Last week the family celebrated the second birthday of grand-daughter #3. Grand-daughter #1 had prepared a small quiz via the Internet site kahoot; somehow we had to display the questions on our tv. As this is a smart television, it is connected to our wifi network; like at work, I was able to connect to it with my work laptop ("connect to a wireless display"). For some reason, this doesn't work on my regular computer.
The next day I realised that I could show films to our grand-daughters by loading them onto the work computer then connecting to the tv. But first I had to get the films onto the computer. I have an extensive library of dvds containing films recorded from television, in days when I had a working dvd recorder. The work computer doesn't have a built-in dvd drive and the one on my regular computer doesn't work, so I dug out my portable dvd drive - one of my best purchases, from ten years ago.
This drive was able to read most of the dvds, so I would copy them onto the work computer then transfer them to my regular computer via vnc. This way, the file transfers are within my home network as opposed to transferring them via AnyDesk which would mean that the files would get transferred via the external internet, a slower process. Each dvd consists of eight to ten separate files; they have to be joined together to create a single mp4 file.
As it happens, I have a program suitable for doing this - Handbrake. I don't think that I've ever mentioned this program before, but it has proved useful when manipulating video files. All I need do is point Handbrake at a directory and start converting; the files are converted into a single mp4 file. Unfortunately this process is slow, taking somewhere between an hour and an hour and a half to convert.
Most of the discs that I fed the dvd drive were read without problems, but one stopped at the 90% mark and another would not be read at all. Today I remembered a trick that I used to use when vinyl records had a lot of surface noise: I would wash them lightly in water then dry them carefully. This worked very well with records, and to my surprise, it worked well with the dvds. The drive was able to read both of the problematic discs without bother.
| Title | Tags | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 326 | Copper socks 3 | Copper | |
| 537 | The birds | MIDI, Peter Hammill | |
| 1194 | Under pressure but trying to escape | DBA, Holiday |
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