worship tricks [first series]

no 20 : dvd rip

a colleague at cms showed me a great trick. now i'm a mac user so this won't actually work for me, but i'm sure with some looking around i'll be able to find something equivalent. but if you are a PC user this could work for you! the trick is this - get a clip from any dvd you have and get in a format that you can just drop into presentations such as powerpoint. now it is a little complicated but well worth the patience to find out exactly how it's done. the really good news is that the software is free. go to clonead and read all about it and download the relevant software. you will need a pretty powerful computer with quite a bit of memory (say 6 gig spare) - i saw it done on a sony vaio (spelling?) which has 20 gig in total. the process involves burning a video file from the dvd (or the relevant chapters), then using a second piece of software selecting your clip and exporting the video and sound in particular formats, and then in a third peice of software combining the two and saving them as an avi file which you can then play or drag into powerpoint. it is a very neat trick - i confess to being well impressed. i have been critical of powerpoint but this really spices up the possibilities. please don't e-mail me to ask about it - read the documentation and work it out.

[update]
since i first wrote this trick i have discovered a free piece of software for mac - handbrake that is far simpler.