Archive
Audio/Video

Panic, the mak­ers of some fan­tas­tic soft­ware such as Trans­mit or Panic, also have the most light-weight audio con­verter for the Mac OSX platform.

It's called Audion: get it here.

It's now a FREE soft­ware. Just use the free ser­ial provided:

RNL07P0-030HWMV-4MAGDS3-4U17REX

Works per­fectly.

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I use the excel­lent Sub­merge to flat­ten sub­ti­tles into my AVI files and other movies. But some­times, sub­ti­tles are avail­able from sources such as Sub­Scene or All­Subs as not the usual *.srt files (Sub­Rip for­mat) but as *.ssa or *.sub.

While search­ing for a con­verter between the cap­tioned for­mats, Google did not turn up too much. After some search­ing I found a nifty lit­tle util­ity that allows you to con­vert between many for­mats of sub­ti­tles. It's Win­dows only, so if you are not on Win­dows you may have to use this within a vir­tual machine:

Down­load Sub­ti­tle Workshop

Usage is as sim­ple as load­ing a sub­ti­tle file from the File menu, and then Save As and Bob's your uncle.

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Con­vert from (m)any video for­mat to any other.

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The MKV for­mat, although never orig­i­nally intended to share stuff online because it's large and really high qual­ity, has now become stan­dard. Espe­cially now with Blu-Ray becom­ing a stan­dard. But some of us are happy stor­ing AVI for our own use espe­cially if we can have it in decent-enough qual­ity (MKV files are usu­ally 1GB or more for, say, a film).

Google is full of tools and util­i­ties that allow MKV to AVI con­ver­sion. Many of them are share­ware. You down­load them free but then you have to cough up $29.99.

I have found the FREE tool, All2AVI ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/alltoavi/ ) does the job and does it superbly. It's fast, free, and the con­ver­sion from MKV and other for­mats to AVI hap­pens pretty effi­ciently and reliably.

If you're on OSX, you can use Visu­al­Hub or Sub­merge, but both of them are a bit unre­li­able. Visu­al­Hub in par­tic­u­lar is a fan­tas­tic way to do any con­ver­sion on Mac OSX, but if it col­lapses with a cryp­tic "Sorry, could not con­vert for some rea­son", then you may wish to use All­toAVI inside an XP vir­tual machine.

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