I have this video camera, a Sony DVD201E which records straight to a mini-DVD disc. I want to copy the recorded video onto my PC but the software which comes with the camera is pretty awful. Besides it is Windows-only and I do prefer to use Linux.

So I have made a little Linux app which can extract scenes from a DVD disc. The camera records each scene as a DVD “chapter”. My application reads a DVD disc and copies each chapter into a separate MPEG file. I’ll publish it here in case anyone else finds it useful.

Downloading and Compiling

I’m just releasing this as source code at the moment. I have tested it under Ubuntu 7.10 but It will probably work fine on any UNIX-based system. You can download it here:

DvdChapterExtract-1.2.tar.bz2 (16k)

You will need libdvdread and libavformat before you compile. So install those:

sudo apt-get install libdvdread-dev libavformat-dev

Next unpack and compile:

tar jxf DvdChapterExtract-1.2.tar.bz2

cd DvdChapterExtract/Release

make all

Usage

1. You need to record your discs in Video mode, not “VR” mode. VR is a Sony proprietary format which cannot be read in a regular DVD drive.

2. After recording your disc, you must Finalize it in-camera.

3. Put the disc into the DVD drive on your PC.

4. Launch the DVD chapter extract tool like so (assuming /dev/scd0 is the name of your DVD drive).

./DvdChapterExtract -d /dev/scd0

It will extract each chapter into a separate file called chapter001.mpeg, chapter002.mpeg and so on. These can be loaded directly into any video editing software.

The camera also tags each chapter with some meta-data such as the date and time the scene was recorded. I have not yet figured out how to read that data.

I’ve just released an update to my freeware data verification utility. This is a bugfix release, I found it would not give an accurate comparison if you ran it on any files larger than 2 gig. But now it is fixed.

Click here to go to the MultiComp page where you can download it for free.

I have finished an update to my KidType application. As an engineer I could not cope with the executable being 408k for such a simple application, it really was irritating me so I tossed the MFC and re-wrote it in Win32 and now it is only 36k. Much better but I still won’t be entering the 4k coding competition any time soon!

I also changed it to save in TXT format instead of RTF because that is simpler and also more compatible with a wider range of other software.

CLICK HERE to check it out.

KidType is a simple Windows application I whipped up last night so my kids can have fun banging away on the keyboard without messing up the files on my PC.

CLICK HERE to check it out.

This is a Windows application I wrote ages ago. I’ve given it a bit of a brush up and put it on my freeware page. It’s a really easy and simple slide show player you can use to distribute self-running slide shows.

Click Here to check it out.

MultiComp is a free Windows utility you can download. It verifies the accuracy of a file copy. It is very useful for checking CDs you have just burnt, at least that’s what I use it for.

Click Here to take a look at this very useful tool.