Multimedia Software
Tuesday, March 9th, 2010I have so much multimedia software that I am at risk of forgetting what’s what and why it’s there! So, to save me having to re-learn it all should I ever feel compelled to re-install my OS (!), here is a brief summary…
1. Music Composition and Midi File production
I used to use Noteworthy Composer, but it costs money (and quite a lot of it, all things considered). So now I use Musescore, which is GPL’d and thus entirely zero cost. It does an excellent job with music notation, and also exports to midi and WAV and a whole lot else. Excellent for writing that symphony you’ve always wanted to pen, and also good at setting down Bach music examples! Without dedicated midi hardware or additional configuration, Noteworthy does a better job of approximating violins and other instruments (everything in Musescore sounds like a piano out of the box!), but it’s not enough to convince me it’s worth paying for the upgrade. Musescore it is.
2. Blu-Ray Playing
I’ve used the trial versions of Cyberlink PowerDVD and ArcSoft Total Media Theatre. Both cost in excess of $100. Both integrate nicely into Windows Media Centre (so playing a Blu-Ray or a DVD with either of them is a simple menu option selection using the standard Windows TV remote control). However, I found the Cyberlink product to be a nightmare to use (it rarely worked flawlessly). Arcsoft’s offering is much, much better in that regard.
However, I don’t actually play Blu-Rays very often: I much prefer to extract the .mt2s stream from the Blu-Ray and play that off the hard disk. Neither Cyberlink nor Arcsoft handle that particularly well.
Thank God, therefore, for the ever-so-humble but oh-so-brilliant Media Player Classic Home Cinema. It comes in a 64-bit version, which is good. It plays .mt2s streams without a drama. It does not integrate with Windows Media Centre, which is a shame… but it’s 100% zero cost, so that makes up for everything else. In short, it might not be as convenient to use from the Home Cinema lounge, but it does everything else that I could want it to do. Blu-Ray player problem solved.
3. Blu-Ray Ripping
First off, you absolutely have to have AnyDVD HD. That will cost you money, but is definitely worth it, and will leave your Blu-Ray disks unencrypted. Turning the contents into a single, playable, still high-def file is, however, still trickier than it ought to be. The tool I use more than anything else is called Clown BD, which usually correctly outputs a single .m2ts file containing the entire movie in one hit. Subtitles seem to be trickier to handle than I expected, especially when they are of the sort where a character in the movie speaks in a foreign language for only part of the movie (ie, you don’t want the entire set of English subtitles, just for the bit where fluent German, French or what have you is being spoken).
Assuming you get that far, it is then difficult to turn a 30 or 40GB .m2ts file into something usable (say, a 10GB mkv file). The standard tool I use for converting DVD movies to MKV is HandBrake (see below), but it usually chokes when presented with such a large input file. I therefore normally use Aieesoft HD Converter to turn the .m2ts file into a standard .avi or .wmv one. It’s not the greatest program in the world -it’s grasp of English syntax seems to be lacking at one or two points, for example!- but it (usually) does the job. Sometimes, I find the audio gets out of synch with the video, which is very annoying, but if you tweak the conversion settings enough times, it usually works in the end. When it doesn’t, I’ve also used the Free Video Converter from Koyotesoft to do the same thing, and it usually succeeds where Aieesoft’s offering fails (it also has failures of its own, though, so neither is perfect).
I must confess, though, that if we are ever presented with a choice between a Blu-Ray version of a movie and a DVD version of the same thing, we will usually buy the DVD version, simply because turning it into something we can actually use comfortably in the house is a lot, lot simpler. Blu-Ray ripping and converting is still not a seamless, painless exercise, in short, no matter what software you install.
4. DVD Ripping
As I mentioned above, you have to have AnyDVD HD: there’s simply nothing like it for making working with encrypted DVDs painless.
After that, I simply copy off the VIDEO_TS directory onto my hard disk and then point HandBrake at it. I run HandBrake at insane settings, extracting every last bit of quality out of the source, even though it takes 6 hours to convert (on an overclocked i7, 4 cores, 8 threads, with 8GB RAM to work in). Patience pays, however: you end up with 1.5-2.0GB MKV files that are a pleasure to watch.
5. Audio Ripping
Just as DVDs are a pain to have cluttering up the place in their physical form, so I haven’t played a physical audio CD in years. They all get ripped to lossless WMA format the minute they’re delivered from Amazon! My preferred tool for doing that is dbPowerAmp Music Converter. It incorporates AccurateRip, so you can be certain the final rip is as good as it can be; it’s multi-threaded (if you buy the Reference version), so my 4 hyperthreaded CPUs are used to their maximum potential; it has stacks of codecs which can be plugged in at any time, so if you happen (like me) to also need to convert your WMA rips to MP3 (or pretty much anything else) for the sake of your portable media player, that’s easy to do, too. The only bummer, I suppose, is that it’s not zero cost… and at US$36, it’s no longer the peanut-sized $18 it was when I first purchased it, either. But, all in all, it’s worth it.
I’ve experimented with zero-cost alternatives (like Exact Audio Copy), but I’ve never found anything with quite the ease of use of dbPowerAmp. To take just one example: if a CD contains three different Bach cantatas, I would like to rip them into three separate folders, each containing tracks numbered 1 to (say) 5. dbPowerAmp has a unique ‘track offset’ feature that makes doing that a piece of cake; nothing else I’ve ever tried has, so I usually end up with three folders containing, respectively, tracks 1-5, tracks 6-10 and tracks 11-15. It doesn’t make a lot of difference when you play the stuff what the tracks happen to be called at the OS level, I realise, but it’s just one of those organisational things that dbPowerAmp gets right.
6. PDF Creation
I’m not shelling out hundreds of dollars for the Adobe Acrobat product, thank you very much! My needs are much more modest… so I make do with Primo PDF Creator, which costs nix, nada, zilch. It doesn’t integrate well with anything and you can’t edit the PDFs after you’ve created them… but, if you can print it, you can create a PDF with it (since the software installs as a new printer driver).
For a PDF reader, I actually make do with the Adobe offering -but the Foxit alternative is just as free and rather smaller to download. It’s also less prone to ‘phoning home’ (tip to the wise: in the Adobe Reader, visit Edit -> Preferences -> JavaScript and uncheck the Enable Acrobat JavaScript option, unless you fancy leaving your PC open to potential security exploits).
7. Graphics
The Other Half does a lot of fancy-shmancy effects work on photographs taken with a digital SLR. For that, nothing approaches the Photoshop/Lightroom combination, and ToH is happy with them. No way am I installing that behemoth on my PC, however. Apart from anything else, I’d spend the next three years learning how to use it all And besides even that, I don’t have $1000+ to spare! Therefore, I content myself with Paint.Net, which is entirely zero-cost and does all that I could ask it to do by way of simple (and also not-so-simple) image transformations and conversions.
Yup, I could use the GIMP, I suppose. But then I could also beat myself over the head with blunt hazlenuts in an attempt to look vaguely attractive. Both seem rather pointless wastes of my time! (Truthfully, the GIMP’s layout, menu structures etc. have never seemed half so intuitive as Paint.Net’s layout/menu structure etc. Your mileage, as they say, could well be different).
8. Scratched Disk Repair
I do get the occasional DVD or CD with a nasty scratch on it. The only way I know to retrieve anything from such a disk is with the IsoBuster. It can take hours to navigate past a defective patch on a disk, and you may end up having to pad the output with zeroes (which is, effectively, a data loss situation), but it will usually get there in the end. When I’ve done that on a DVD, for example, I’ve seen a second of so of cubist garbage flash up on the TV before the thing continues to play completely normally: better that than a completely unplayable disk, surely?! As a bonus, it’s completely zero-cost (well, there’s an option to upgrade to the PRO version for US$29.95, but I’ve never taken that option, and I’ve still saved disks with the freebie version).
9. Codecs
With all my movies in MKV format, it’s a little tricky to persuade Windows Media Centre to play them. But Shark’s Codecs make that a non-issue. (It also means Media Player can cope with FLACs and so on) I’m not usually a fan of installing codec packs (they are often virus/trojan infested, for example; and if not that, then they have a habit of making your PC as stable as a jelly in a gale), but Shark’s ones are safe, competent and comprehensive and make your choice of format for your multimedia files an entirely moot point.
10. Editing of Recorded TV Programmes from Media Centre
Sometimes, we want to save a TV programme recorded with Windows Media Centre. This is not especially easy, since the Windows 7 MC records in a weird format that Microsoft themselves don’t support very well (.wtv, if you’re interested). If we want to top-and-tail a recording (or strip out adverts, etc), we first right-click the file and turn it into a .dvr-ms file (that’s the format used, I think, by the much older XP media centre). Then we can load those converted files into DVR-MS Editor. That lets you edit the file to your heart’s content, and is completely zero cost.
Obtaining DVR-MS Editor is not exactly a piece of cake, however! It’s actually downloadable from Stephen Toub’s blog, right at the end of a very long article, and from a very small hyperlink called ‘OldCode.zip’. Once you’ve downloaded and unpacked that, the relevant executable (which needs no installation) is found in ..\OldCode\Code\DvrmsEditor\bin\Debug\. Easy, huh?! Still, works just fine.
I think that’s just about it. Scanning through my ‘Programs and Features’ screen in Windows 7, at any rate, that would appear to be most if not all of the key multimedia-related software I’ve currently got installed on my PC. Should make any future re-installation a bit easier, I hope!

