One of the many free-time projects that I work on are pirate radio shows for the Barscape forum. At least, I used to. Audio and video tend to use a lot of hard disk space and I ran out on my Compaq laptop some months ago. I have since built a networked file server and have collected all of the code, data files, documents, photos from various old computers and hard drives and have put them in one place.

Now that I have a new system with lots of free space, I’m back to producing the pirate radio shows. One of the things that I wanted to add to the show was some comedy bits from some DVDs that I have. So, how do I rip video from DVDs and extract the audio files?

An application called HandBrake is available for Mac OS X systems. It is a free download and is version 0.9 or so. It can rip entire DVDs and/or chapter subranges. It can rip to H.264 MP4s as well as a couple of other formats.

After I rip the video, I still need to do audio extraction. After downloading some damaged freeware with horrible user interfaces, I read a blog entry that mentioned using Quicktime to extract audio. What? I had just updated my Quicktime Player to Quicktime Pro last night. Was it that simple?

You betcha! Quicktime Pro can extract AIFF, AU or WAV sound files from MP4 video files. Audacity, the free open source audio editor I use, can read WAV files. (Probably the others, too.) I’m wicked psyched about this.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 20th, 2008 at 10:10 am and is filed under Miscellany, Hackery, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.