The Great Internet Swindle

[memly]

Ok a few months ago I got one of those lush new 5th generation Ipods which I was chuffed about.

I even grew to appreciate Itunes after much faffing about.

Because I am due to bugger off soon, I thought it would be a good idea to put a load of por... I mean movies onto the Ipod so I can watch movies whilst on the go.

I then decided to see what programs were available to convert AVis to MPEG4 using my favourite bit torrent site.

The program I downloaded was a trial app which created a watermark on the movie.

I decided to look into buying this as it looked like it did the trick, I ended up buying the full version online for around £30.

I then started converting all the "My name is Earl" episodes form AVI to MPEG4.

24 episodes later I thought the job was done (although there was an error message at the finalization stages of the convertion of every ep)

After banging them onto the Ipod I realised that after a few minutes the audio started going out of synch with the video.

So I sent the company an email.... and then another one.... and another.

I've not heard a dickie bird from them.

Have I been stitched up like a right monkey?
Or do I have consumer rights?

If I take this any further, will there be copyright issues involved?

I'm obviously not gonna get a refund.

Any suggestions?

[davemacfrombath]

I have no idea mate, but good luck anyway.

[Hexaphim]

This problem is caused by the original xvid/divx-files having variable bitrate audio.

What you basically need to do is to save just the audio from each .avi in uncompressed format, and then splice the video and audio back together as you convert to MPEG4; if the program you're using is worth its salt, it will let you select individual video and audio sources.

You'll need to do this to one episode at a time (unless there are faster and more convenient ways to do this nowadays, it wasn't when I was tearing my hair out trying to figure out why my DVDs had audio out of sync)

To extract the audio, first download VirtualDub from here: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/virt ... p?download

Open the .avi file in VirtualDub. You should get a warning about Variable Bitrate (VBR) audio being detected. Click OK.

Go to Audio - Full processing mode, then Audio - Compression...
Select No compression (PCM) (note that you have to click on it even though it's marked in blue. This gave me some headaches when trying to figure this out whay back when), and click Ok.

Now, choose File - Save WAV... and save the audio file. Be adviced: for an episode of My Name is Earl, this file will be fairly large, about 350 MB or so.

When it's done saving the audio file, open your converting program of choice, choose the original video file as video source, and the wav-file you just made as audio source, and voila.

Simple, really.

[memly]

Nice one Hex.

Will have a fiddle.