which was utterly useless. That was because they tried answer questions I hadn't asked and tried to solve problems I didn't have. By far the most useless letters are those which suggest alternatives for the programs or procedures I use that work correctly. I always have mixed feelings about that: one level I'm grateful that they w