How do you put clips from a DVD into a website?

Question

I have a promotional DVD from a client, and they want to put clips from it on their website.

I'm in a Windows environment, so I'm looking for a decent video editor program, free would be preferred. Then I guess I'd have some kind of flash-based player to embed in the website...

What do you recommend?

Answer 1

FlowPlayer is self hosted flash player for websites. It supports direct content and streaming servers. Remember though, video requires a lot of bandwidth so make sure your servers/webhost can cope with that requirement.

If not, you might want to look at offsite hosting of the video content. YouTube is the obvious free one (and supports embedding the video on your site), but there are loads of others around if you Google for them.

For video editing, I'm a big fan of cinelerra, but it's Linux only. Windows movie maker does the basics if you just need something simple. Or there's virtual dub, but it only does clipping and doesn't do transitions or non-linear mixing last time I used it.

For processing the videos, ffmpeg and MEncoder (comes with MPlayer) both do all kinds of conversion,rescaling,encoding etc and will come in handy if you need to convert to specific formats or need to compress the clips a bit.

Answer 2

VLC has a record feature that can grab clips from DVDs. I hope this helps.

Hat tip: The How To Geek.

Answer 3

I'd recommend VirtualDub for your video editing needs. For flash-based player, perhaps youtube is your best bet. It'll bring attention from other sources as well.

Answer 4

There are a lot of free applications for DVD -> avi/mpg (Handbrake), and a lot of applications for avi/mpg -> flash (Riva FLV Encoder). You could try the lazy way of converting your dvd to a avi, and than convert that avi to a flv file.

Just set the quality of your encode in handbrake to very high to reduce the quality loss in the first step, and than use Riva FLV Encoder to to convert the avi file to flv.

A nice tutorial on how to convert and put the flv on a website can be fond on the video help forum.